 There's three different places in the house where we're gonna have a TV or projector. Family room upstairs, the VR gaming space here, and the theater room. And if we want to have the capability to play Xbox games in all of those locations, I'm gonna need three Xboxes. Multiply that problem by every other potential gaming system. Got your Nintendo Switch, you got your gaming PC, and all of a sudden you've got a huge problem with respect to cost, complexity, and even just power consumption. Fortunately, as much of a champagne problem as that might be, the solution is not that champagne, and is one that might actually be applicable to you as well. It might be a $6,000 receiver, but the feature that we're gonna use is present on a lot of them. Even the one that I bought for like a hundred bucks has two zones. What we're gonna do is use those receiver zones to split this Xbox into both displays. So you can play Xbox here, Xbox there, PC there, PC there, Nintendo Switch everywhere. And what's really mind-blowing is that on this particular unit, we can actually take two different inputs, like the gaming PC and the Xbox, and then route them to two separate outputs at the same time. You can even mirror them, you can switch which one has which. It's pretty exciting. Just like our sponsor, Jackery. Their Explorer 1500 power station provides a huge 1500 watt hour capacity. It charges up to seven devices simultaneously, and it takes only four hours to recharge from zero to hero. I mean 80%. Get 10% off with code LinusTechTips at the link below. Naturally, the first thing we need to talk about in this video is Jake's beautiful diagram of how we expect all of this to work. We did this together, thank you very much. So if it doesn't work, you're sharing blame. Basically, we've got our receiver. We've got our Xbox going into the receiver, then we run the eARC from the screen one, which is the projector to the receiver, and the regular HDMI output to the VR room TV. This should give us 4K 120 to the receiver, and then can be split or switched between these two zones. Or mirrored. And then you get eARC back to the sound bar, and the receiver has its own speaker, so we don't have to worry about sound there. Obviously, in the theater room. Then the PC. Okay. Even though this receiver is like top of the line, it only has a single 4K 120Hz input. Now, we have a solution to that in the long term, which is just a secondary HDMI input selector, but we don't have that today. So to test, we're going to run the PC directly into a 4K 120 input on both the projector and the TV. Then we use eARC to get the audio back. That's the idea. We don't know if it's going to work. Representing the VR room TV, we're going to have this LG C148 inch, and then representing the theater room projector, we're going to have the theater room projector. Epson, whatever it is, 12,000. The models here are actually kind of important. We need both displays to have eARC. I actually picked a monitor as one of the displays first, and then it was like, oh, that's not going to work. We also need our display to have eARC on a port that we're not going to use, because remember, it's just for the sound bar. So we need like three HDMI 2.1 ports. Just for these two inputs. And then naturally, Sonos and their infinite wisdom doesn't have a single additional HDMI input. Oh, Jesus. Look at the TV. Oh my God. You're not even on the ground. Oh my God. Oh my God. Thank you. You might say you jumping in to fix that makes you an arc reactor. Sound bar goes into HDMI input 2, eARC, which allows the sound from... Yes, the sound from the other 4K 120 inputs to be passed through to this sound bar. Is this hurting your brain yet? Yes. It's hurting my brain. Okay. You should use monitor two, because we're not using the zones yet. We're not. If this plan works, we don't even need to use the zones. It's confusing, right? Monitor one and monitor two, those are both zone one. What? I've determined this. Because it said it had like three zones on that like, it does have three zones. like, Crutchfield documentation. The third zone is audio only. I see. Remember the PC doesn't even plug into this thing. So this will allow us to mirror the outputs basically on zone one. Now we take our Xbox series, whatever it's called, that goes into 8K in. That's our only HDMI 2.1 input on this whole damn thing. $5,000 receiver. And you know the best part? They released like new low-end receivers that have three inputs. In the time since I bought this? Yeah. Actually, it was like a week after you bought it. Where are you going? I need to power that. I'm plugging this into a computer. You're a computer. You're a computer. Now we're not done yet because this graphics card now needs to go to both of our displays separately from the receiver. Okay, so we have one on either right now, but we also want to be able to have it on both, right? Yeah. So switch the TV to HDMI 3, which is the Xbox. Beautiful. Oh, shut up. Was it really that easy? Okay, what's cool about this? You could have people gaming in the theater room and people are like playing board games out here and just peripherally paying attention to who's winning or whatever. Or you could be playing a local multiplayer game like a split screen green game or whatever. And you could have each of the teams sitting in a separate zone so that they can talk to each other, like kind of have private comms between the two rooms. Wait, hold on. What? What about audio though? Because we have audio there. That's theater room. But not here. No, I don't hear anything. Oh zone. Wait zone. Because they're both zone 1. Yes. Why don't we just use two zones then? Because then it's not 4K 120. It would just be 4K 60. There's only one 4K 120 input, but if we could select that input on that output. Yeah, that's what I thought Crutchfield said. Okay, well, let's try that then. Okay. So we need to switch to the other zone. Like I said, I pulled the TV out of the monitor 2 for zone 1 and I put it into 4K zone 2, which is under HDMI out 8K. Okay, so zone 2 says it's on the game source right now. I can see all the sources here. So we go view zone 2. What? Game. Okay, so we want aux 2. Where's aux 2? It's not there. What if we look at the main zone? What options do we have for main zone? Whoa, a lot more. Wait. It just doesn't even let you select the source. You can't use aux 2. Because it's 4K 120, bro. I have a workaround. Big but, it wouldn't be 4K 120 on both. Oh, really? But. But? You can do 1080 120. Oh, that's not bad. So I'm thinking the Xbox would be on that. Okay, I put it back in the other way then. This is just a theory too. I don't actually know if this will work. The best part of all this is that even if we solve this problem, we have more problems to overcome today. What I did notice is you can see like game, DVD, cable sat on both of them. Yeah. So I figure if we plug the Xbox into one of those, then we can just pick and choose. Xbox into game. Well, then the PC doesn't have to have separate things out to each thing. It could just use the 8K. The who-dee-whad-dee-when? Oh, wait, no, no, no. The PC. Nothing, nothing, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because we can't do it to the second zone. Well, let's do PC into the TV, because then it can e-arck the sound back to there. And then PC into the 8K input. So then we have sound to put in the receiver. Otherwise, we're not going to have sound to the receiver. So if we take the PC, plug it into the 8K input. So PC is aux 2 now, and the Xbox is game. So we'll do game for zone 2. Okay. And then main zone. Let's do game as well. Let's see if we can get. Okay, cool. It's on both, right? Do we have audio? Well, the arc's working. And we have audio here? Yeah. Okay. Well, that's progress. So we have audio on both now. And video on both. And if we go into the Xbox menu. What? Your TV doesn't support 120 Hertz. What? Yes, it does. Jake told me not to power cycle everything. So I power cycled everything anyway. There it is. Okay, but will it stay is the question. Come on, come on. Yeah. Does the projector even support this resolution though? 1080p 120? I bet it does. I mean, if it does 4K 120, why would it not do 1080 120? I mean, I've seen dumber things. In fact, I don't even see it having a signal right now. Maybe the projector doesn't like it then. Epson, y'all got some splaining to do. If it can do 4K 120, then you guys need to enable 1080p 120, okay? Well, hold on. This might just be like receiver being stupid. Yvonne's gonna kill me if this whole setup is just like super complicated and stupid. That's kind of what it's looking like. 4K 60 Xbox, we could do that. If 4K 60 is fine, then we just need to figure out the PC. Okay. Yeah, so we got both. Let's check the PC now, man. Now the idea is not necessarily that you would want to mirror the displays all the time. So before we check the PC, should we see how easy it is to say, oh, I'm actually I want the Xbox out here or I'm actually I want it in the theater room. Now I go to zone one, which is my projector and I can say, okay, I don't want to see that anymore. I could go back to zone two. I go back to the game input and sweet. Okay, so that's not that bad. That's actually not bad. Once we just got it built into a couple of Harmony remotes or whatever those new like kickstarted ones, we'll have to try it, I guess. All right. What if we try to switch to the PC now? Yes, main zone. Yes, main zone, which is the theater room. I wish you could rename those and they weren't hard coded on a remote, but okay, cool. Okay. Now for audio. Yeah, hold on. Hold on. Oh God. Oh, I stepped on the remote. Okay. There's our in-game audio. Now hit me with this. Man, Crab Rave is such a masterpiece. This is awesome. Okay, hold on. But what if we want the PC in both locations? Then all we got to do is go like this. HDMI one, which will be done by the Harmony. Now I need to know if this also is Crab Rave. No, because it's not. Because the PC, oh God, Windows. No, no, there's an application. There's an application. Oh yeah, voice meter. Yes. You can output to two different things. Yes. Okay, we got to set our Windows output to voice meter input. Yes. And then we have hardware out. That's Denon. And the second one should be the LG TV. LG TV. Oh, I turned it all the way to max. Yeah. Holy shit, it works. But we're not done for today. Just because we can take our different inputs and send them to whatever outputs we want, doesn't mean that this is how we want that to go down. So the projector needs to move to the theater room. The TV needs to stay here. And the Xbox needs to go somewhere in between. Dude, if this falls, like this thing's done for, you know. It might as well fall that way. Oh, it's actually like... See? These are cool. These are the solution to having our source devices, be they Xboxes or gaming PC switches, whatever else the case may be. And then our displays in completely different locations. So both of the cables I'm holding are active HDMI cables from Phantom Cables. These can come in a couple of different varieties. Copper active cables. So these are directional. You got to plug the specified side into your source and the specified side into your display. And then they're going to have pretty thick copper conductors because they actually are boosting the signal effectively to make it all the way to the other side. Then you've got your optical cables. These can either have an auxiliary power input like this Vivify one, or they cannot, but they actually convert from copper zeros and ones to light zeros and ones and can often go much farther. Like you can do a hundred foot. You can do a hundred meters. You can do a hundred meters. Yeah, this 25 footer is going to be pretty tight. Oh, do not pull. No, no, I'm not going to pull. I'm just going to go here for safety. Yeah, if you just want to go there and hold it, then I can pull on it and make sure. I'm going to move the projector over. Wait, hold on. Is this speaker wire long enough? Here, can you plug? Well, we have more anyway. Plug that in for me, will you? Yeah, sure. Sorry, Brandon. I'm going to keep walking. I'm a little tangled. No, no, wait. Stop? Okay. Yes, stop. Oh God, the PC. Yeah. Where are we going to put that? Here. Everything just goes here. This is the projector output and then this one needs to go to the TV. Cool feature. And this has become more and more common on receivers since the Chromecast came out. We've got a USB port back here, but it's not for firmware updates or anything like that. It's just a little 5 volt power source. Boop. So if we have something like a powered optical HDMI cable, boop, we can power it like that. Okay, HDMI out here. Into the game. Yeah. And put. This is all it takes and now I got game. This boy goes here for the 4K 120 input there. We just need another long one to go from the PC to the TV. I don't think this is going to reach Jake. Brother, we'll just move the TV. I'm running out of cable, boys. So this is input one. Whatever you want. I'm so thirsty. I forgot my water bottle. If only I had thought to shop on LTTstore.com, I would have a water bottle. And there are so many different colors available. Editor like Photoshop. Yeah, I was going to say thanks editor for all your hard work. Here, can you put this water bottle in my hand? But no, I bet you you can't. Why you gotta be like that? Get that out of here. He's wasting your time, which is wasting my money because he thinks it's funny. I have no idea what's going on here. I need the remote. I'm just going to take your word for it. I'm turning on the projector. It's just working. Oh, wow. You see, I'm a drift God, bro. You ever played a projector on a black screen like that before? Man, once we actually have light control in here, this is going to be amazing. And not a black wall. Great. Okay, so. Let's check the TV. Did we ever actually turn the PC on? It's a good question. We should probably check that. Computer didn't post. I think it might just be confused about not having a keyboard and mouse and stuff. Oh, you f***ed it up. I did. I f***ed it. Okay. Well, let's check the projector while you fix that. I just finished giving you guys a tech tip about how these active cables are directional. See, I have the display end plugged into the PC. What I want is the source end. While he fixes that, let's check the projector. Hey, it works. Look at that. I don't have a keyboard and mouse to like mess with it, but it works. Hold on, I can help. Left more. Left a little bit more. Oh, the tiniest bit left. Okay, click. I don't know why it's not working. Oh, there's like an edge prompt. Okay. Oh, how did you do that? Escape. Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, click. It's working. Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na. Am I doing it right? All right. Okay, let's go check the TV. This is fantastic. As expected, we're able to use the receiver's multiple inputs and outputs. And this is actually a feature you might be able to find on a receiver for a couple of hundred bucks on Craigslist, even if it doesn't support the latest standards. Or one you already have. And we're able to take whichever input we want and send it to whichever destination we want. The only hiccup we ran into is that we can only have one of our sources be 4K 120Hz until better receivers come out and... You buy another one for $6,000. Jake gets a great deal on a formerly $6,000 receiver. I'm on to you. But we still have one more problem to solve. While moving HDMI over long distances is no problem. We could have that Xbox in the basement and a TV up on frickin' the second story. We could have a TV on the space station if we had a long enough fiber. He's not wrong. What we can't move around easily is the wireless Xbox controller signal. And this is kind of ironic because Microsoft actually makes a USB dongle that allows you to connect four Xbox controllers to it that you could extend with an optical USB cable to wherever you want. But the issue is that dongle is only PC compatible. So the last thing we need to test is can we actually reach the Xbox in the mechanical room from both the VR gaming space and from the theater room? You feel that? What do I feel? Oh, I think it might actually be working. Your TV has to restart itself. Oh my... to update the tur... Oh, wow, look at that. Do you want to throw it in a split-screen gaming mode and I'll head over to the other room? This game doesn't have a split-screen. I'll go to the other one then. The Forza 7 whatever had it. Now this is approximately where it end up and this is pretty far from the Xbox through at least two walls. A BMW M1? Okay, sure. Jake, it doesn't matter what car we're driving. We're just trying to find out if the controllers are going to work properly. It matters to me. He's taking him on the inside. Ah, you pushed me off the track you ass. Oh, this thing drives like ****. See you later. Oh, you suck. Any perceptible leg? Well, I mean it's an Xbox. So yeah, but... Well, right, but I mean other than that. Yeah, it seems fine. It seems fine to me too. Compared to playing on a racing wheel on a computer. This is like... this is dog ****. Well, okay, that's not the point. The point is it works. The point is it works. Yes. For bonus points, do you want to try this upstairs in the family room? Do we have a long enough cable? I think we can go straight to the family room. I think it's right there. What time is it? Let's just go right there. 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Go to freshbooks.com slash Linus and get more time back to build the business you love. If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out the projector one. That was fun. That projector is. That one's a blast. It's a black wall. It's so cool.