Directv Tivo in two rooms

For the longest time I’ve struggled with what to do about a TV in our bedroom. We don’t watch a lot of TV in bed, but occasionally it’s nice to have. We currently only have 2 TVs – one in our living room with a DirecTV Tivo, and the already mentioned bedroom TV with nothing. The Bedroom TV used to have a satellite connection, but we didn’t use it enough to justify the cost.

I finally did some research online and came across the idea to take the Video-Out from the Tivo (actually the Cable-Out) and run a cable to another room. What this does is essentially give us an exact copy of what’s on one TV on the other.

The specifics of the cable hookup are like this:

1. I had all our rooms wired for cable quite some time ago, and all the rooms run into a box in the basement
2. I ran an additional cable from that box to the living room with the Tivo, and fished it through the same hole as the existing cable wall outlet
3. I bought a new cable wall faceplate that has 3 cable connectors instead of the usual one (Directv Tivos use 2 cables from the Satellite dish, I just needed 1 to go back out) and connected this new cable to it. This made it look perfectly normal in the living room, no messy cables coming out of a hole in the wall
4. Connect the new cable coming from the living room (connected to the extra Cable-out from the Tivo) to the cable going to the bedroom
5. Now the TV upstairs sees exactly the same thing as the living room

This solved the problem of getting the TV upstairs to work, but how do I control the Tivo, change channels, etc? Simple, I used a Remote Control Extender – which I got here (link). You basically set up the ufo-looking object somewhere in the room with the Tivo, then put the transmitter in as one of the batteries for your remote. You can then operate the remote from almost anywhere in the house – it’s great. They even supply two batteries, one of which is stored (and charged) in the ufo base.