TV tuner cards, how to drive 3 adjacent displays?

[AbsolutZero]

We're getting the go-ahead to develop a 6-display kiosk at work (mounted from the ceiling, mainly hands off), 3 of which will be TV-tuner output from 3 separate PCs. How can you best do this with a limited budget?

* The remote controls for the TV tuners will interfere with each other if we put the IR receivers anywhere near each other. The only thing I can come up with is to buy 3 TV tuners (with remotes) from 3 different manufacturers.

* Is XP the way to go or will 98se be just as good with the newer TV tuner cards. We have licenses for 98se but not XP.

* As far as tuners, the Leadtek, ASUS, and Hauppage cards are the ones that seem to do the most for the least $$. I see there are new 10-bit phillips chips too, the ASUS 7133 uses that and is at newegg for $69. Any others cheap ones with a remote?

 

[Peter]

I'd stuff three PCI TV cards into one PC, give it a triple head graphics card from Matrox (which supports three overlays!). Linux for the operating system, X on top of it, and "lirc" remote control services. One instance of lirc, set up to let you control all three screens from one remote. lirc setup is a pain in the arse, but you can do pretty much everything.

Maybe you can use the same approach in Windows - you need a generic remote control service running that lets you control multiple applications. I've seen this kind of software come with TV cards.

 

[AbsolutZero]

OK, I'll look around. We know enough linux to be dangerous, but nothing about lirc. We have a 3headed linux workstation with 2 video cards, works great. Not as easy for tv tuners I bet. We prefer to stay away from messing with kernels and so forth in case we want to push this to other field offices.

After some reading of the lirc.org page, I'm worried the remotes from 3 different tv tuners may even interfere with each other. Same codes and/or RC protocols?

Might be cheaper and less time consuming for us to just get something off the shelf for this sort of thing. Hopefully its not too expensive.

 

[AbsolutZero]

Anyone have experience with this?