when looking at projectors this question never came along until now and google is giving me the run around. When you get a projector like a CRT projector, i'd imagine you dont run everything up the wall across the ceiling to the projector itself right? Or you dont just get on a ladder and hook a cord up to the back of the thing right, you need to get some sort of device where all this stuff hooks up to for convenience? Can anybody explain, elaborate, whats it called, what do they do etc etc Thanks
You run wires to your projector, regardless of whether it is a CRT or a digital projector. I ran a big run of RGB in the ceiling before it went up, and I put a dedicated circuit outlet in the ceiling too. I may also vent heat out of the rear of my room. So the answer is yes, you run wire to your projector, however you can. Without wire you get no picture... When my theater is complete, the computer will be located in an adjacent storage room, and that wall is where all the wire that goes all over the place terminates (video, antennas, cable, speaker wire, cat5, etc etc). If you have a finished room, you may just have to run a fat conduit up to the ceiling if you want want to fish wires in your ceiling. Avoid wireless transmission at all costs.
What Chris said. When I built my theater, I ran large conduit through the walls from the equipment room to the center-ceiling mount area. Dedicated power outlet as well... and a screen trigger cable from the PJ to the soffit where the motorized screen hides. In retrospect, though, I should have run very large conduit because 5 runs of RG6 with BNC connectors (RGBHV) is a fat bundle indeed. I ended up having to cut the connectors off of one end... feed the cable, and re-terminate. Ouch.
Are you asking about video switchers/source selectors? I have 4 devices which use component video so I use a component video switch to select the device to display and then have only one component video cable to run to the projector. If you need to send s-video to the projector you could use an s-video switch and one s-video cable to the projector or use a converter/scaler to convert s-video into component video and keep it to a single cable run to the projector.
