The 2024 Grand Rewiring

 

Had to replace the OLED TV because of six or seven years worth of burn-in. Notice the before and after pics of the screens above. Which meant a GRAND REWIRING. 

My setup is complicated to the point of bordering on baroque. It’s gotten simpler over the years, and tends to get simpler each time, but even now, my setup includes a TV, a soundbar, a cable box, an Apple TV, , a 4K Blu-Ray player, a DVD recorder, an XBOX Series X, a PS5, a Switch, a Harmony remote and hub, multiple game controller charging docks, and an HDMI switch box because no TV has enough inputs for all that shit.

And, over the years, as things move in and out of rotation, the wiring gets fucked. And so any major upgrade means a Grand Rewiring, where we unplug everything, dust everything, rearrange everything, reconnect everything as neatly as possible, test everything, and hopefully move on with our lives.

This Great Rewiring took about a dozen hours total over three days. But it accomplished a lot.of things I’ve been wanting to implement for a while, including but not limited to:

• Adding smart plugs. I’ve been putting in Kasa Mini smart plug adaptors on outlets that are tough to get to and draw a lot of vampire power so, in the case of an extended power outage where we’re running the house off the battery, I can power down non-essentials. So there’s two 12-outlet strips behind the TV, and one has been deemed essential and one non essential and both have smart plugs.
• Oliver-Proofing: The cat loves to sit on the sound bar, blocking infrared signals from the Harmony Hub. The Hub has IR blasters to deal with this situation, but one of them is needed for the Xfinity Cable Box whose IR receiver is, possibly, purposefully shitty to make you use the XFinity Remote, and for the XBox Series X, which needs it for playing Blu-Rays.  They were, in the old setup, bottom left and right respectively, meaning I couldn’t have one under the TV behind Oliver’s butt. Now the Cabel Box and XBox are on the top shelf with the IR blasters, so it’s all good.
• Direct-connecting the PS5 and XBox. New TV does 120HZ for gaming, which means 120HZ for Rocket League, which means the consoles get the dedicated TV inputs. It’s glorious.
• Finally going optical vs. HDMI ARC for the soundbar. Don’t know why I didn’t do this years ago other than laziness, but after one day with the new setup, I -really- wanted to have the Apple TV hooked up directly so it could do Dolby Vision for digital movies. Which mean getting that port free on the TV. Also ARC was behaving super slow and shitty for some reason, and the optical cable fixed that too.
• Getting the controller chargers on the shelves instead of on the floor in front of the shelves.

Fun things about a new tV setup:

Motion Smoothing is of course Not Your Friend. Turned that off right away.

HDMI-CRC is also Not Your Friend, at least if you have a complicated setup you want to behave the way you want it to behave. CRC overrides shit willy0nilly. But I had to leave it on for HDMI ArC so it was breaking shit left and right and then I got the optical cable, shut off CRC, and everything was back under manual control.

I bought a TV in 2024, so I also had to disable three or four different “AI” fetures. Don’t want it don’t need it thanks.

As of now, it appears to be done. Another day of using it normally to identify weird pain points, but I don’t think i’ll find any. And 120HZ Rocket League is glorious.