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Cool Homes
Video Wall Is a Quadruple Sports Threat
Professional electronics installer Jay Cobb rigged a video wall composed of four Panasonic plasmas that can show four separate broadcasts or one unified image.
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All eyes are on Jay Cobb’s video wall during busy NFL Sundays. Credit: Otto Marketing
December 29, 2008 | by Rebecca Day

There’s no question where Jay Cobb’s friends go for Sunday afternoon football: to the game room of his Northern California home, where they can rack them up or down a few while taking in the week’s four top NFL games.

Cobb uses the four-part display—along with the home’s Control4 home automation system—as a living showroom for his Fresno-based Hi-Tech Home installation business.

The four-quadrant TV is fast becoming a trademark of the Hi-Tech portfolio, and it makes for any easy sell to prospective clients—especially sports fans, when they can see four sports events at once on dedicated 42-inch TVs.

Cobb used four 42-inch Panasonic pro-grade plasma TVs for the video wall, which can be converted into a single 84-inch display for movies or a major sporting event like the Super Bowl.

He taps one Control4 button on the wall, and each TV tunes to a different station from the DirecTV receivers. Audio corresponds to the TV in the upper left quadrant when there’s different programming on all four TVs.

A second button, labeled MERGE, reformats the TVs to show a unified image (Cobb went with pro-grade monitors because they make for a more seamless combined image), and the third button reverts the video back to independent images.

What do his friends think about their buddy’s showroom? “They cruise in and shoot pool, have a beer and watch four games of football,” Cobb says. “It’s their dream room.”



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Comments (8) Most recent displayed first.
Posted by Melvin Surdin  on  07/02/09  at  11:10 AM

Terrific idea ...

Posted by Rich  on  02/05/09  at  07:12 AM

I would like to know the make and model of the TV and what is controlling the quadrants.

Isn’t there another way to do this with multiplexing on 1 large screen? Are the framerates still the same.

Has anyone else done this….

Posted by John  on  01/02/09  at  08:21 PM

This is perfect for watching different games in a game room and having the capability to merge all screens into one for that big game once a year…like the superbowl.  Great idea!

Posted by Dave D  on  01/01/09  at  05:18 PM

I think personally id find software to do that with a pc and a projector so there isn’t the frame effect. still pretty cool tho

Posted by Dan  on  12/31/08  at  02:32 PM

I have a 100” projector and have always wanted something that could take 4 inputs and shoot them out as one stream.  4 games durring football season for an extra $20 a month is fine, but I’m not willing to throw down another $5000 in hardware and make watching a unified image painful.


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