Multi-room setup - What's possible?
#1
I'm distributing CAT6 around a new house and trying to work out the best way of distributing XBMC to different rooms. I've currently got a PC that stores music and video and I've got a single HTPC running OpenELEC. I might ditch the PC server and fit a second hard drive to the HTPC to get the media on one device if that's an option.

I'm primarily interested in having music available in different rooms, though the ability to connect a TV up to the system in the rooms to access video in some of the bedrooms would be an advantage, if not a priority. I'm not massively up to speed with what's going on with XBMC in this regard, so I'm hoping you guys can help me out with some pointers.

Based on my knowledge the solution I came up with was Raspberry Pi installs hidden in rooms, linked to speakers. I can use an XBMC remote on my phone to login to the different installs to then select music etc in any one room remotely. On the face of it this seems like a simple and relatively inexpensive way of doing it. It's important to be able to use a mobile phone app to control as I will not bother with a display to interface with in rooms like a bathroom.

However, it would mean that I'd have multiple systems to maintain and I couldn't tell the system that I want to listen to the same music in more than one room at once. Ideally, I would have one XBMC setup with output to different rooms that could either be different or the same and controlled from mobile phones.

Is that at all possible? Is it possible with video output to different rooms and would my HTPC fall over trying to play several films at once for example? My guess is that I'll have to go with multiple setups, but how do I set this up to allow synchronised music around the house? What do you think and is there a better way to achieve what I want?

Thanks!
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#2
in a short answer, its possible. there are many ways to go about, all at different price points. but it really depends on what you want/need out of the system, and how many other users will be using the system (ie kids/wife/guest/etc).

the longer answer
i personally, would keep your media "server" as it is, with all of your media in 1 central location, and its probably on all or near all the time anyway i would imagine. this will allow you to do any of the following options, where if you moved your media to 1 of you media centers, either that machine would have to be on all the time so other devices could stream from it, or you will have issues with your media being offline when trying to access it in certain circumstances.

there are 2 main options when it comes to multi room streaming.
the first, like you mentioned, is setting an individual box up in each room, connected to a tv/stereo, and you can choose which room you want media to be on via your smartphone remote or whatever. this route is usually cheaper, provided you have less than 4 rooms you want to stream to, and are ok with not being able to completely sync media playback in all the rooms without additional hardware and much time configuring.

the second, would be to have a hdmi (or cat6e with cat6 to hdmi converters) video matrix. this would allow you to have your media centers in 1 central location, and choose where you want to stream each media center. for example, say you have 3 rooms connected via the matrix, you could play 1 file in a single room, all the rooms or any combo just by switching the outputs on the video matrix. this WILL be the more expensive route, and you will have to figure out a good way to incorporate the matrix into your control system so you can choose where to play the files. I would only do this route if 1, cash was no option, and/or 2, you have more than 4 rooms you want to stream to, AND in-sync playback across all zones is preferred.

Currently, xbmc only allows streaming 1 file per computer/instance at a time (although i think i saw a post allowing 2 screen usage from 1 machine, but i have no experience with that or how your hardware could handle it as i dont know your pc specs.).

if you are mostly setting this up for music to be synced across all rooms, then you should be able to set that up with newer receivers controlling each zone, you can have the receivers linked as auxiliary zones to a main/central receiver, and turn them on or off as you want from the main unit, this will not work for video I would imagine, but ive not used new receivers in a number of years, so i dont know what their current video sharing capabilities are.

i think we need a sticky for this info, as there have been many questions about this type of setup, and no good place to point people to (at least that i have bookmarked)
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#3
The "same music in every room" is easily solvable: the LogitechMediaServer (not the new stuff, the older client/server that used to be Slim/Squeezebox). There's a ridiculously small command-line client called squeezelite that runs on just about any kind of system (and especially well for the Pi). I have it on each system in my home and it starts at boot. The LMS itself is running on the main file server (24/7, NFS mounts for video). Each XBMC installation has the XSqueeze add-on, linked to the CLI client running on that box.

I have a WifeAcceptanceFactor of this setup at a 9.3 out of 10...
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#4
Multi room audio is best with squeezeserver. Rpis can be clients. See http://www.squeezeplug.de/

Love the synchronisation.
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#5
The LogitechMediaServer option looks neat - think I'm going to give this a try. The high WAF definately helps too. Thanks!

I looked at the squeezeplug link and I'm still not clear what it really is, besides VERY big. I've already got a server running so I'm thinking it must do a lot of stuff I can already do.
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#6
squeezeplug can work as a music server, or squeeze client, or both. My setup is squeezeserver on my server (ubuntu package)[1] and two squeezeboxes (hardware). If I want another client I can simply use squeezeplug in client mode - which is essentially running squeezelite.

[1] this is the same machine that is my mythtv backend and video file storage machine.
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#7
I'm currently setting up raspbmc to work with 2+ raspberry pi. once it's set up (mysql, bluetooth, samba etc..) I hope to back up the SD card to a .img file so management should be OK.

Regarding synced audio I have a solution using a centralised XP machine and a 4 output sound card (M-Audio Delta 1010lt);
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=125780&page=2

It is not the most elegant of solutions and I'll probably look at replacing the setup with just one pi and combining some audio cable and getting an amp.
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#8
Not sure what OS you're running on the server, but if it's linux, I'd suggest you consider mpd.
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#9
Thanks for all the input, I'll probably need quite a bit of time to digest it all and work out what I want to do.

Do any of the solutions for sync allow easy control of the sync, eg it's easy to decide to clone the music in the living room to the kitchen and later to the bathroom and then decide you want something different in the kitchen and unsync it?

I'd ideally want to be able to control it from my mobile phone (Android) too, which is something I can do if I have separate instances of XBMC running in each room, but I don't know how that works with the sync stuff.

I'll have a look at the 4 output card as that could work well in terms of running speakers in communal rooms and then having separate instances of XBMC in bedrooms etc.

It may be that the best solution is simply to run a single communal instance of xbmc with each room having it's own amp in the wiring cabinet and an on-off-volume switch in the rooms.

Will do some more reading and work out what I'd like to do!
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#10
XBMC will not sync music in multiple rooms. Squeeze/LMS will. Squeeze is easy to control from android.

Your proposed "best solution" will only allow the same music in all rooms.
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#11
Yeah, I should have explained that better, one feed for the whole house with individual feeds in some rooms with a switch in the rooms to select which source the sound comes from.

I'll look at the other options suggested and see whether any of those will strike a better balance in terms of what I'm after.

Thanks.
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#12
ok i just wanna be sure before i try this...i have main pc as server, with xbmc in 3 rooms running off 2 atv2's and a pc....i want to play the same music in sync throughout house...squeeze is what i need? i already have hanewin setup as my nfs server for everything if it matters...
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#13
Squeeze is what you need.
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#14
Is there a way of centralising the database? That would help with the maintenance of multi room systems?
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#15
(2014-04-18, 12:53)inuit Wrote: Is there a way of centralising the database? That would help with the maintenance of multi room systems?

Share centralized library through UPnP ?
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Multi-room setup - What's possible?0