TV Cables

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Hi, planning first fix for a new build and wondered how do we get Sky in all of the bedrooms but just pay for one subscription box?

What cables do I need to get for the electrician to fit?

Also be grateful to hear of any other modern day devices/gadgets that people tend to run cables for in new builds?

Note: I know nothing about electrics
 
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Simplest way is to run the tv aerial straight to the sky box, then the RF out goes straight up to distribution box in the loft where it gets distributed around the house. if me then i would run cat 5 cable and hdmi cable to every room, could then get hd from the sky box via hdmi distribution box.
 
just keep in mind they will all have to watch the same channel
you need a separate feed and skybox in each room to get a different sky selection in each location
 
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You are, of course, installing an aerial so they can all watch (different) channels of Freeview as well, aren't you?

Depending on you tastes, you may not need to use the paid-for service much.
 
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Newest 'Sky Q' boxes do not need any cabling for other rooms using a 'Sky Q Mini' and the Wifi in the house. At £99 each plus £50 installation (For some reason).
 
I have absolutely no moral problems whatsoever in using card sharing, skybox type devices to bypass the extortionate fee's of Mr. Wupert Murdoch's empire.

(Apparently, he absolutely HATES being called Woopert or Wupert & you very, VERY rarely hear of it being used in the MSM, even when they are 'allegedly' mocking him !)

All channels . . . £10 per year. Cheap as chips. The whole fookin neighbourhood is in on it, even the serving & retired Police.
 
Newest 'Sky Q' boxes do not need any cabling for other rooms using a 'Sky Q Mini' and the Wifi in the house.
Do yourself a favour and network them with a network cable anyway. These abominations are designed with built in spectrum pollution which by design will kill legitimate uses of radio spectrum in the neighbourhood. While WiFi should work, that's vastly inferior to wired networking.

But back to the original question ...
The answer is to install flexibility. Unfortunately, modern building methods are the antithesis of that - being careful to make future maintenance as hard as is possible.

So my recommendation is this. Install DEEP boxes - for all AV stuff my preference is 47mm boxes, 35mm if it's something like my current house with 'kin 'ard brick. In a new build, sinking 47mm boxes at first fit stage is a doddle. Install conduit (the white oval stuff is fine, I;d suggest 32mm for the main points to give plenty of room), but here's the bit your sparky will baulk at - the conduit must go INTO the box. Standard practice is to stop the conduit 1/2" or more from the box so the cables can dogleg through the pre-punched holes in the box - this makes pulling cables in "problematic" at best. Some sheet nibblers can quickly open up the hole to take even the widest conduit.
If he suggest that the way to do things is to clip the cables to the walls and then plaster over them - then find one that isn't a complete tool.

Then make sure that you can get under the floors in order to make use of this flexibility. Again, modern building methods are designed to stop this. In the past it was easy to lift a floor board or two - use a rod or cane or something to fish cables along between the joists (from one lifted board to another) and thread them through the joists along the line of a lifted board. No they insist on using large sheets, glued together and to the joists. Complete and utter PITA for maintenance. In the house a relative is planning to move into, I see they've put 2 or 3 full height noggins between the joists as well so you can't even fish along the joists.

Done this way, you can change the cabling if/when technology changes (y)

In the meantime ...
Run 2 or 3 coaxes to the "master" TV location - 2 for satellite (though Sky Q can now use just one I believe) and one for terrestrial.
Run 1 or 2 coaxes to the TV point in other locations - one for sat and one for terrestrial.
And run at least 3 (yes three) Cat5e or Cat6 cables to each location.
All these cables need to go back to one central location.
For watching one sat box elsewhere, use an HDMI over 2xCat5e/6 sender at the master point and a matching receiver at the other end. You can also get HDMI switches and splitters that do 2xCat5e/6 for each input and output - you can put one of these at the central location to split the signal to multiple rooms.

For the sat and terrestrial, several options ...
Split the terrestrial signal - with a passive splitter if you have a strong signal, a distribution amp otherwise - and feed down one coax to each room.
For a small installation, take multiple outputs from the sat LNB and connect them directly to the coaxes to each room. Once you get past about 4 points, you might as well use a quatro LNB and a multiswitch.
If you go down the multiswitch route then you can save on coax as most units have a 5th input to send the terrestrial signal down the same cable as the satellite signal (and then use a diplexer outlet to split them at the other end). For this reason, you might choose to use a multiswitch for even a smaller system.

And, use one of the Cat5e or Cat6 cables for the wired network and put a small gigabit switch at the central location.
 
I use satellite TV there are many flavours, simple is free to air, this has a very poor electronic TV guide, but does get all free channels, next is freesat like free to air but with better program guide, then you have Sky. The latter is often able to record and play at the same time so needs two connections to the dish. Most the others only need one connection. Until the latest Sky box you could take a coax from the Sky box and use a magic eye to change channels in the remote room, many of the other boxes also have an RF output. However you don't get HD with analogue RF signals.

The problem is the RF output is not very clean and the signals interfere with one another, so it needs a lot of experimenting to find good clear channels.

There are a few channels which use freeview only, MovieMax is one, others vary with region used. But freeview don't seem to be able to make their mind up what they are doing, and it seems twice a week it asks you to re-tune, so I have in the main given up with freeview.

So old way was aerial down to Sky+ box and two feeds from dish to Sky+ box, then a coax to loft feeding a booster with a magic eye let through, and then coax from that to each room. However today one has to consider LAN and other Coms and by time it's all installed it is all out of date.

Metal in dividing walls can kill wireless so some still need wires, but it is near impossible to work out what you need. I would use an 8 output dish two to main room one to every other room and forget trying to second guess what other connections may be useful.

The boxes do come with many flavours, I have a HD box from Maplin which has both satellite and freeview inputs and you can swap the order of programs so you have best of both, you can put ITV3 next to ITV3+1 so if you are disturbed it's easy to go back an hour. My son-in-law has a box with two dish inputs each dish aimed at a different satellite. You can also get rotators built into the box so the box re-directs the dish as you change channels.

Some boxes are like smart TV's with LAN input and USB but these vary, the Maplin box is useless for internet, but does let me view films from my hard drive. The Bluray player is far better for internet but not so good with formats it can handle.

A hard wired network is likely best idea, yes I can carry hard drive from PC to TV but with Wifi the rate is not good enough.

Wife likes Universal or Sky would go. Freesat is good enough.
 
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Most new televisions don't have an analogue tuner either, so any RF out type solution is a total bust.
Are you sure about that? It's certainly what I used to think - so when I needed to replace a TV a couple of years or so ago (and since I have an extensive analogue RF distribution of ex-Sky TV in my house) I asked around and most people reassured me that, although generally not 'advertised', they virtually all (at least then) still did have analogue tuners - and when I started looking into it, that seemed to be correct. Have things changed since then?

Kind Regards, John
 
That's also what I'm seeing - I have yet to come across a TV without an analogue tuner. I doubt it'll get dropped any time soon since it would probably cost more to leave it out than to just leave it in - do any tuner chipsets not support analogue ?
Until there are zero countries the manufacturer markets to with any analogue TV at all, they'll need an analogue tuner for that market.
 
That's also what I'm seeing - I have yet to come across a TV without an analogue tuner. I doubt it'll get dropped any time soon since it would probably cost more to leave it out than to just leave it in - do any tuner chipsets not support analogue ? Until there are zero countries the manufacturer markets to with any analogue TV at all, they'll need an analogue tuner for that market.
Indeed. I'm interested to hear that your experiences are the same as mine.

Kind Regards, John
 

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