Drive 2 TV's through Onkyo 626 with two separate signals

[iamthemoose]

Yeah, it's a funny wish I have.

Picked up Onkyo 626 and a polk 5.1 setup. Works great. Sounds good. Pretty pleased.

I want to know if anyone has any ideas (or has tried and knows) on how to set it in a unique way. I have my ps3, ps4, laptop, wiiu, all plugged in and working. Assassin's creed 4 ship battles are ridiculous fun in 5.1.

Here's the unique part:

I want to be able to play any of my gaming systems on my main TV. I want to add a second tv off to the side to play movies for background entertainment (sometimes those tail missions in AC games are just too boring to listen to). I'd want to be able to hear the 2nd TV audio through the 5.1 and either have no audio for the gaming TV or just use the TV speakers for it.

So, I want two different hdmi signals going through the receiver to two separate TVs, and the receiver would drive the 5.1 audio for one source or the other as I'd specify.

Hopefully I'm making sense and someone can help with this?
TIA

 

[TLS Guy]

Yeah, it's a funny wish I have.

Picked up Onkyo 626 and a polk 5.1 setup. Works great. Sounds good. Pretty pleased.

I want to know if anyone has any ideas (or has tried and knows) on how to set it in a unique way. I have my ps3, ps4, laptop, wiiu, all plugged in and working. Assassin's creed 4 ship battles are ridiculous fun in 5.1.

Here's the unique part:

I want to be able to play any of my gaming systems on my main TV. I want to add a second tv off to the side to play movies for background entertainment (sometimes those tail missions in AC games are just too boring to listen to). I'd want to be able to hear the 2nd TV audio through the 5.1 and either have no audio for the gaming TV or just use the TV speakers for it.

So, I want two different hdmi signals going through the receiver to two separate TVs, and the receiver would drive the 5.1 audio for one source or the other as I'd specify.

Hopefully I'm making sense and someone can help with this?
TIA

I have been thinking about that. There is no way of doing directly what you want.

You would need to have one TV as a switch and it would need an audio return channel as would the receiver, form one of the TVs.

You would need separate peripherals for the second TV if you wanted different programs on the TV.

I have to say I don't see a lot of point in this.

It is akin to TVs you can't hear in restaurants and other places. That is just one of many nutty modern fads, and you are well on the road to joining that crowd.

 

[Adam]

Welcome to the forum! You present an interesting challenge. I agree with Mark, though, in that I can't think of a way to route everything through your receiver like that. The two HDMI outputs just mirror each other on the 626. There might be a way, but I'm not seeing it right now.

However, you could achieve your end goal without too much work, I think. I'm assuming that you want to play movies on the second TV using some source (e.g. blu-ray player, PS3) that you'd normally use on the primary TV, so you want that source routed through the receiver. If you aren't already using the "TV/CD" input, the audio part might be pretty easy for you - the video portion may require an HDMI splitter. Page 40 of the Onkyo manual explains how to play audio from an audio-only input while watching video from another input (TV/CD is audio only). So, if you have your movie source hooked up via HDMI (assigned to one of the Onkyo's inputs) and a digital audio connection (assigned to the Onkyo's TV/CD input), you could watch and listen to movies on your primary TV over the HDMI connection, but listen to movies on the TV/CD audio input when you want to have audio only for the second TV while watching video from a different HDMI input on your primary TV.

As for getting video to the second TV that is different than what's on your primary TV, and if you only want that for one source (that is playing movies), an HDMI splitter should work great. If your source already has two HDMI outputs, you won't need one, but most sources don't. I bought this Sewell splitter, and it works great.

Just let me know if any of that wasn't clear, or if you have any other questions.

 

[iamthemoose]

Yeah most of the replies I'm seeing say HDMI switch or matrix. Was mostly just hoping I wouldn't need any more hardware at this point ^^
Thanks!