By Chris Long BBC Click

We have dvds, mp3s, wmvs, avis, movs and many, many other types of media clogging up our computer, and the more great stuff we have on the computer upstairs the more we want to watch it on the big TV downstairs. So just what kind of network do you need to pump pictures around your palace?

Many devices deliver content from your PC to your TV

Networking a house specifically to enjoy your films recordings and pictures is tricky.

You need to shunt a lot of data around for it to work and that causes problems.

Cable is the best bet because it has the biggest bandwidth but unless you like ripping up floorboards and making holes in walls it is always going to be messy.

Next step is to use the electrical cabling that is already there, powerline technology is coming on leaps and bounds. It is not as fast as cable but it is an option - and then lastly there is wireless, the slowest but easiest of them all.

Home networking is developing quickly. Microsoft has just announced a version of its business server for the home. Cunningly named Home Server, it highlights how technologies originally found only in businesses are drifting over to the home.

The best way to enjoy this digital fun is via a cable network, which means getting involved in cables.

Wired up

There is an interesting, or not as the case may be, progression in names and speeds when it comes to local area networks and how they have developed.

As far as I can tell they are specifically designed to complicate and confuse, so it is with that in mind that I share them with you now.

Ethernet is an umbrella term used to refer to local area networks, so you will have heard of Ethernet networks. The speed of that network is effectively regulated by the ability of the cable and its associated hardware to pass data around it.

There are a handful of different speeds - 10 megabits a second, 100 megabits a second, one thousand megabits - which of course is one gigabit per second - and now just around the corner ten gigabits per second.

To achieve those speeds you need better and better cabling.

These are referred to as categories - the current "most popular" category is category six or - as the industry likes to call it - cat 6. Over the last handful of years it has been Cat five, which evolved into cat 5 e to cat 6 now, cat 6 e is just about here and category 7 is expected soon.

For 10 gigabit technology to become a desktop application we believe it has quite a way to go for two reasons.

One is the cost of deployment and the second is there is not much content demanding ten gigabits at the moment in the consumer or desktop space.

Traffic cop

To shunt the data around the network you need a box called a switch which is effectively a traffic cop sitting in the centre of the network shunting data around the most efficient way it knows how.

And hanging off the network are new hybrid boxes that turn the networked data being slung along the cables into the high definition pictures and sounds that are selling this revolution.

The volume of this data is forcing the development of new storage systems that connect to the network and allow you to store the many, many gigabytes of data we are expected to accrue.

If you cannot put in a cat 6 local area network maybe you can use the latest powerline mains networking technology instead.

And there is wireless - while the throughput of wireless is not quite as much as the other technologies, the set up is a lot easier.

Wi-fi radio that bizarrely connects wirelessly to your network - but not to traditional radio waves - is the classic example of a device that works with the comparatively limited bandwidth offered by wireless. Wireless will do high definition data streams but will be very vulnerable to interference.

Bottom line? Always consider cable - but do not panic if you cannot because there are lots of other ways of shifting data and another solution will be along soon.