Hey everyone, was thinking about Linus from LTT’s home setup and how he’s able to access his machine in different areas of his house. I have something similar but way less organized and in only two rooms out of the three I now need… It’s not great.
My current setup is as follows:
Living room; this is where the Laptop sits with its lid closed and hooked up like a patient on life support next to my AV receiver and my TV. It’s a Sony A80 which supports 4k at 120hz with HDR. I have all my wireless peripherals allocated to this area for the ultimate couch gaming experience. It’s an Atmos setup over EARC, so the receiver is handling display passthrough. My NAS/Game Server/Pihole abomination also lives here along with the switch that connects the laptop to the network upstairs.
Music Studio; I have a Corning Thunderbolt 3 cable running up my staircase to a Thunderbolt 4 dock hooked up to a 4k 240hz Alienware monitor, 2 external ssd’s, a bunch of random studio peripherals including my interface, and my Dante network. I have a separate wired mouse for this room, and I just take my wireless keyboard upstairs with me when its time to work.
My racing sim/ practice room is right across the hall from the studio, and I’d like to be able to leave my laptop downstairs while having my sim hooked up to it. That would include another mouse and keyboard, a TV most likely, and an interface for audio for the sim and to get signal back to the studio for the synths I have in there.
I feel overwhelmed thinking about what I’d need to do to get all this jank worked out, as it’s an evolution of multiple setups over the years. I’m open to spending some money if the solution is straight forward, but using what I have would be ideal. Also, am I anywhere near to approaching the data limit of my tb3 cable?
Many thanks, pic is the studio in its current state <3
Honestly I am curious on whether Moonlight/Sunshine could eventually replace this. The latency of streaming has gotten very low as of late and theoretically you could just have thin clients that just run moonlight to connect back to sunshine. From a networking perspective Gigabit copper would probably work fine but you could even go for something fancier. Network gear is slowly coming down in price and it is fairly cost effective to get a 4 port network card.
Last time I played with moonlight/sunshine they couldn’t handle the data rates needed for a high spec. PC. as I have a 10g connection. Not that they did badly mind you. I could play dark souls on my shield instead of get out of bed but then I’d die from lag and get out of bed.
I actually use X2go for connecting to my main computer but only cos I use it for my servers. There’s no end of remote tools that work great over a fixed line (not so great over wifi). Experiment … VNC I think is the favoured one but there are plenty of others. And they’re fast. Sunsine/Moonshire are for gaming but since I won’t let windows near physical hardware I used to game through the default remote-viewer qemu had.
Or you could get seriously retro and go use your main computer physically. All that noise has gotta get on the neighbours nerves.
The game streaming experience will depend on the games you play and how sensitive you are to latency. I think you will have issues trying to stream at 4k/120 but I haven’t tried streaming since the original Steam Link.
Regarding the laptop, I’d be concerned about the heat buildup with the lid closed. You should check your temps and make sure it’s getting plenty of airflow.
Unfortunately streaming isn’t an option for me, I don’t want to deal with moving the laptop to another room and it complicates the EARC setup I have with dolby atmos.
Thankfully my system is tuned very well, and my home is spaced far enough that they don’t hear it. I do this for a living, I’m not monitoring anywhere near 100dB ever lol.
Time is a factor for me, and being able to walk into a room and have my setup available in a few seconds is invaluable. Versus the alternative of shutting down the laptop, plugging in all my drives, ect. It takes a lot of time to do which adds up. Not to mention, I cannot have the laptop in my studio at all because of the noise.
My setup is an amalgamation of many solutions over time converging to my current solution. I do have a NAS, 16TB of storage with 8TB of parity, and 4TB of cache. My end goal is to have everything move to the NAS.
I travel a lot for work, so I’m forced to use a laptop. Hotel internet isn’t always the best, so I still need portable storage. The NAS is almost like cold storage/ backup, but it also hosts some misc game servers and other networking tools. Nextcloud is a life saver but too slow to work from in these types of situations, so I use it for miscellaneous file storage and finalized work.
I use a 24 fiber trunk cable from one side of the house to the other, and it sends HDMI 2.1 (and DP if you want it, also HDMI is upgradeable) and 6 USB 3.0 cables. The USB can be used for any devices including USB DACs or USB Mics. I plan to get 2 more trunk cables and go to different rooms with it later this year with some tax return money.
This would get you extremely low latency and has all your video and devices covered, and gets you high res and high refresh rate just fine. It also has complete compatibility with all normal things you send over HDMI or USB since it has full bandwidth for every device and looks like a normal HDMI or USB to end devices. Cost is the only issue for 3 rooms. The trunk cable and breakout for each end is only $190, but the expensive part is the connections you want to do. Fiber to HDMI is $125 to do each room, and fiber to USB is $125 per USB device in each room.
Email their customer support and tell them what devices you want to connect, and ask them a recommended configuration for a breakout cable from that 24 fiber trunk, and recommended models for the end HDMI and USB stuff you want and they can put a quote together for you. They are pretty quick with any custom quote and the shipping is fast as well.
You can also use a keystone wall plate and make the connections to end devices terminate nicely on your walls. Basically like Ethernet keystone stuff but with the fiber connections for this stuff
edit:
This video is a guy using a different brand of cable and HDMI ends, but it gives you the same idea for how it all works:
Also since you have pro audio racks in the studio, instead of keystone wall plates you could use D Series plugs instead and have the plugs all terminate in one of your racks if you wanted: https://www.heyoptics.net/products/opticalcon-d-series-xlr