At our old house we built a bar in our back yard, and over the years our amazing neighbors gifted us items to make it a legit watering hole. Among those gifts were TVs to hang on the wall, you know, like bars have. I know it seems extravagant to gift a TV to your neighbor, but these were older ones that they'd replaced with newer technology. Think a 720p replaced by a larger 4k TV, and they weren't sure what to do with the old one.
Anyway, we recently moved to a new house which does not have a great backyard space for a bar. It does have a small upstairs game room though. I didn't want all the TVs to just sit in the attic so I came up with a plan to hang five of them on the game room wall. I do have three kids living at home, so they could each have their own gaming TV and the two larger ones could be for the... audience? I don't know. I had to make up some kind of justification to put five TVs on a wall.
Long story short, I mounted all five TVs to the wall. I bought myself a new xbox one x and gave my son my old xbox one, then bought two xbox one s on a Christmas sale for my other two kids. I pulled an old original xbox out of storage and even an original Wii. I also had two Amazon Fire sticks that were used on the bar TVs. The next question was how to make this all work.
I could, of course, just wire everyone's xbox to their respective TV and be done with it. If I wanted to play a classic xbox or wii game, I'd just swap out the cables to one of the TVs. The xbox can connect to youtube, netflix, etc. so there's really no need for a fire stick on those TVs. The sticks can go on the big TVs.
But where is the coolness factor in that?
Thus began my research to find a way to take those multiple inputs and broadcast them to any or all of the TVs on that wall. It didn't take long since there is an entire industry built around doing that very thing. I delved into the world of HDMI matrix switchers and at first was disappointed because they were all so expensive. I certainly like paying lots of money for things I don't really need, but there is a limit despite what my wife thinks.
Then I came across the TESmart switcher. Half the cost of the nearest comparable 8x8 switch, it seemed like the perfect solution. But being half the cost sets off alarm bells because there has to be some horrible catch, right? I read through many of the reviews and saw people talking about loud beeps, TVs cutting out when switching sources, poor instructions, and what-not. I decided that for half price I was willing to live with a few inconveniences, especially since the switcher was intended to eliminate some even more inconvenient inconveniences that didn't really need to be eliminated at all to be perfectly honest.
I've had the switcher installed for a couple weeks now and really the most difficult thing about it is remembering what device is connected to what port. I am going to get a labelmaker or something so it's easy to identify sources and outputs. Otherwise the switcher does exactly what I want and even a little bit more.
Addressing the complaints:
Yes, the beep associated with pressing the buttons is insanely loud. You can hear it throughout the entire house. The good thing is that you can turn off the beeps by using the associated software. I haven't done that yet but that's on my to-do list.
Video cutouts do happen. Not all the time, strangely enough. It can be annoying when someone is in the middle of playing a video game and their screen blanks for about one second, but it's really not that big of a deal for anything else. It beats completely rewiring things.
Switcher don't switch: Sometimes the switcher just doesn't want to do its job. You press an output, a source, and nothing changes. You can try changing the output/source combo, but occasionally the switcher just doesn't want to obey. There is a very simple solution to this - power cycle the switch. As you can imagine this isn't ideal if someone is in the middle of a game or whatever. I'm not sure if there's a fix for this but I would love to get it.
And now for the awesomeness:
MAJOR coolness factor. I had a NYE party at my house and everyone was just blown away by the switch. Showing the same video on all TVs was the most popular demonstration. I'd blaze through the buttons and put different inputs on other TVs and people were agape. Which is funny because they see this technology at practically every sports bar they've ever been to. I guess you don't see it in houses all that much.
Works with a soundbar! I put an older soundbar as one of the outputs and it works beautifully. You just pick whichever output you want to hear the sound from and assign it to the soundbar and BAM, you have audio. For our setup this is great as all three kids have headsets for their xbox. They can listen to their own audio and if one of them has guests over they can put their xbox to the soundbar so everyone else can listen in. Or, all three xbox could be in play and the re...