On 8/2/06, Dave Sherman <thurianknight at gmail.com> wrote: > I was starting to think along those lines as well, after sending my last > reply. I'm going to rackmount everything in the closet anyway, so a simple > kvm setup wouldn't be too difficult to add. Throw 8-10 small PCs in there, > each dedicated to one room in the house, and run the analog outputs from > them instead of all coming from the server. I know it was said by others, but between the cost of cabling the speakers (which evidently would be high) and the pain of all that, would it make more sense to build some PCs around minipci using some 19" cases (a component profile, rather than a tower or rack-mount) and just not put a keyboard, monitor or mouse out there in each room? You can the use SSH or VNC to control each one. Plus, these PCs are usually fanless and quiet. You don't even need a hard drive in them...boot off of a CF slot , or netboot. Then all you have to run are network cables back to your huge file server. If you're going to purchase 8 PCs anyway, this makes more sense to me. They may be more expenseive, but putting the PC locally could allow you to reduce the total number of PCs for situations where two rooms' TVs are back-to-back. Then you can just run component through back-to-back wall-jacks.