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Three TVs, One Room, One Remote


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Hello Everyone,

I'm in need of some desperate help. I'm a newbie to Control4. I became a dealer in December and have only installed 12 systems so far. 

I was at a new customer's house a few weeks back and he had a URC remote that controlled his set up of 3 TVs in his family room. He has a main 79-inch TV and two 32-inch screens to the left and right of the main TV for watching multiple games. The main TV is hooked up to a Yamaha receiver with its own cable box and the other two TVs have their own cable boxes hooked up directly. He wasn't crazy about the URC remote and I told him I'd contact Control4 to see if I could make life easier for him. 

I contacted Control4 tech support and asked them if it was possible to control all three TVs from one remote using the three custom buttons on the remote rather than using the multi-screen agent and a matrix. The tech said yes, I could control each TV individually by setting up programmed custom buttons. So I sold the job to the customer and I go to install today and I couldn't get it to work. I contacted tech support again and explained the situation and they said it's not possible after originally telling me it was. I'm at a loss and need to get this done. 

Basically, what my customer wants is to be able to hit Custom Button 1 and it turn on the left TV, hit Custom Button 2 and it turn on the main TV and then hit Custom Button 3 and it turn on the left TV. When each custom button is pressed it would then put the SR-260 into that TVs mode and control its cable box and then be able switch between all of them and control them individually depending on which custom button is pressed and ultimately be able to turn them all off at once.

I could do this with a Logitech remote or ProControl but I can't according to Control4 with an SR-260 and an EA-5 at four times the price.

Any wisdom, guidance or help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

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Ok well first I should ask...just cable boxes? No other video to tv's? And we don't care about flipping tv1>tv2 etc?

I bet I could get it to work. You need a matrix use the driver, add a 4th tv in the project as the master lock the inputs on the matrix little bit of programming and bam. Tv's stay locked on input and c4 will think it's changing. Volume may be iffy but you probably get that to work with some trial and error. 

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2 hours ago, cctech said:

it would then put the SR-260 into that TVs mode and control its cable box and then be able switch between all of them and control them individually depending on which custom button is pressed

No - no you can't. At least not in any way that techsupport should have told you yes in. To be clear - you CANNOT programmatically change what room a remote controls/is set to.

 

Now..depending on how limited the desired control is, you could fake a very simple (simple control) setup.

This is assuming that each TV has a dedicated Cable/Sat box

First, have your usual three rooms setup as normal

Second create a FOURTH room called 'all screens'

We're assuming here that the Yammy is the only one outputting sound and controlling volume.

Now, add a fake video switch (3 in 1 out) - doesn't matter what driver as it'll be fake anyway, but IR is best because C4 isn't expecting feedback that way.

Add all three dedicated boxes to the video switch - and connect the video switch to the input the actual box is in on the yammy. Note this is all in programming opnly, no physical connections.

Now, briefly going back to the original room for the yammy - hide the 'false' sources under navigator. (just in case)

 

The 'All screens' room now gets a virtual TV (again, something IR, doesn't matter what) - set video endpoint to it, and set audio and volume endpoints to the (actual) yammy - yes Composer will allow multiple rooms.

Now program for the 'All Screens' room that custom buttons 1,2,3 (or color if you prefer) to select each of the cable boxes (ie WHEN custom 1 is pressed, select room 'left' Cable box as the source in 'all screens'.

Voila - when you press the button you control the cable box for the left TV - you get the idea?

Now, add some programming on 'all screens' room off to turn off the other three 'real' rooms.

 

Up to you/client if you want to retain any or all of the 'actual' rooms as individual rooms or hide them and just have 'all screen' - my guess? Hide the left and right TV 'rooms' and keep the 'main' surround room as I'd guess there's the occasional movie watched on the main screen.

 

Capisce? :huh:

 

 

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10 hours ago, VINCELdUB said:

Knowitall is correct. This can be accomplished with some programming. Feel free to contact me for details. Pm sent.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I agree with Vinceldub, if all you need is to control each tv individually and no screen switching, it can be done using programming. Especially if every tv has its own cable box. Custom buttons is a great idea to do this. 

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  • 5 months later...

Back when I used to do this work I did his very thing. It was a fair bit of programming but it worked awesome. We used the colored buttons. The remote, by default, controlled the Center TV. If you pushed the colored button just right or left or center on the SR260 it would turn on the TV on that side and set it to the same channel as the main TV. The idea was you use the main TV to find the channels for the secondary TVs and then push them over. By default, the secondary TVs were on mute. If you pushed the OUTER most left or right colored buttons, it would mute the main TV (Denon 7.2 setup) and unmute the TV on whichever side you pushed. All controls would then control that TV as well so you could hit replay or whatever. It was really slick and worked bullet. A press of that same outermost button mute the secondary TV, unmute the other and control would go back to the main TV.

 

The Star and Pound buttons would turn off the secondary TVs (left or right depending on the button) and room off would turn them all off.

 

Behind the scenes I had to setup multiple rooms to do this, but there were no additional drivers required.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

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