Kyle Ohme — In the life of a dot com

One topic in the HTPC / Mediacenter market that i fail to see a lot of attention on is how to distribute your HTPC to more than one TV at at time.I understand and I am aware of many other ways of doing this; many of which are more costly or require more hardware.I am also not saying this is the best way of doing this but think of this scenario.

• You have a Windows Mediacenter in your house and you only can watch it on one TV in your house.
• You dont have a dedicated PC that you want assigned only to your Mediacenter experience and its in a different room in your house.your office)
• You want access to all of your music at all times from more locations in your house than just one.
• You have an automation system that you would like to see working from any TV or you have web cams that you can now only see in one location.
• You get the point, your currently stuck in one location and you want more!

I have used several products form channel plus to perform such a task, the nice thing with this solution is you can also control your Tivo, DVD changer or any other component you would like to see throughout your home.Head on over to ebay and do a search for “Channel Plus” what you are looking for is a RF modulator that will allow you to have a video input and turn it into a selectable TV channel for your house.The options for this range from $50 used to $475.

On the cheaper side (Channel Plus 3025) you still get a great unit tht works very well for what you are after, it allows you to make a TV channel (Example: channel 78, 80, 82 and so on) for this one source in your house.The cool thing with the channel plus products, it also gives you a way to control your devices via IR.(I will post on this later).With the more expensive solution gives your more channels to create and also S-Video and better audio.

The overall concept is very easy you take a device like the 3025 (giving you 2 sources) plug in the audio of your HTPC and video, select the channel that you would like to create and inject the channel into your house cable system.Now with this system they show you that you should run all video feeds to the rest of your house through this solution, I have been able to actually inject the signal into the CATV system in my house using some filters also available from Channel plus.

Do the video runs from your HTPC, into this solution, then via coax to your cable splitter in your basement and put it in front of your cable splitter for the rest of the house.(or if you dont have cable TV Service you are even better off).
Once successful you will have the ability to get to your TV from any TV that is hooked up to your coax system in your house.

You now have music in every room that you have a TV, movies in all rooms, DVR content to every TV and best of all it only cost you about $50 of parts.

I currently have my home set up this way, I am using this solution to make the TV channels for the TV’s in the kitchen, guess bed rooms, garage and so on.I dont need HDTV to every TV in the house but its sure nice to know that my Tivo and MCE work from any TV.
PS: Adding more units creates more channels - You can also use this for video cameras to create a channel that any TV in your home can get to.Use of a multiplexor may be a good idea when you add more than one camera.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Media Center. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.