Need to get HD TV signals into other bedrooms

I have Virgin Media installed with a box in the living room and another in one bedroom. The one in the living room can record stuff and the one in the bedroom cannot.

Anyway, how do I get HD signals from one of the boxes into the other two bedrooms so I can put a telly into those bedrooms?

I'm assuming that sharing the HDMI out of the box in the upstairs bedroom is going to be the easiest option. I would need to split the signal three ways to feed the telly in that bedroom and the other two bedrooms.

I'm not too bothered about controlling the set-top box just yet but that would also be a good thing if it can be done easily. I know Sky I could use the 9V signal on the UHF2 output with a magic eye but I don't know if Virgin HD boxes have the same capability.

Ideally the older scientific atlanta V+ box which has component video outputs. You cant watch some protected movies through that system though.

Otherwise a HDMI splitter and a long cable run. It sounds like you will need a very long cable run and you might have problems with this. A lot of home cinema installers still prefer to use component video due to problems with long HDMI cables.

Personally I would buy a reasonable quality long HDMI and just run that across the floow and try watching one of the tv's in the bedroom for a while to see if you get any problems.

Break this down in to two bits.... Splitting the HDMI signal, and then sending the HDMI signal a long distance.

A HDMI splitter is the obvious choice. Try and get something that uses a power supply, and that has a definite spec level (1.3b) rather than the cheapest plain box from the bay.

Sending the signal over distance - a good HDMI cable is possibly the cheapest way up to 10~15m. After that then signal degradation can become an issue. You also need to make sure that the rest of the HDMI cables and devices are a decent spec too. HDMI is only as strong as the weakest link. Every time you make another link in the chain then the margin for error gets reduced. A cheap short cable might work okay connecting a player to a TV, but it has no place as the first step in your distribution chain.

The alternative is HDMI baluns and then a couple of runs of CAT5 to each room. Some of those systems also relay IR back.