Recently saw my friend’s Sony KDSR50XBR1. The thing that amazed me beyond anything was the Twin-View PIP feature.
He had an xbox360 and a wii. With those two and his cable box, he somehow hooked it up to the tv and could swap between any two of those three inputs. I didn’t really bother with the details of how it was hooked up and haven’t bothered asking.
He could also swap the audio source between each one but I had seen that before. And he could watch one large input and one small one. Sure sure, this is all stuff I had seen in my 10 year old tv. But the cool part was that he could also alternate between a 50/50 ratio and another 3 to 4 other different ratios.
This is the kinda thing I didn’t realize I needed until I saw it. But now I realize how often me and my housemates have to choose between watching TV and playing video games. A lot of video games don’t need sound or sometimes one person wants to watch a sports broadcast that doesn’t really need sound.
Since I just bought my tv less than half a year ago, I won’t be changing to a Sony any time soon. I was wondering if anyone knew of a possible solution that could be done with either a dual tuner card (preferably a pci-express one) or a receiver (sort of like this: http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/receivers/1939/sony-str-da5200es-av-receiver-video-performance-page2.html but with more functionality in the pip department)?
*edit* – sorry forgot to mention that whatever the solution, I’d like it to still support full 1080p in single view (non-pip) mode when the source is actually 1080p. From what I’ve read so far, most PIP solutions only do 1080i max.