[Shop-talk] tv - home theater cabling problem

[Ronnie Day]

John & group -

Going through something similar. This is gonna be a bit long, but it's a
more complex situation than it may appear to be. A bit of background  -

I've been in and around the music and A/V business for close to 60 years. 9
of my 11 years of AF active duty I played in several AF bands, always doing
sound and recording as an "additional duty". I also designed and built a
couple of
in-house studios. The last two years of my active duty time I did film
sound recording, editing and mixer for a DoD outfit in SoCal. A couple
years later I ended up in DC working for Naval Media, and started working
with digital audio for film and TV projects. So, I've seen things go from
1/4 inch reel-to-reel tape through 35 and 16 mm magnetic film to analog,
then digital videotape, to all of the digital formats we play with today. I
retired from the VA in Temple, TX, three years ago after 20 years working
as a TV engineer/photographer, so I've played with all of the different
media formats over the years.

We have three Samsung 4K TVs. Regarding sound out, you should be able to
select the sound output to the TV speakers, the HTiB receiver and maybe one
or two other options, depending on how you have things connected. Look
under Settings>Sound Speakers or Output. On some TVs you can switch the
audio output on each input individually, on others it's a universal setting
for all the inputs. I suggest you draw this all out for yourself in pencil
and have an eraser handy.

I've attached a diagram of the following - In our MBR, the system I'm
working on now, we have a Dish Hopper going through a Yamaha A/V receiver
then to the TV. First problem occurred when I routed a new Sony 4K DVD
player through the Yamaha. I couldn't play 4K DVDs, but Blu-Rays played
fine. After a lot of head scratching and more than a few choice words, I
contacted Yamaha T/S and found out that the several y/o receiver (RX-A840)
only supports HDMI 2.0, not 2.2, which the Sony needs to play 4K discs, so
currently the 4K player is connected directly to the second HDMI port of
the TV. To get the audio from the DVD player back into the Yamaha, I come
out of the optical audio port back to one of the optical ports on the
Yamaha. Works fine.

Things got complicated when I decided to playback 4K movie files from hard
drives or other removable devices. I've got a couple of USB3 8TB drives
full of movies. One is all 4K files. Some of these are formatted
slightly differently than others and require a seperate audio codec. plus
the TV has only 1 USB port. After posting questions to a worldwide media
list I've been on since the late '90s when I built my first digital A/V
editing system, the consensus was that I needed a "media player" to connect
the two hard drives to the TV, so I ordered a MyPin M29 media player, $60
from Amazon. It supported the file formats I needed, but it wouldn't let me
turn off subtitles/closed captioning (bummer) and I get frequent, subtle
"stuttering" in the audio (MAJOR bummer). If I plugged the 4K hard drive
into either my Mac or PC and used VLC, everything worked fine, but I want
to watch these movies on the 55 inch in our bedroom. An added problem was
that the output of the MyPin player is HDMI and I was already out of HDMI
ports on the TV. So, after several discussions with several folks, I
ordered a Lenovo M75 Tiny mini PC and plan to run Plex server as the core
of a home media server down the road. The hard drives plug into it, and
there's plenty of room for expansion.

Now, how to get these additional souces into the TV? While working to
connect all of these input devices I noticed that TESmart has a 4 x 1 HDMI
switch. I'm using one of their KVM switches to let me control a couple of
Macs and a PC with a single keyboard and mouse for some time and it works
great. I sent their tech folks a note describing my issues with 4K and they
said try it. The switch was $25 and they offer a 30 day return.
Unfortunately it won't work with 4K so it's going back next week. After
talking to a Ford AV systems engineer in Austin that I've worked with
before, I ordered a Monoprice (31057) switch/scaler that Monoprice promises
will do what I need. It, too, has a 30 return.

Sorry if i've been a bit long winded but setting up all of these boxe to
work together, especially with 4K is a bit complex. The reason I'm going
through all of this detail is that if anyone's not doing 4K video, all of
the simpler routing and switching should work fine. However, if you have
ANY thoughts of going to 4K, plan for that now. Hopefully I can save other
folks some blood, sweat & tears!

RD


On Fri, Aug 14, 2020 at 12:39 PM john niolon <jniolon at att.net> wrote:

> Hi guys.   is there a tv/audio guru that can drag me thru a
> tv/U-verse/home theatre quandry ??  shop content is I watch shop videos on
> u-tube
>
> john
>
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