In my new place, I have a 16 channel DVR to record what’s going on the outside of my home. My DVR does provide HDMI out (along with RCA and VGA), and I’m thinking that I’d like to have the DVR fed to all of the televisions in the house by the time I’m done with the cabling and wiring.
Unfortunately, I’m unfamiliar with the spec – is it possible to split HDMI signals and send them to different resolution destinations? Is there equipment out there available to do it?
I’m also thinking that I’d like to put my DirecTV receivers in the basement (they’re controlled via RF) and then run HDMI over ethernet to each TV. Is there a way that I can control HDMI inputs from the TV? I know that HDMI does support passthrough of the red/green/yellow/blue buttons and up/down/left/right/OK buttons, but I’m unaware of any devices on the market that do such a thing right now.
Has anyone attempted to combat this problem before? If so, how did you solve/resolve it?
Thanks!
Ian
Although I’m not an expert, HDMI is a protected format, designed to prevent tapping into the stream and copying the digital signals. There apparently are products that do what you are looking for in terms of splitting and feeding multiple resolutions at: http://www.home-technology-store.com/structured-wiring/hdmi.aspx although they are not particularly cheap.
For your DirecTV unit, we also have a RF DTV receiver, and I don’t think you would need to support the HDMI passthrough control in order to have full control over the receiver. I do have an auto-select HDMI input for a TV, since I have multiple sources but only one HDMI cable to the TV mount. This unit automatically selects the input that is ON. So it would work for a situation where you have multiple remote sources, but only one HDMI extension cable to your display. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0020426AG/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i01?ie=UTF8&psc=1
And for general interest, apparently the HDCP encryption of HDMI is breakable, which I did not know. http://adamsblog.aperturelabs.com/2013/02/hdcp-is-dead-long-live-hdcp-peek-into.html