I'm extremely disappointed. I send you out for exciting, new designer drugs, you come back with tomato sauce.

March 28, 2007 7:33 AM

Tivo and DVD to another room of the house.

So, doing some research it looks like I want to inject the signal from my tivo and the signal from my dvd player into the cable stream. What's the best/cheapest device to do this? I'm confused about how the remotes would work as well. Some devices claim to support the remotes somehow, but will I need to buy something else to do it? What do you recommend brilliant mefi colleagues? Thanks!

posted by striker to technology (7 comments total)

Probably a whole lot easier to just get another Tivo and DVD player :)
posted by zeoslap at 7:56 AM on March 28, 2007

You need to ask yourself some questions about that television.

Do I care about having the best possible video quality?
Do I care about having the best possible audio quality? Will I want surround sound or to run the sound through a stereo?
Do I have the ability to run another line of coax to that location?
Is it an HDTV? Will I want it to be soon?
Is it a Blue-Ray player? Will I want it to be soon?
Will I ever want to watch something on both TVs simultaneously?

The easiest solution (balance of effort and cost) would be to buy a second cheap DVD player and run a coax cable from the TiVo to your second TV. Then get an RF remote extender for your TiVo.
posted by deadfather at 9:00 AM on March 28, 2007

Quality is important. Can't run coax. Not HDTV. No on the blu-ray. Yes on simultaneously. I don't want to buy a second dvd player or tivo, or run cable. My understanding so far is that I might want a channelplus type modulator. But I'm unclear as to what the full setup needed is - or if this type of thing is what I want, and I need some recommendations for hardware. Thanks for your help so far!
posted by striker at 9:13 AM on March 28, 2007

I don't think there's a way to do this in reasonable quality without running additional cables. If you use a modulator to inject the video from your Tivo/DVD into the cable line, you'll get fair picture and poor sound - mono, if your modulator is like this one. You'll be able to use both TVs simultaneously, but you'll suffer the quality loss on both sets. For the remote, you'd need an RF remote extender as deadfather mentions, although they can be a little flaky.

Your best bet is probably some kind of digital wireless video extender, like Sony's hugely expensive LocationFree TV system. I can't vouch for that or any wireless system, but I can tell you that anything that you send over the cable line or via analog wireless will be of fairly low quality.
posted by pocams at 10:18 AM on March 28, 2007

Just to chime back in here, I agree with pocams. You can throw $50-75 at a crappy modulator with crappy results. You can throw $200 at decent modulator with decent results. Or you can spend $50 for a new DVD player and next time the cable man comes around, pay him $50 to run a cable line to the other TV.

Don't even think about wireless solutions, they're awful and prone to bandwidth issues.

As much as we'd all love some convergence, with one super box sending out happy video streams to all the far-flung televisions in our house, we're just not there yet. Or if we are, it's either a custom solution or wacky expensive.

Yes on simultaneously.

You probably know this, but the TiVo can only output one thing at a time, so you won't be able to watch two different saved shows at once.
posted by deadfather at 1:55 PM on March 28, 2007

So you don't want to run any new cables (RG6 or Cat5)?
posted by toomuch at 3:23 PM on March 28, 2007

I'm disappointed to hear the modulators suck.

deadfather - i know this
toomuch - yep
posted by striker at 5:14 PM on March 28, 2007