Controlling a sky box in a different room

[Easty-5]

I am in the process of trying to sort out my AV set up for our new house. I am almost there with what we need other than controlling our sky boxes. I intend to have our sky box in a cupboard in the hallway. I will have HDMi cables run to the lounge where the TV will be mounted. So I need to have a way of controlling the sky box. Obviously I do not want any wires on show at all.

Any suggestions what I can use? Also, we intend to have a magic Eye in our bedroom for Sky. Do I need any other cable run for this other than Co-ax?

[JimbobVFR]

Easty-5 said:

I am in the process of trying to sort out my AV set up for our new house. I am almost there with what we need other than controlling our sky boxes. I intend to have our sky box in a cupboard in the hallway. I will have HDMi cables run to the lounge where the TV will be mounted. So I need to have a way of controlling the sky box. Obviously I do not want any wires on show at all.

Any suggestions what I can use? Also, we intend to have a magic Eye in our bedroom for Sky. Do I need any other cable run for this other than Co-ax?

The magic eyes are fairly low quality being an analogue TV signal and mono sound only. I use 1 with a small 17" in my bedroom where its just about acceptable. Its going to look pretty crap on anything much better though.

You could use another eye for control in the lounge, just bear in mind newer sky STBs don't have the RF out built in anymore, you'll need to add an iolink device to get one, also if you're using 2 eyes you'll need to make sure any splitters or distribution amp are compatible with the power sent down the coax cable to make them work.

I've found that the eyes don't even necessarily need to be visible to work well, one of mine is behind a TV facing down and works fine, IR can bounce to a certain extent.

[karma mechanic]

I've got an IR sender/receiver that works over the HDMI cable, one of these: http://ukhdmi.com/ir-over-hdmi-kit_QQ103095

The bedroom TV has an HDMI cable dropped to the main room below, where there is another TV plus the Tivo. The Tivo output is split two ways, for the local TV and the upstairs one. The sender HDMI unit has a little flying lead with the IR blaster on it, and that is stuck near the front of the Tivo. The counterpart pickup is mounted near the upstairs TV.

Works very well indeed, much better than a previous wireless-based unit that I struggled with for years.

[badgerade]

The Sky app for Android/iPhone is pretty good, I've replaced our IR links and now just use the app. Improved recently with a 'back-up' button so you can get rid of the on screen prompts etc. The only negative I've found is that it's not possible to control BBC Iplayer from the app.

[moles]

A RF remote is what I bought whenI put all my stuff out of sight a Harmony Ultimate http://www.amazon.co.uk/Logitech-Harmony-Ultimate-...