Wireless AV senders

[GavinBrowne]

I am in the final stages of completing the building work for an extension to my house (or rather, the builder is!!). When it is finished Roland will be installing a Barco 708 and Iscan pro in my new home cinema room.

My question is: Are these wireless AV senders any good?

I was thinking that it would be a good way to get the output from my Tivo and Sky box through to the projector from the lounge without the hassle of hard wiring everything. I don't plan to watch a lot of TV on the projector but thought that this might be a relatively cheap and hassle free way of providing the signal when required.

The only thing is, I don't want to waste £130 if the picture quality is gong to be terrible. I suspect most people will use these things to send pictures to the portable TV in the bedroom, where as I will be looking at the picture on a 7 foot wide screen.

Has anyone got any direct experience of these units and could offer first hand advice?

Thanks in advance.

 

[refinechange]

I bought a WaveCom Snr a couple of years ago and, as long as you do not want to send the signal too far, it's great. I live in an old house with 2 foot thick walls (didn't want to drill for cables) so I though I would give it a try. I can get about 30 feet but I am looking at setting up another unit as a relay (one reciever, one transmitter on a different chanel) to see if I can get to the other end of the house.

On the whole pretty good with the bonus of stereo sound and IR remote, though not of the cable box:-(

Hope this helps.

Cheers
Alex

 

[Rob.Screene]

I bought mine from Argos. I think this stuff applies to the money-back guarantee period. Anyway, they work fine for the occasional big-screen TiVo viewing, better than I expected.

It's important to note that they only send composite, not RGB nor S-Video signals.

The bottom line is that I haven't used them since the first week though. It was interesting watching F1 on a 7ft screen using Dscaler though.

I think a hard-wired 20m composite cable would be very similar in performance. I'm not sure how RGB or S-Video leads would fare over that distance.

I think the composite, slight fuzzyness and my wife wanting to use TiVo herself in the other room all put me off.

If you want the best picture quality solution, then I think we need an S-Video feed from a box near the HTPC/projector.

An extra Sky+plus box with standard S-Video output straight into a S-Video capture card would work well. I think Jeff uses one of these into Kryton (HTPC).

Alternatively a TiVo close-by into an RGB to S-Video converter would be your next best bet.

A truly high-end solution might be the HOLO3DGRAPH card, as that may allow component input into a HTPC. Perhaps there may be a way to transcode RGB into component YrPrBr(?) or even a way to get the HOLO3DGRAPH to take RGB, but as it's a US product, I'd say it would be very unlikely.

Rob.

 

[jim.rae]

I have installed the Philips videosender system and it's OK if you can accept composite pictures.

Stereo sound is fine, but it doesn't like 18 inch thick Victorian walls...it's better between floors than thick walls.

Best to attach it to the composite output of your video for the most flexible performance as it doesn't do RGB or S VHS or (why not?), component.

 

[GavinBrowne]

Rob / Alex / Jim,

Thanks for the positive feedback. I am pretty sure I will buy one after reading your comments.

Thanks again.