I have to hang a plasma on a wall and put the equipment in a remote cabinet. I've done a bunch of these, but always with a home theater receiver. This time there will be no receiver. There's a DVD player a Tivo and an HD cable box. Do I have to run two sets of component wire, one s video cable and three sets of audio cables to the plasma or is there a simpler solution?
Thanks,
Jack

Try looking at 5 and 6-core cable from signature wire, extron, and IXOS. We run however many 6-cores we need to run to make it look, then put our own connectors on the wire. Signature has a 5-core with a CAT5 in siamese for IR control.

www.signaturewire.com
www.extron.com
www.ixoscable.com

Mike

how about an iscan hd with the equipment? then you only need dvi to the plasma. Thoughts?

Yeah there is a simpler solution: Sell the customer a receiver.

I see in your post that you mention the customer has TIVO and a HD cable box. You know thast these two animals are not compatible right? The Tivo does not have component IN on it. And the HD box does not have Composite OUT. So you have another problem.

Although, this could still be accomplished by getting anothe cable box, then the 2nd cable box is going to interfere with the first IR frequency. Now you've got another problem. Or you could just eliminate the cable box into the TIVO altogether, but then you have 3 splits behind the receiver 2 for TIVO 1 for HD and you would not get all of the cable channels without a cable box.

Anyway, you see where I'm going with this. It's a freakin' Pandora's Box.

The only solution to this is to do one of two things.

1. Make the customer get rid of the HD cable box or; (No HD)

2. Make the customer buy a HDTIVO for DirecTV. roughly $1000.00

Why not connect an DVDO IscanHD with dvi to the plasma. Have the cable box into it, the tivo into it, and your done. one snag though - no recording off the cable box - as Skybird said - not campatible. Or get 2 cable boxes and an rf remote with ir routing.

more complex than you thought?

you could run all to the plasma. dvi for the cable box, component for the dvd, component or s for the tivo. you have choices.

dvi doesn't allow rf to pass on sci atl cable boxes. I think they might have a cable box with pvr though. that could work.

It all depends on how many inputs are on the plasma. A Fujitsu has two component, a composite, s-video and DVI inputs. Newer consumer models have only one of each input so you would need to install some switcher or A/B switch if you had more than one source sharing an input on the display. One could run separate wires to the display for each source and switch inputs on the plasma and use the plasmas speakers or internal amps driving external speakers for audio if the display had sufficient inputs. But, yes, without some A/V switcher you will need to bring audio and video for each source to the display. Or if you have multiple S-video, composite or component video inputs and a display has only one of each you will need external switching equipment.

Alan

I think they might have a cable box with

Yeah, it could work but they're not HD. What is more important to them HD or TIVO?

Is it possible that the plasma they have has a built in HD tuner? If so, you could install the HD antenna for HD locals, they wouldn't have TIVO but oh well. Then they could have TIVO on all of the other cable channels, once they get rid of the HD cable box that is.

Send one set of component video cables. Sell them an upconverting receiver and you can connect anything you want. It will be eisier to use and cheaper to connect. Heck, everybody wins that way!

Hey, what do you use to terminate those itty bitty cables? You can't terminate those with regular crimp or regular compression fittings, can you??

OK How's this? I send all the video and audio to a home theater receiver that upscales all of the video to component and send one component wire. Then I send all of the audio to the receiver and go tape out to that input?
As far as the tivo... I think I'll send the component out to the amp and the rf out to the Tivo and that out to the amp on s-video
WHat do you think?

Run everything A/V or S, or Component to the receiver. It doesn't matter with an upconverting receiver. All audio goes to the speakers via the receiver and just video to the TV. TV now stays on one input. What could be easier than that?

SkyBird:

I put SD TiVos with HD cable boxes all the time out here... (Comcast DCT 6200). Run the HD box component straight to display and s-video to TiVo then to display. Macro switch between them that re-sets the channels on both after watching HD (so the TiVo 'knows' what channel is on for recording purposes). It works fine. How can you say HD boxes and TiVo are mutually exclusive? I agree though, DirectTV TiVo is MUCH better!

Just curious, What happens when the customer is watching HD and tries to change the channel? but the TIvo is recording so it either;

A: doesnt change the channel ,leaving the customer thinking the remote is broken and calls for service

or

B: the HD box changes channels and the Tivo keeps recording not Knowing this, and the customer looses their recording and calls because the Tivo is broken.

Yes, you can make the Tivo do all the channel changing (A:) but that can confuse most people. I agree with keeping them seperate and having the customer rent another box for Tivo.

They can afford it if WE are working in their house.


As for the original post, I would run a cable for every input on the TV if possible plus a Cat5 for control. You never Know what they might change in the future.

If you had a ReplayTV instead of the crappy Tivo, a Crestron system and some programming ability you could "read" the code the Replay outputs telling you it is in record mode and

a) force the plasma to switch to the same SD input to which the Tivo is connected.

b) task switch to some other cable box if a matrix switcher were installed ( there are generally additional boxes for bedrooms, kitchens and the like )

c) indicate on the touch panel that the Tivo is recording.

d) install 2 cable boxes; one for the Tivo and a high def unit for the power user or he who is impatient and cannot tollerate the DVR taking 5 seconds to change channels

First principals, folks: design your system not according to what you can sell or what the client is willing to pay but according to the control system you will install. The less powerful the control system the simpler the installation should be no matter how many devices the client wants installed or how much you can charge.

Alan