Remote Control HDMI/IR Adapter

When you’re hanging an HDTV on a wall, the biggest pain is fishing wires through walls to the video equipment that’s hidden in a closet or another room. It is necessary to run an HDMI cable through the wall for the audio/video, but the other pain is figuring out how to control all of your hidden equipment with your remote controls since remotes require a direct view to work (like Blu-Ray player and TIVO in the case of my parents). This tool is really cool because it lets you use the HDMI cable that is already installed to relay the IR signal back to your equipment so I don’t have to run a second wire through the walls.

I’m the one in my huge obnoxious family that everyone asks to wire their house with an ethernet network, surround sound system, home theater set-up, etc. This is my third home theater set-up job, the other two I’ve used a wiring system that requires you to screw a connector block to the closet where the equipment is and to run these wires through the wall. That took hours. This kit takes a couple minutes to set up. All you really have to do is unplug your HDMI cable from your TV, plug in the IR injector adapter, and replug the HDMI cable into the IR injector adapter (and then repeat on the video equipment side). Then, I just took the IR blaster that is on the equipment side and pointed it in the direction of the video equipment, and it works like a charm 100% of the time.



In the past I have used the wired kit from Cables to Go a couple times. It is a really reliable kit, but it is almost twice as expensive and takes twice as long to install. I’ve also seen other wireless models but read in forums that those convert the IR signal into an RF signal that can go through walls, but that the RF signal is too similar to your wifi signal and so the interference makes it not work 100% of the time.

-- Colin Cameron