I have had a television aerial engineer round, who has quoted around £90 to £100 to fit a wide band aerial, but has been looking into a FreeSat solution that would serve both the Orangery and the lounge where the current TV is with HD TV. He has yet to get back to me and as we are out of time I have done the research myself and hopefully found a solution that I can work with.

I have decided that if I am going to do this I should go the whole way and do it properly. The standard self install freesat kits that you can pick up from B&Q or Screwfix look great on the face of it, a great price and seemingly the ideal solution, however, they will only generally have a 2 way LNB which supply 2 devices, usually one for recording and one for watching TV.

The LNB is the part of the satellite that points back at the dish, this has a number of ports on it, each of those ports can have a wire attached which will supply one device. 

If I am going to go the whole way and wire up the whole house for FreeSat I need at least a 6 way LNB, with two going to the orangery, two to the front room and two to the back bedroom which is also the office. With this in mind I will have to find a custom solution. In theory one could buy the B&Q or Screwfix solution and then replace the LNB with a suitable 8 way LNB, however, I am not sure if they are all interchangeable and where any problems may present themselves.

I have found a supplier who will put a custom package together, it contains a satellite dish, an 8 way LNB, 140 meters of wire cut to lengths and terminated. I just need to get myself a satellite finder device, and two set top boxes along with 3 satellite USB DVB-S device for the three media centre ready PCs.

This kit is all coming tomorrow, this means that I can get the wires into the void above the ceiling in the kitchen before the plasterboard goes up next weekend.

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The television will be wall mounted at about 1300mm off the ground, we will also have a media centre PC running windows 7 media centre tucked away under a cupboard in the centre island.

I have the problem that I need to get a number of wires between the TV and the media centre PC. I will be installing:

2 x HDMI
1x DVI
1 x SVGA
2 x 3 way phone leads
1x TV aerial

I will be running these cables up the wall in trunking installed prior to plastering so it is hidden. I was looking at solutions as to how to terminate those cables at the TV end. There are many solutions on the market, modular systems that allow you to add the connectors you want leaving a series of sockets for you to plug into, this would mean that we would have to solder and re-terminate wires and would actually cost quite a considerable amount of money.

I found the Labgear Dual Brushed Media Faceplate on Screwfix. This seemed like the perfect solution and at £9.79 inc VAT it was worth a punt so I have bought one.

I must say that I am very impressed. It is a very simple design, the same size as a standard double socket (you can also get a single). It is like a normal blanking plate with the centre area cut out. It then has two rows of brush bristles along the top and bottom, through which you push your wires.

Admittedly this is not as fancy as the modular system or media faceplate solution but it is far cheaper and far simpler to install and use. Just screw it to a socket back box and push your media wires through the bristles and away you go.

Highly recommended, you and buy the Labgear Dual Brushed Media Faceplate from Screwfix.

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This opened up many more possibilities for the media centre to be more than a simple recording station, so I wanted to link the media centre to the TV and Surround sound system, and although the laptop and TV were quite capiable of doing this, I faced the well known ATI/Ubuntu graphics driver problems which at best meant blue lines at the top and bottom of the screen and at worst a totally blue screen on the TV while the laptop was quite happy.

Along with this problem the laptop was showing its lack of power when recording the CPU fan would be at fill speed and thus created quite a bit of noise.

I took the decision to invest in a media centre box and found a nice Elonex Spectra on ebay. It is only a Pentium 4, but it has a stylish case with many controls on the front meaning it does not look out of place in the hifi rack. More importantly it was designed for silent running.

As soon as I got the machine I put in another gigabyte of Ram that I had lying around brining it up to 1.5gb and proceeded to install Ubuntu and MythTV which I had running and nicely configured, and with an Intel graphics card it worked well with the TV, however I found that I could nt quite get it quite right, screen resolutions would reset, it would forget my scheduled recordings and it did not like my MP3 archive as it ran to over 500gb of music and it never seemed to cope.

I started looking into the new version of Windows Media Centre on Microsoft Vista Ultimate and it seems that since I ad last looked at it and discounted it, it had become a contender. I took an evening and got it installed on my original media centre laptop and had a play and was impressed with what I saw. So I bit the bullet and installed it on the media centre.

The benefits this brought were immediate, although trivial; I could now get the front LCD panel working on the media centre and more importantly the surround sound system on the computer working with my hifi system. Along with this we could get office installed and use the system as a computer in the living room.
Te over riding benefit was that I could install the software from our HD Digital Video Camera and record direct onto the hard drive and then downscale to DVD (Eventually I intend to install a Bluray recorder).
Since then I have not looked back, it links to my NAS drive and runs my music and pictures, works as an internet PC, allows us to use the BBC iplayer and of course records TV. I have three TV tuners installed so my only problem now is disk space and as the system is running a Sata hard drive which means that I can easily upgrade to a 1tb disk for around £60

The main feature that I miss from the Ubuntu/MythTV model is the ease of the internet controls, although I have installed a plug-in to control the Windows Media Centre via the net, this was never worked correctly. The one with MythTV was perfect in this regard so much so that I was able to control this via my mobile phone.

On balance I do not think that there is much between the two, however the age old problem of open source software holds up both Ubuntu and MythTV in that they are just somehow not quite there, they are not as slick and are a bit rough round the edges. I have to say that they are getting close and given a few more iterations of development I am sure that I will be able to consider them again in the future.

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