My media setup

I have two computers, three monitors and four speakers - not counting the laptops, phones, etc. What I wanted was to be able to have the sounds played on either computer come out of the same speakers and for each computer to have its own dedicated monitor with the third being shared between them. My solution is not perfect, but it works.

Firstly, the two computers are

1. My main PC that I use for web browsing, work, etc.
2. My games and media PC that I use for games and watching TV.

The three monitors were

1. A 60 cm widescreen (shared)
2. A 49 cm 4:3 (main)
3. An analogue TV (media)

The speakers are hooked up to a sound system and set up for surround sound.

The main PC outputs via HDMI, VGA and DVI. The media PC only does DVI and HDMI. The widescreen takes any of those, the 4:3 only takes VGA and the TV takes VGA or DVI.

The first problem to tackle was the sound. I looked into doing this via the network but streaming from one computer to the other introduced too much lag, and although I mostly only play music on the main PC I also do watch YouTube videos on it. So that wasn't working.

My next option was to run an audio cable from the speaker port on the main PC to the line in on the media computer. Then all I needed to do was make sure the media computer was set to play any sound that came through the line in.

In order to get the sound from the media PC to the speakers I connected the computer to the sound system via HDMI, which I then ran through to the shared monitor. Because it's HDMI it cuts out for a few seconds whenever you turn the monitor on or off or switch its input mode, but that's an infrequent enough occurrence that I don't really mind.

The only remaining audio issue (which I was unable to solve) was that the audio from the media computer was in surround while the audio from the main computer was only stereo. But as I don't play games or watch movies on the main computer that's not much of a loss.

All that remained then was to connect the other two monitors; the 4:3 obviously had to be connected by VGA, which left DVI as the only option left to connect the shared monitor to the main computer (the monitor's HDMI port and the computer's VGA port being in use). The TV was connected by DVI as it was the only option.

This all worked until recently when two of my monitors (the 4:3 and the TV) started dying. The former has been finicky about turning on - needing to be turned off and on again repeatedly before it starts working - and the TV has gradually been getting darker and darker to the point that I often couldn't see what was going on in night-time scenes even with it at full brightness.

But now where will I sleep?

So I bought two new monitors; a little one (55 cm) for the main computer and a bigger one (71 cm) for the media computer. The problem? Neither of them take DVI input.

The media PC still has to connect to the sound system by HDMI - but its only other output is DVI, which the new monitor doesn't take. So that HDMI cable from the sound system now has to go to the new monitor. This leaves the DVI port to connect to the shared monitor.

The shared monitor's DVI port had been connected to the main computer, so that obviously wouldn't work any more. And the HDMI cable I had left wasn't long enough to connect that monitor to that computer, so it had to be VGA. And that left the main computer's HDMI output to connect to its new monitor.

In both cases there was exactly one setup that would work. I felt like I was trying to get a chicken, a fox and bag of grain across a river.