Advice Wall mounting a TV

[DaGaffer]

Any got experience of the costs of properly wall mounting your flat screen? Fully hidden cables etc. I have to get our living room telly up on the wall before the kids destroy it/themselves. Only problem is that I need to put it onto a cantilever arm because the TV will need to sit in one of the alcoves beside the fireplace but needs to swing out to be able to see it from the whole room.

I've costed out a solution that doesn't involve huge amounts of rewiring and plastering etc. (I'll use a cable-tidy column that doubles as bracket holder for the BluRay player and Sky box etc. and store all the power sockets and excess cabling etc. in a sideboard in the alcove) ibut it still looks like I'm looking at €500 to do it properly! Anyone done anything similar? And how much did you spend?

 

[soze]

Mine is on the fireplace and the other equipment is wall mounted beside it. I put it on the Chimney and drilled though at an angle. I have trucking running down the corner of the alcove and I have two shelves on the wall in the alcove. With the trunking in the corner the wall bracket and two shelves it cost under £40. I have some exposed wires but not enough to bother me into chasing the cables into the wall which i lack the skill to achieve and costs money.

Like so. It works OK for me.

 

[DaGaffer]

Mine is on the fireplace and the other equipment is wall mounted beside it. I put it on the Chimney and drilled though at an angle. I have trucking running down the corner of the alcove and I have two shelves on the wall in the alcove. With the trunking in the corner the wall bracket and two shelves it cost under £40. I have some exposed wires but not enough to bother me into chasing the cables into the wall which i lack the skill to achieve and costs money.

Like so. It works OK for me.

View attachment 11028

Problem is, I have to keep the cables away from the kids as well (especially the one year old) and the power sockets and LNB cables are on the left hand side of the alcove and the chimney breast is on the right. I was also warned (by an installer) not to put an LED TV on the chimney breast if you actually use the fire (we have one of those fakey real effect fire thingies) because it'll fuck up the screen. Said you shouldn't put the telly anywhere near a radiator either.

 

[soze]

Fair enough mine is blocked so was not an issue.

The arms and shelves can be found very very cheap. You could route one power lead up the wall and have a power splitter on the bottom of one of the shelves. You then just have one power lead running up the wall and you can put that in trunking it is easy. If that does not work you either get your electrician to chase the power sockets up the wall so they are located behind your TV and then all your cables will be behind the TV? A lot more expensive but its what my mate did coming out of the shelf is the power network and HDMI for all his devices and you really see nothing. But it did involve knocking a load of wall down and replastering and means if you want to move the device or need a different power lead you have to start again.

 

[Ch3tan]

I've got a vogel bracket too, I can recommend them. I was going to get the cably tidy / bracket thing at the time, but my kit was too big for them (wanted the amp and centre speaker on them).

 

[Kryten]

Our TV is flat mounted to a similar setup (chimney/alcoves) - TV flat to the wall, all cabling run through trunking which goes about 6" to the alcove then round the corner to the back. All the gubbins (Wii, Sky+HD box, Router, DVD) are on one shelf of a large (6.something foot high) wooden unit which was £100 ish from eBay (cables through the back)

(Corona 2 door bookcase, here - http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Corona-Bo...UK_Bedroom_Furniture&var=&hash=item53efef926b )

We've put a maglock on the bottom cabinet bit where any important stuff is locked away (dvds and what not) so the kids can't get at. Boots on the bottom two shelves. AV gubbins on the top shelf. AV system subwoofer right on the top (we're short on space!)

 

[Zenith.UK]

I'm in the planning stages of creating a false chimney breast media centre for my lounge. The Home Cinema section of AVforums gives plenty of examples for inspiration.
http://www.avforums.com/forums/members-home-cinema-gallery/

I have an AVF UL804PB TV mount which was normally £180 in Comet, knocked down to £90 in their liquidation sale.

The initial aim is to hide all wiring and cabling inside the centre and behind coving around the walls for the speakers.
The ultimate aim is to have a video streaming setup which can be accessed from any connected computer in the house.

 

[Yaka]

i whent to old way used an sds drill to make a channel in the wall and use ready mixed cement to fill it over, sanded it down and used polly filler over that and painted.
one thing bout any cabinet you get. make sure you fit locks ( both my lads were and are curious with tech an love pressing buttons and stuffing thier toys in) to them and make sure you put in fans to extract heat out from the amp and consoles and pc you may or may not have in there i lost an onkyo amp because i was too lazy to do it.

 

[caLLous]

I had to mount it on a 500 year old stone wall so I fixed a metal bar on two studs and fixed a VESA mounting system to that.

I had high hopes of hiding the cables somehow but it just wasn't on the cards with such an uneven surface behind so I just cablie-tied them together. I did get a separate bracket for boxes (just 2; Sky and Blu-Ray) so the cables are *relatively* tidy, in that they don't have far to go (there's also a soundbar mounted on the wall between the TV and said bracket). The only cable that extends below the bracket is power (satellite cables come down from the ceiling), with a 4-way adapter nestled behind the boxes on the bracket.

It works, sort of. :\

 

[Hawkwind]

I just used a standard Panasonic Wall Mount Kit that came with the 55" LCD. You only need two wires going up to it, HDMI and Power Cable so not really a huge issue. Everything else switches through the Av Amp. I could use a grinder, dig a channel and embed a cable routing housing into the wall but can't be arsed! We have a cabinet under the TV which houses the two Satellite Decoders, Av Amp, Blu Ray DVR, Wii and Xbox. Ctr Channel Speaker and Xbox/Wii Sensors sit on top of the cabinet.

 

[itcheh]

The ultimate aim is to have a video streaming setup which can be accessed from any connected computer in the house.

Do you know what solution you're going to use for the video stream?

 

[Zenith.UK]

Right now the lead candidate is XBMC because I can skin it and have all my installations looking the same, access network shares, play just about every video format I throw at it and use either my universal remote or my mobile phone as the remote.
If I get OpenELEC or some other Raspberry Pi implementation of XBMC working well, I can convert the TV into a "smart" TV as well.

 

[Moriath]

just make sure the cables are above the reach ofa 1 year old or up to 4 year old .. i mean if your mounting your putting it above or aroudn head height so a 1 year ol shouldnt be an issue really unless you hold him there while he pulls the cables

 

[itcheh]

Right now the lead candidate is XBMC because I can skin it and have all my installations looking the same, access network shares, play just about every video format I throw at it and use either my universal remote or my mobile phone as the remote.
If I get OpenELEC or some other Raspberry Pi implementation of XBMC working well, I can convert the TV into a "smart" TV as well.

What about in terms of hardware? Are you going to stream directly to the TV with some sort of AV Sender or are you connecting up a computer/server which will be wired to the TV and sit on the network?

 

[caLLous]

Right now the lead candidate is XBMC because I can skin it and have all my installations looking the same, access network shares, play just about every video format I throw at it and use either my universal remote or my mobile phone as the remote.
If I get OpenELEC or some other Raspberry Pi implementation of XBMC working well, I can convert the TV into a "smart" TV as well.

Slight derail but I've been playing with MediaPortal (which started off as a fork of XBMC but has since been completely rewritten from scratch) and it's fantastic - the MP-TV Series plugin is an absolute godsend for going through folders full of TV series and downloading art and episode info etc...

As for your question itcheh (even though it wasn't at me ); I've had a small box (Lian-Li A04B, micro ATX mobo, i5-3570k with 8gb RAM) plugged into the TV for a few days for testing. Eventually it will have 8 3 or 4tb drives in RAID 5 or 6 (I chose this case because it's micro ATX but can still hold 9 3.5" HDD's) but atm I'll have to make do with 4 USB WD My Books plugged with all my TV and movies on. This is sat by the telly and plugged in via HDMI and to the network, and I control it with aMPdroid from my Galaxy S2.

 

[Zenith.UK]

Whole house is going to be wired with cat6 to double sockets in each room. This will give me the basis for gigabit ethernet end to end.
I'll be putting a short rack cabinet in an upstairs cubby room with a patch panel, managed gigabit switch, blade server with multiple drives, separate NAS enclosure and a 1U UPS-PDU. That leaves a bit of room for something I may have forgotten or put in at a later date.
Server will be running VMware ESXI with multiple VMs so each member of the family so they can have "their" desktop on any computer they use in the house. RAID1 for the datastores as well as a backup schedule to a hard drive. A crazy blue-sky idea (which probably won't come to pass) is to create a similar setup at my mum's place in Scotland and VPN the two sites together to be each other's off-site backup storage.
NAS will be the "receiving ground" for incoming media which isn't precious.

I also have an IBM x206m server with a RAID1 array for the absolutely precious "these pictures and videos must never EVER be lost". I deliberately degrade the array by yanking a drive and sending it to mum's, then letting the hot spare jump in and rebuild the array. There are 3 drives in the server (2 RAID1 + 1 hot spare), 1 spare waiting to be plugged in and 1 at her place.

I'm looking at a Vu+ Solo2 satellite HD decoder to allow recording of satellite HD content to the home network. Then any device running XBMC should be able to play recordings. From what I can tell, an XBMC client *should* be able to access live streams from the Solo2 as well.

To stream to the TV, a Raspberry Pi will be the AV sender running OpenELEC which is an implementation of XMBC which runs on R-Pi. The media will eventually be on the server in the rack and the NAS depending on if it's a downloaded TV show or if it's recorded from the sat box.