help me design my home Internet media/camera system

[Wings]

Here is the situation.

I work from home most days.

I have a decent desktop computer that is fine. Currently, I have a 2 4.5 external Hard-drives that go straight into my router. Asus RT-N16

My Comcast comes into the corner of my house, and I'm sick of choppy streaming from Plex that is running on my deskop thru 2 rooms over, let alone upstairs. I have used Chromecast in the past, but have heard those don't process as well.

I just picked up a Roku stick to test out, and will likely need another one (although i rarely watch tv in the bedroom)

Here's what I am looking to do:

1) keep my work PC as is

2) get a faster router that can reach throughout the house, AC compatible (is important, yes) and ideally use a router or 2 as repeaters so the single strength is good.

3) build a media PC that can hold all the song/movies/television AND, this can also store/record the wireless video cameras (I have 3 Amcrest Pro's) I have purchased (and want to add on a few later to keep track of where the 2 year old critter is in the house)

Should I split the media PC away and have a separate PC for just the camera viewing/recording.

http://screencast.com/t/bVMFtgVcFLxV

That is my bandwidth up and down. I have a 2900 square foot box (I live in the Midwest) and I have the budget to do this right for many years.

Ideally I could be working and 2/3 people could be streaming plex to the tv's in their rooms (just 2 tv's right now but I have some older 1080p TV's) I plan on converting from computer monitors to televisions to use throughout the house.

Finally, I'm switching from an LG Tvs (that each have a old dell monitor on each side of it) that repeat to my standup desk. I'm looking for 4 high quality flatscreen monitors of decent size.

Okay, have it, please.

Thanks,

Matt

 

[gtmtnbiker]

I would run some Cat6 cables from your router to different parts of the house. Yes, definitely get a good router and an access point or two for the remote areas of your house. So how is your desktop connected to the network? Via wifi?

 

[AlNipper49]

I have the exact same setup.

I disagree on running cables. Invest in really good wireless and you will never need to worry about all of that hassle.

If Plex is choppy it's the server or the thing displaying it. Chrome cast is fucking garbage. Use a (real non-stick) Roku. You can play with buffering settings on the server as well, that will take care of a lot of your problems that you can't fix via hardware. You can also change how they're encoded and pre-encoded. The forums will help you there a lot.

I use crappy little AirPorts expresses, Rokus and a decent server and can stream HD no problem, to multiple devices.

The new Rokus can do 4k

 

[SumnerH]

Chrome cast is fucking garbage. Use a (real non-stick) Roku.

Yes. With Roku (or similar--WDTV Live) you're sending the original compressed video file over the network. Then it's decompressed and played back on the receiving end.

With Chromecast, when you can actually get it to work you're decompressing it on your computer for playback, then recompressing it to h.264 in the Cast app/extension, then streaming that; the recompression is the reason Chromecasted videos all look like crap, as it introduces another round of video artifacts and quality loss into the process.