1 computer for 2 rooms?

[Marty2003]

A friend of mine is going to be moving into a new house soon and he put me in charge of helping him choose a PC. He's going to have a dedicated computer room which is directly beside the master bedroom. There's going to be a full home theater in the basement but he's also going to have a television in the bedroom which will be used for movies occasionally. He also wants surround sound in the bedroom. Nothing high quality, but at least a 4 or 5 speaker setup.

I was thinking about connecting the TV in the bedroom to the PC, possibly running XP MCE, so he wouldn't need to have a DVD Player, decoder etc in the bedroom, as well as giving the TV PVR capabilities. I'm thinking about running the sound wires, a video cable and a IR receiver through the wall. Does anybody see any problems with this setup?

I've never used a dual display setup but I think it's possible to setup the two screens to display as individual screens, would someone be able to use the PC on the screen in the computer room while it's showing a movie on the TV in the bedroom? Would the person in the bedroom be able to control a program like Showshifter with the IR receiver, while someone is using the PC in the PC room?

I don't think both screens will be used concurrenty a lot, but I just wanted to know if it would cause any problems, or even if it wasn't possible.

[rallynavvie]

This is similar to what I'm doing to my cabin. I'm putting together a rackmount that will go in the closet under the stairs adjacent to the home theater system that will go in downstairs. The closet is through the wall to the left of the screen (I'm using an LCD projector) and I'm putting an entertainment center there with a computer hutch. The actual PC is in the closet but I'm running the KVM cabling, USB hub, and FireWire hub, and digital audio cable through the wall. The S-video cable will go through the suspended ceiling to the LCD projector.

The KVM will feed the local PC as a sort of terminal, similar to having yours in the room next to the bedroom but the PC is right there. The USB hub will have the IR receiver for MCE plugged into it and give access to the USB ports, the FireWire hub will have the DVD burner in it so you can playback and record DVDs. You may want to do something similar with your setup, running an external FireWire DVD drive to the bedroom with the TV. You're probably going to need a splitter or switch for the audio on your system though as there really is only one way to output audio AFAIK.

There are some limitations with the dual-display and MCE. The MCE app itself wants to take over the whole display, however you can set it to run in a window that always starts up on the second display but it won't look as nice as if it were run completely maximized. The remote is also going to fight with the mouse if someone is using the PC at the same time. The MCE GUI will also show up while the mouse is being moved by someone (similar to when you have Media Player on full screen and you move the mouse to bring back the controls). One of the biggest downfalls to trying to use MCE and the PC at the same time is that MCE wants to eat up a lot of power. I'm using my previous SMP workstation as my Media Center PC so the MCE app can use one processor and the PC user can use the other (or the home monitoring server when I'm not there). You may be able to get away with using a fast processor or a P4 with HT enabled though the SMP system will work a lot better. My simple dual 1900 MP setup runs pretty smooth with MCE and a server running. BTW MCE is also a full version of XP Pro with only a few minor limitations so it'll double as a home PC very nicely.

Any other questions I'll be glad to answer. I'm discovering this little by little as I go along with my experiment. It is a lot of fun though. One other thing you may want to consider is a Media Center Extender. It's a wireless set-top box that connects to your MCE machine to access media files and settings from it. I don't know how well it streams video wirelessly though. If someone here knows how well these things work I'd be interested to hear.

[Marty2003]

Thanks for the input. Right now everything's in the early planning stages, so options are wide open. I guessed there would be some trouble with control conflicts, but I guess the setup would be fine if only using one side at a time, or to do light computing on one side while a movie is playing on the other as long as the movie viewer doesn't do anything except view a movie without input.