Allan Bogild Pedersen's blog

In my opinion a flat panel TV has to be mounted on the wall so you can fully enjoy the design, but even the most well designed flat panel look ugly with a large pile of different colored cables hanging from it. Here is a way you can get around that.

 The amount of cables needed to use all the functions on today’s flat panel TV’s has dramatically grown in numbers, besides power also needs a network cable to use DLNA, one or more HDMI cables for DVD players and set top boxes and of cause a SCART cable for that old VHS that you haven’t thrown out yet. All together this can be fairly large stack of cables hanging from TV, you can of cause use something to hide them but most products for this is also pretty ugly to look at.

This is how I have done it
My setup includes, besides a huge amount of ugly cables, 3 setup boxes a satellite receiver, a popcorn hour and a Slingbox solo. All 3 boxes are placed in my office which is located on the other side of the wall from where my TV is hanging. A have drilled a pretty big hole behind the TV to run cable in, and the result is absolutely no visible cables in the living room. This introduce a small problem, my normal remote controls could not reach the setup boxes though the wall.

Logitech Harmony 895
Logitech Harmony is a series of universal remote controller from Logitech that works a bit different that most other universal remote controls. Logitech harmony is event controlled and thereby know what it needs to turn on when you want to watch fx. Satellite TV. It will automatically turn on the TV and change to the correct input source, turn on the satellite receiver and change to you chosen start channel and so on. The remote also knows that when you press the volume up button it will send the code to the surround receiver or whatever you have programmed it to. This is such a cool way to do it because you really do not feel that you’re using a universal controller, normally universal remote controllers’ needs a lot of key presses to change what equipment you are controlling.

Logitech Harmony 895 also have little extra neat thing, that most of the other Harmony remotes don’t have, it comes with a remote radio transmitter, that I have placed in my office. The remote transmitter works by receiving radio waves from the remote control and send the signal to a number of IR transmitters that you can but on the equipment you want to control. The radio waves have no problem going through walls so it makes it possible for you to put everything out of view.