Turning Your PC Into a LAN-based Intercom? 25
AugstWest asks: "With all of the VOIP projects all over the net, and more and more of us geeks installing machiens in every room in the house, it hit me that we've got all the wiring and hardware necessary for a full-house intercom installed.
Software, however, is another story. None of the VOIP projects I've been able to find can be easily adapted to instant-on lan voice communications. With a microphone hooked up to all of the machines throughout the house, shouldn't it be simple to set up instant-on voice software? I've scoured the net for it, does any already exist?"
A bit OT: The Holy Grail of Interconnectivity (Score:5, Interesting)
Ever wire a house for voice, video, data? Well, there's a rather standard way of doing it and it involves two four pair cables (Cat5e, generally, though in the "old" days, if you were penny wise and pound foolish, you'd run one Cat3 and one Cat5, or worse, one quad "Jake" and one Cat3), and two RF cables (RG-6/U, preferably quad-shielded).
One of the quad-pair is used for data, the other for phone (some of the more complex phone systems actually need all 4 pairs); one of the RF cables is used for distribution from the headend, and the other for modulated distribution back to the headend, to distribute your DVD throughout the house.
It's supposed to be the most cost-effective way of doing things: cheaper to RF-modulate an analog signal than do real-time MPEG2 encoding to stream over IP, right? Same for the phone stuff, though, as the original query hints, not out of the realm of afordability to do it over IP. And all that cable! Do you know how thick a bundle of 2xCat5e and 2xRG6/U is? About 3/4-7/8 inch. It's a real pain to retrofit into an existing house. Been there, done that. Wireless data networks start to look real attractive.
Now, you can get products like SpeedWrap that add an extra jacket (and some even include Fibre), which makes deployment a bit easier, but the cable costs about double what individual cables do (still, if you're paying for installation, it can be worth it).
Yeah, it would be real nice to do it all over IP, and thus, one 100BT or GigE network connection.
I've often thought of a "per-room" interface box, with network in, and telco, intercom, digital audio, and video outputs and possibly digital audio and video inputs. The idea is to interface to legacy equipment (like standard handsets, intercom speakers, stereos, TV's, etc), with one little wire snaking back to the headend. Computers, of course, connect directly to the network. You might want to splurge and have several nets: entertainment, data, and DMZ data. Such things would be a real hacker's dream to design, build, and deploy.
The kicker, of course, is cost. A phone and a bit of wire is way cheaper than this kind of tech, which requres, effectively, a fairly powerful computer in each room to be networked. Gigabit ethernet switches don't come cheap. Start running MPEG2 video around your home lan and the ??AAs will be all over you for "infringement". Still, Moore's law being what it is, in about ten years, such things could be made as cheap as doughnuts.
Yeah, this went off-topic, and didn't provide any tech solutions for IP-intercoms, but it does warrant examing the bigger issue of putting all of a home's digital and digitizable traffic on a LAN.
XMMS-Shoutcast? (Score:2, Interesting)