I work in a bar and am wanting to refurbish and modernise our entertainment system.

Does anyone know of a picture splitter.

For example, we have 4 picture inputs, sky, teleclub, laptop and Swiss Tv. We also have 5 televisions. I am looking for a piece of equipment which would allow me to connect the 4 inputs and select each television individually to show what i want. This should therefore make the process of showing live football easier because at the moment we have several remote controls which can be confusing.

Also, we will be buying a new sound mixer. Would it be possible to buy a machine which would do all of the above.

Your help would be much appreciated.

Tony

You want certainly for the TVs some kind of distribution amp. Basically, I have two satellite boxes connected using scart into my distribution amp which then is inserted into my cable TV network at home. I got mine from www.sp-radiohess.ch - it's a Triax of some description.

You then tune the TVs to the different sources and can have everything running independently.

For your sound mixer, I have no idea.

but, would that also cater for the numbers, 4 inputs and 5 outputs??

It supports up to 8 inputs and you can choose what frequency the output is on - that's within your cable TV network so in theory several hundred.

Thanks Lob, your name suggests nothing about your intelligence

Thank goodness for that - otherwise they'd be PM-ing me for advice

You have five data sources providing video (Vx) and stereo audio (Ax) being fed to displays TV Dx.

All video sources can be routed to any display
(V1..V5) -> (D1..D5)

The audio will be routed to its respective TV (it makes little sense otherwise having audio that doesnt match picture through the TV).
(A1 -> D1)
(A2 -> D2)
(A3 -> D3)
(A4 -> D4)
(A5 -> D5)

You suggest the audio will go into an audio mixer which requires at least 5 stereo channels. I am not clear what you are trying to achieve here.
Mixers by definition take multiple sources and mix them down to fewer (groups) or normally two outputs, one left, one right. Is that really what you want ? That means everyone will be listening to the same audio.

I suspect what you really want to do is route the audio from each of the five stereo to different speakers or zones within the bar ? This is normally done with selection of the source for each stereo channel on a multi-channel amplifier. Each of the channels will have its own gain control...

Its vital that you spend a little time accurately defining the problem before you talk equipment and definitely before you put your hand in your pocket...

dave

Would this do what you want?

There must be thousands of VDJ units that would do the job.

Can you specify what you want the sound mixer to do:
What do you want to put into it ?
How do you want to distribute the output. To one speaker system or more ?

Forget what i said about the audio mixer. Our mixer is to be able to select which input we want, ie, we can turn the sound for sky off and switch it to a cd. Put yourself in a pub, they can show many tv channels but either have a cd playing or a tv channel, football for example.

My biggest worry was the equipment for the video and to be able to selct which tv shows what, easily. The problem we have right now is that because we have a limited number of video inputs some tv's will always show the same. This is due to the fact that we run it through a video recorder which has a couple of inputs and outputs.

I was just thinking maybe there was a device which could act as a sound mixer and a video mixer. When thats not available then no problem. What Lob recommended will work for video but i would need a seperate device for sound. Its ok for the sound to come from the televisions but we also have many speakers in the pub and require an amp from the mixer to run to.

Hope this helps

if you have just one source of sound in the pub, you are laughing. If you want more than one, you will need to do some thinking.

That is almost what i would need, it would be perfect but i need 5 video outputs and a couple of scart inputs. a very big step in the direction though, just dont know if you can change each monitor seperately or if they all show the same. i need to have the flexibility of changing each of them.

Gives me an idea that something is out there though, cheers

We have many but they are running through our current mixer which i want to upgrade to hopefully a video/sound mixer.

I can live with keeping the old one though if i am able to get the video problems sorted in one way or another

what I suggested could solve your video feed issue. Your in-pub cable TV network is connected to each TV?

A brief check showed it to have 2x video outputs and 4x video outputs for monitoring, so although it's no exactly what you need it could take 4x inputs and take any one of them, or all four, and output them to any of the outputs.

RE: scart , s-video to scart is a easy, you can can adapters everywhere.

Google up "vdj mixer" I bet you'd find something a bit simpler that will do what you want.

yes, at the moment it runs through a video recorder which leaves us with limited opportunities to change each channel seperately

Thanks for that, i shall look into that. Something like that would be perfect but may be a bit too technical for some of the staff. Gives me a great option though and could be cheaper than buying the mixer and the video splitter seperately. thanks for your advice

the video splitter you want is an "AV Switch" I think

Edit: like this (although this leaves you 1 output short)

If any of you guys would like to help us install it pm me. Its all a bit over and above my technical mind. We could come to an arrangement over it.