Recommend HW/SW setup for small office (1 Viewer)

[dennis9999]

I'm a media server newbie. I'm considering MediaPortal. Would someone please let me know if what I want is doable, and recommend any components (HW, SW, Plugins, etc.):

Within a small office LAN, I would like to distribute multiple 'live' sources to multiple devices (tvs, pcs), each device selecting source (or in case of tv, a master pc indicating which source to send to tv):

inputs:
3 IP Cameras - ideally cat5 PoE
1 DVD Player (or can I just use the DVD player on the PC?)
1 Cable Box (recommend TV tuner card?)

outputs (players):
2 TVs with HDMI (and other input capability)
3 PCs

optionally, access cameras over internet.
Also, I don't yet have the HTPC for this, so if you could recommend a pre-built one with not just minimum, but actual real-world "recommended" CPU, Memory, etc. I'd really appreciate that too.

TIA

 

[mm1352000]

Hi and welcome dennis9999

So the first thing I want to clarify is that MediaPortal is PC software, which is to say that you can't use MP to distribute anything to a TV unless you have a PC (with MP installed on it) connected to that TV.

Within a small office LAN, I would like to distribute multiple 'live' sources to multiple devices (tvs, pcs), each device selecting source (or in case of tv, a master pc indicating which source to send to tv)...

That sounds generally doable.

3 IP Cameras - ideally cat5 PoE

MediaPortal's TV Server (which is what I guess you'd want to use for receiving and redistributing the IP camera feeds) is really designed for tuners. I don't know how you would connect the cameras into TV Server unless they produced DVB compliant IP-TV streams... which I think is probably unlikely. If they have composite, s-video or other generic AV outputs then you might be able to capture the streams with tuner card capture inputs. Note that I say tuner card - with the exception of the Hauppauge Colossus and HD-PVR MP does not support pure capture cards. We only support capture inputs on some cards that also have a tuner. Further, if the cameras don't have an audio feed then I'm sorry but they just won't work.

1 DVD Player (or can I just use the DVD player on the PC?)

You can indeed use the DVD player on the PC.

1 Cable Box (recommend TV tuner card?)

Are the channels encrypted?

optionally, access cameras over internet.

If you found a way to ingrate the cameras into the setup via TV Server then you would be able to do that by configuring the router appropriately.

mm