Remote-controlled TV tuner - preferably ethernet controlled

Factual Questions
1

I’m dealing with a large university, and they are doing digital signage all over the place. Part of this signage is the ability to insert video feeds from an encoder - typically connected to a tuner.

What you end up with is a big dollar system attached to a bank of VCRs (for their tuners) that someone has to go in and manually adjust the channels on.

There has GOT to be a better way. Some sort of appliance that has multiple tuners in it (eight would be ideal), and that can be remotely controlled - preferably via ethernet.

Anyone have any suggestions or experience with this? All my searching is coming up with stuff that won’t work (HDHomeRun - great, but I need an analog feed coming out of the tuner) or media center type stuff.

-Joe

2

Not sure if it has what you need, and you might have already considered and ruled it out, but have you looked at Slingbox? http://www.slingbox.com/

3

Strangely enough, I hadn’t considered them. That being said, it looks like the one thing that it won’t do that I need is to actually function as a tuner. They do all sorts of talk about needing a set-top box to connect to, which isn’t the case here.

-Joe

4

My understanding is that the Slingbox Pro-HD has an inbuilt tuner:

http://www.slingbox.com/go/slingbox-prohd-help-me-choose

"
Built in tuner avoids conflict with viewers at home
Built in analog & HD digital (Clear QAM) cable tuner*
Built in analog & HD digital (ATSC) antenna tuner*
"

And it doesn’t require a set-top box to function, you can connect pretty much any video source to it:

"
Connect and control multiple audio / video sources

FULL SET OF PASS-THROUGH CONNECTIONS
Easily connect to one of 5,000 compatible standard-definition or high-definition devices. Component, composite, S-Video and ATSC connectors.
"

You should give them a call and see if they have what you need. The one limitation I see is that one Slingbox can handle only 3 sources. You might need multiple Slingboxes to reach your objective, depending on your budget.

If this doesn’t work, it appears that what you need is to contact “cable headend equipment” manufacturers or service providers.

5

i recall that with Slingbox you need only one receiver (computer) can connect to any Slongbox as a source at a time.

6

That seems like a 'roundabout way of doing things. When I was doing research for my own digital sign question, lots of the higher-end products supported things like custom RSS based on location (ie, display weather for wherever the sign is), and streaming video.

If they don’t support streaming video, the thing that comes to my mind is gluing a bunch of IR devices on your VCRs, and controlling all of them with a PC.

7

Well, the signage will do the stuff like the localized RSS feeds and all that. All I’m working on right now is to just get cable feeds into some (way overpriced) Scientific Atlanta video encoders. All this stuff is crammed into a closet at a far end of the campus, and those five encoders are connected to five VCRs. And there are no digital signs in that room.

So, you have someone in front of a bank of VCRs with no feedback unless they take a laptop and open up a UDP stream through VLC. Plus there’s no guide or anything like that.

Basically, we have a bunch of half-assed stuff setup because I have no good way of doing a tuner simply remote controlled…

-Joe