New house hookups, three room dilemma..

[szymas]

I will have three plasma tv's in three different rooms (New house - Dining room, Rec room and Living room) that will be HDTV, but I do NOT want cable boxes near the tv which will be mounted on the wall about 5 feet up. What are my best options for feeding the signal to them?

I thought this would be best: A central cabinet location within 50 feet of all three, this cabinet would have 3 cable boxes and audio gear to feed each rooms plasma with a hdmi cable and speakers, etc using a Harmony remote...

or another option?

Thanks!

 

[MDS]

If you will have three identical cable boxes and want to control each TV independently, you'll need a remote with addressable emitters. I don't know if the Harmony RF remote can do that or not but the MX-350 and above models from Universal Remote can.

 

[szymas]

Thanks for your response..

Can I have one harmony to each cable box or because they are the same I'm out of luck..

 

[MDS]

If the cable boxes are identical then they all use the same IR protocol and the same numbers for each function. A single remote programmed to send those numbers will control ALL of the cable boxes at the same time (assuming they all are in close proximity to each other and all see the code at the same time).

A programmable remote and RF base station with addressable emitters allows you to specifiy which 'device' the code should be sent to. So for example if you had three identical cable boxes you'd have three 'cable' devices (each sending the exact same code using the exact same IR protocol) but you tell the remote that 'cable 1' codes should only be sent to emitter 1 and emitter 1 is attached to cable box 1. So when you put the remote in 'cable 1' mode, only cable box 1 will be sent the remote control code.

Keep that in mind when you choose a remote. If it says it can support 10 devices, remember that 3 of those 10 will be occupied by your three cable boxes. If you want to control all three at the same time, then you don't have to worry about it - one command from the remote will change all three cable boxes, but that is usually not what people are after because they want to control each independently.

 

[szymas]

thanks again.. would HDMI cables up to 50 fett be ok? or better with component and audio pulls to each location?