Centrally Switch Off TVs Across Site

[Spuddyboy]

I don't know if this has been asked before, or if it is even possible. But I have been asked to find a way to turn off all of our Plasma TVs from a central location within the school. The request has been prompted by today being an inset day when there is no-one in school but the TVs were still turned on by the built in timer.

 

We have 7 TVs located in 3 separate buildings within the school. All the TVs are Samsung PS42A457's.

 

I was thinking something along the lines of putting an IR repeater on each of the TVs, that could be controlled over IP, to turn each TV onto standby (We can't turn the TVs off at the mains as they lose all of their timer information when we do this for some strange reason)

 

So I would be really grateful if anyone has any solutions that they could recommend or an idea of how this could be achieved.

 

Obviously the cheaper the better, but if a cheaper solution may be temperamental I would prefer to spend a bit more.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Ben

[SYNACK]

Looks like those TVs are extremely limited in their connectivity options, some models have serial ports that give you full control of them which is the best solution. With the above TVs you are right in thinking that IR is the only way, cheaply you could wire up one of these http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/755e/ in each room with the switch wired back to a spare network port or something.

 

A better solution could be using one of these IRTrans Infrared Control System which would allow you to send different commands to the TVs. Probably not cheap but a decent looking cnetral control solution.

 

Here are some other systems:

http://www.globalcache.com/products/gc-100/models1/

http://www.mermardesigns.com/ether_ir.htm

 

If they all take input via HDMI then there may be a way to control them via that witha program like this http://valkyrietech.com/index.php/media-gallery/

 

Looks like the above HDMI based system will probably work with the TVs you have as long as the TV signal is being provided by a PC via HDMI, not sure how the app would handle multiple TVs but it could lead to a very impressive solution giving you large amounts of centralized control over existing HDMI distribution.

Edited April 1, 2011 by SYNACK

[LosOjos]

How are you delivering information to the screens? If they are attached to PC's, *most* Samsung TV's will automatically enter standby when the PC is switched off and come back on again when it's turned back on (like a monitor), you just have to put them in to "PC Mode" in the display settings, then you can just enable wake and standby by LAN and do it all remotely... of course it does mean there'll still be a little power consumed, but nowhere near as much as just leaving everything on...

 

No use to you if they're not attached to PC's though...

[ihaveaproblem]

On our sony TV's they connect to a small computer via a serial to usb cable and then using RS232 commands we can turn the screen on/off, change the input, change the contrast,brightness etc etc.

Do you have serial ports on these?