X-box on a theater screen

[Gordon McLeod]

It will work we have them in most of our theatres with a cable length of around 130 feet of Cat6. Most of the time the audio is played back through the HDMI port but we do have a coulple of locations that the seperate output is used with a Startek adapter

[Jill Mobley]

I have a converter that lets me run HDMI over ethernet. Very inexpensive, and works perfectly. The instructions indicate it can run 300 feet. I purchased from monoprice.com

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

They used to do this at the Zion Canyon Giant Screen theater (Imax Clone) theater in Springdale, UT. I only got to see game stuff on screen one time, but it was pretty cool. The 85 foot wide screen there also made playing video games more way challenging.

[Hamzah Batha]

This sort of thing should be relatively simple. Just treat it like any Blu-Ray player but keep the controller range in mind. Some consoles allow you to use a controller over the network with a device like a laptop (e.g PS Remote Play).

I've done something similar before but with a PC. We have one rack mounted in our booth. It's all standard gaming PC hardware so I thought that it would be nice to load up Steam and play some GTA in my spare time.

Purchased an active USB extension lead and a Bluetooth dongle. Ran it from the booth, up into our gantry and left it dangling over the edge above the seats. Was able to connect my DualSense controller and it works great! The PC itself is connected to an Extron Scaler which passes through video and multi-channel audio just fine to our CP950/IMS3000. It's really immersive when playing games with 7.1 audio support. Yeah there's latency but when you have such a big screen, most people could brush that aside.

For consoles which don't have great Bluetooth range like the Nintendo Switch or when a user wants to plug in their laptop, we have a wall mounted DTP Transmitter on the wall next to the screen. I just have to set the scaler to the right input and I playback an SPL with the HDMI source.

GTA demo:
https://youtube.com/shorts/6qxHmUOO_SE?feature=shared

[Juan Enriquez]

I helped set up an Xbox-on-theater-screen event last year, so I can relate to figuring out the HDMI and controller issues. For us, it worked best to place the console as close to the front as possible since wireless controllers just didn't keep a stable signal through walls or from the projection booth. We used a long, active HDMI cable to connect things and that avoided most lag, but it's definitely true that for competitive players, latency from the projector and system can be annoying. Most of the time though, casual players really loved the experience and didn't complain at all. Just make sure to have fresh batteries for everyone’s controllers—nothing ruins the fun faster than dead controllers halfway through.

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[Jim Cassedy]

We've had actual "gaming people" rent one of the auditoriums a couple of times to demonstrate
a new product, as well as customers who wanted too hook up a game as part of a party. There
is a mid-size auditorium (125 seats) that is popular for this, and in that room, there is a wide
crosswise aisle about halfway back from the screen, and they often want to play the game
from there. At that spot, I can easily run an HDMI cable back to the booth without too much trouble,
or I could connect through a CAT-5 HDMI extender from down near the screen. Most of the time,
people choose to set up in that mid aisle, and, for simplicity, I run an HDMI cable bak to the
booth. (It's probably less than 20ft.) But, we also have a good CAT5/HDMI extender to go from
front-of house to the booth. I don't recall they type, but it was one of the better (ie: expensive) ones.
Mostly, I've used that for when somebody wants to hook up a computer for a lecture or something.
I was curious about the about latency/delay. But, the last time I had a couple of "gaming professionals"
come in to make sure the game they wanted to demonstrate a few days later worked OK on our
screen, I asked them if they wouldn't mind spending a few extra minutes to see how it worked from
our "front of house" CAT5 connection, and that I wanted to see if I could use that for gaming, if I
ever had to. (That run is over 50ft, since the cable has to go up, and through the ceiling, and then
back down into the booth) I hooked it up, and they played their game for a bit, and the one guy said
he didn't notice any latency, and the other guy said there was a very 'negligible' amount of delay,
'that most people wouldn't notice'. I'll still try to use the direct HDMI connection whenever possible,
but it's good to know that if somebody every insisted on having their 'box' down front, we could do
it that way too.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

They used to do this on the Giant Screen at Zion Canyon before it closed. I converted the place to digital a long time ago, Stacked Christie SB's. Can't remember much about it because it was so long ago. They acquired some type of converter box adapter thingy, gizmo to feed the projector. Jason should know what you need...

[Ryan Gallagher]

There is so much stuff that can be done in the video village with gaming events it's crazy. Before my current position I worked several in various roles. The "big screen" wasn't just for a console output... it was vision mixed and live switched to follow the best action. The big screen was for the audience, not the players. You'd bounce between multi-view, punched in on one player, face camera shots for player reactions, yada yada.

One of our common setups with this recurring event was about 8 gaming stations, each equipped with PC gaming and XBOX hardware, each kiosk had an audience facing LCD TV that displayed a dedicated output of that player's station, it and the station feed to the video village were handled by a Barco ImagePro in each kiosk to handle the output scaling, Audience monitor was fed by it's aux output and program went to the main vision mixing system.

You'd often have a dedicated operator switching the room cameras and face cameras, and another operator on the vision system such as a Barco E2 (or several), putting it all together on the big screen. Then there are the graphics and lower thirds... so many things!

Each player actually played on a dedicated PC monitor like they normally would. This is part of the crux for competitive stuff, requiring high frame rate monitors etc, their experience has to be unaffected, but a 60hz mirrored feed has to be tapped off somehow. I don't recall if the folks I worked with had quite cracked that nut, or because it wasn't true e-sports, were just letting the imagepros feed the local gaming monitors too, complete with whatever latency and framerate they impose.

Keeping local audio for their headsets while still pulling a feed also requires a bit of software and hardware magic.

Some events even tap into particular game APIs so they can get player stats and do live info graphic overlays such as player health etc. I'm sure the real competitions actually have a whole team of graphics people constantly updating that stuff if the game can't provide it as directly.