Not sure if anyone has a good idea that will save me a little time... I need a way to get HD video/audio (probably either HDMI or DVI and audio) distributed to about 16 monitors in a classroom, and hopefully do it with cheap cable like cat6, even better if it is real IP distribution so I can send it through our switches. I would probably use something like an Extron switcher that will scale the input video/audio up to 1920x1080 so that we have a common resolution to send. Display would probably be a 17 to 22 inch LCD with at least two inputs, the second input would be a live out from the editing system.

If anyone has experience with any products that can do this, I'd like to hear about it.

Another option would be to send just computer content out via a multicast stream to each computer and maybe put it on a second display if possible. A little more resource intensive so it is the back up to the primary plan.

Can't speak from experience, but what you need is an HDMI splitter. I was beginning to research this a while back and the biggest splitter I could find was an 8x1. There are 2x1 and 4x1 versions more commonly available. When I was looking at them an 8x1 was about $150 US and a 2x1 was about $40.

On those prices to get 16x1 it should cost you around $350 - 1 2x1 and 2 8x1 plus connecting cables. I have no more details than that - as I said above I didn't pursue this further. The need evaporated.

Thanks, I'll take a look into that. $350 will be CHEAP compared to the Extron upsampling switcher which will probably run us about $5000.00 or maybe $6000.00. Add in about $3200.00 in monitors and another $7200.00 for a Matrox MX02 mini for each computer.

Sadly I see all this stuff getting cut from the budget.

We are getting a single MX02 min with Max in the next couple weeks to try out for the instructor computer to get to the projector that is currently in the room, should be interesting to see how fast the encoder in it runs.

Just found one at $154, here.

Thanks, the next question is of course... Has anyone run HDMI through 75+ feet of cable? The way the conduits run it will be maybe 50 feet on the short side and maybe slightly more than 75 on the long side.

I may have to buy one of the HDMI to cat5 adapters and play with it for a while and see what I can do.

I may have found an almost perfect device:
www.atlona.com/Atlona-1X9-HDMI-Splitter-with-CAT5-Outputs-SENDER-ONLY.html
They make little tiny receivers to go with it:
www.atlona.com/Atlona-HDMI-CAT5-Receiver-to-be-used-with-AT-HD19SS-or-AT-HD50SS.html

Then all need is a switcher that can up sample/resample any input to a common resolution and I'm set. Still probably be a $10,000 project which means it will probably be cut but it was worth looking around.