Atomictumor

OK, heres the situation.

You have two televisions. One is a nice replacement for a 450 lb albatross that you had passed down from the older generation, and rocks out in the living room. The other is a smaller, bedroom TV.

The content provided to watch is located on DVD players (one in each room), Computer (living room), and cable TV (both rooms).

The goal here is twofold:

• Watch all content on both TVs as independantly as possible (meaning be able to watch a DVD in one room, and an avi from the computer in the other).
• Have IR control over the whole shebang from either room.

Hmm. That means I have problems. Last time I did this, I drew up a nice little flowchart thing of my old situation, which I haven’t recovered from the mighty godaddysucks server crash of ‘ought six. I don’t really have a flowchart, so I drew a picture of how it will look when we’re done.

Yes, I’m a genius when it comes to perspective, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. We still need to make this a reality. Here comes the geeky.

First order of business is figuring out what the hell the problem is. The big thing is to get computer visuals on that TV in the bedroom with a minimum of buying stuff, because, y’know, I’m poor. The computer’s video card has an S-Video TV out, which delivers a bitchin picture along with the associated problems with not having an easy way to split Svideo. To compound the problem, the TV in the bedroom sports only a coaxial input, so we need to get everything dumped onto that coax line at some point. I’ve eyed these things to the left, because they’re relatively inexpensive, and do a decent enough looking job of filtering in some Svideo and RCA audio into a coax connection, but I’m not sure if this will still allow a cable connection, which means I’d need some sort of device to reconcile which input (cable TV or Svideo bastardization) is coming into the bedroom TV.
Just checked specs on this thing (along with paying attention to the fact that theres two little barrels on it) and it looks like this will take the cable input from the cable company along with the TV out input on the computer. Problem is, the sucker is auto-switching, which is jim-dandy if its a DVD player, but that computer TV out jack is always being used.

So, solution 1:
Cable TV coax + computer S-video out combined in this guy, with output coax split to go to both TVs.

I don’t think this will work, because of the auto switching. It seems like the box will just stay on the split mode. Now, I’m sure they make these boxes where you specify which input to use, but then I have to keep getting up to swap em, and I want to be lazy for a change.

That, and I don’t think splitting that connection will do the picture quality a favor.

Another nitpicky problem is that I like the way the TV is currently working with regards to the Svideo input, because just switching the aux setting on the TV to the s-video jack is more intuitive than about anything else I can think of (a hell of a lot easier than the previous 7 step method of switching the living room TV from cable coax to computer svideo, which damn near caused domestic violence and husband abuse when GAC had a hard time with it).
This would all be easier if the TV would accept the Svideo connection, and then spit it back out on the component signal out jack, because I could capture that connection. However, after a half hour of tinkering all I could get was a flickering blue screen in the bedroom, meaning either the TV is incapable of forwarding the Svideo signal, or the bedroom TV doesn’t know what to do with it. That might need more work.

OK, so solution 1 = lame.

Lets try another direction.
Solution 2 = Would it be easier to split the Svideo, instead of the coax?

Well, no, not really, because s-video is a bitch to work with (see how I can’t even settle on how to spell it?), and splitters are real bitches. I mean, yes, true, you can go with something like this, but the picture quality is supposed to really suffer, and you know we can’t have that. Also, another problem here is if I split the Svideo at the computer we’ll have to run about 60 or so feet of Svideo under the house, which I’m not crazy about. If we buy cheap cable (because with a splitter like above, it probably couldn’t hurt the picture quality any more), it’d still cost 20 or 30 bucks, which is two nights worth of beer right there for me and GAC.

So, before I even suggest it, solution 2 is down the hole.

Its looking like the first switch solution(<1992 gangsta>switches for my bitches) is the best one so far, despite its flaws. Now, heres some outside the box thinking that I’m just throwing out there.

Solution 3: What about another computer, eh?

What about it indeed? No, says GAC. But we’ll pretend that I’m not married for a minute (hello, ladies) and explore the possibilities. See, if I throw up another computer and put it in the bedroom, I could use it as another hub. I already have another video card with Svideo and RCA output (”AT,” you ask “why not just use this RCA output card in the living room and make this all go away?” “Because,” I reply,) and I could easily switch the RCA output to coax and merge that bad boy in with the incoming cable.

The benefit of this is that watching content on the home network wouldn’t be slaved to the whims of the living room computer, which is a good thing because it is already the greatest object of desire within the house. I have most everything I need to put together a computer dedicated to servicing the viewing needs of the bedroom, just needing to wire a little cat5 to set it up, which I happen to have in abundance. So really all I need is RAM, decent connectors, and a quick crawl under the house (if the motherboard works, which is a different story).

I won’t lie, I have plans for this kinda thing. It would be bitching to put together a PVR running MythTV or something along those lines, but that would require a TV tuner card, and I’m not yet interested in trying to talk GAC into that (see, I can’t pretend I’m not married for very long), because I think we’d need full on cable TV to really reap the benefits of having a digital TV recorder.  Hmm.

So, taking stock of the situation, I realize that I’ve spent all day typing this, and this is totally what they get for making me work on Memorial Day.

This is AT, signing off.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 29th, 2006 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.