I have been looking at this Sonos play 5 system. I would like to add a speaker system to our new deck and this Sonos systems seems pretty slick. However, the features where it can play shared music on other computers on the network got me thinking what about video?
I have a WDTV Live in the living room that works great. Is there a system that does what the Sonos does, but with Video as well?
WDTV does it.
Really, it depends on what you are trying to achieve. Videos which are stored on your hard drives in your home can be accessed by players like WDTV and at the higher end, Popcorn Hour or Dune products. But, once video has been uncompressed and is now in component video HD or HDMI, you are talking about a completely different type of beast. And I mean a BEAST! You can modulate component video as Clear QAM transmissions at about $1,000 a stream and just use COAX to get the signal where you want it. You can get a HDMI matrix switcher which can run from $500 to $7,000 (or way more) depending on your connectivity/quality.
It would be more realistic to use something like a WDTV at each location that you want it.
Now, is anything built as nice as the Sonos? Nope! Simple as that. They are all designed around using your TV for the GUI, not a Android/iOS device. They don't catalog automatically or get cover art automaticaly, or much else. The best out there is Kaleidescape, but it is not a content streamer as much as a DVD/BD server. So, no online functionality.
Audio is relatively easy, up to a point. It is far lower bandwidth, it only has a few codecs which are used, and it has a very good online database to get information from. Video has hundreds, if not thousands of codecs. HD video is large, sometimes it is extremely large. Just streaming HD video throughout your home can bog down the entire network with a hard wired connection. Compressing HD video is pricey to do in real time. It also can take up a lot of hard drive space. There is no pheneomenal database to get good information from the way you can with CDs. As well, a lot of places really don't want to play nicely with each other or follow a standardized format.
But, at the end of the day, it is about what you are trying to achieve more than anything else.
I personally use a couple of Dune HD products with hundreds of movies on networked storage. The Dune products can stream the videos from my networked storage to the players and I use the TVs in my home for playback. I have a matrix switcher (component video) to send the Dune players to any of the TVs in my home. Pricey, but it works well and looks good.
