How I Turned My House Wiring Into a 24-7 TV Channel

There’s probably a network in your walls that you haven’t thought about in years: coax. If your house was ever wired for cable TV, there’s a good chance every room still has a line that runs back to a splitter in a closet or basement. With a laptop, VLC, and a small HDMI RF modulator, you can turn that abandoned wiring into your own private TV station and play a loop of shows on a real channel number, on any TV connected to your coax.

The fun part is how low-tech it feels once it’s running. You pick a channel, scan your TVs, and suddenly the house has a station again. The practical part is making sure you inject the signal at the right place (the splitter) and avoid common gotchas like “why does channel 16 show up as channel 7?”

Quick note before we get into it: keep this project inside your home. You’re not trying to become the neighborhood pirate station. Also, for media, stick to content you own or content you have the rights to use. If you’re building a library from DVDs, here’s the DVD ripping tutorial I recommend. If you’re into RF experiments beyond this, our SDR section and Getting Started articles have a lot of the same “signal flow” thinking, just aimed at radios instead of TVs.

What you’re actually building (and why the splitter matters)

The cleanest way to understand this setup is to stop thinking about it like streaming and start thinking about it like a tiny cable TV head-end. Your computer isn’t “casting” anything. It’s acting like a 24-7 playback deck. VLC spits out a constant video signal, HDMI carries that signal to the RF modulator, and the modulator does the important job: it turns that video into an honest-to-goodness TV channel that any tuner on your coax can lock onto.

From there, everything lives or dies based on where you inject that RF signal. In most houses, all the coax lines eventually come together at one splitter. That splitter is the hub. When you feed the modulator into the input of that splitter, your channel gets distributed the same way cable TV used to be, evenly and predictably, to every room. That’s the entire trick.

What trips people up is trying to shortcut this by plugging the modulator into a random wall jack. Sometimes that appears to work, sometimes it half-works, and sometimes it turns into a mess where one TV sees the channel and another doesn’t. That’s because wall jacks aren’t magic entry points. They’re just one leg of the network. Depending on how the splitters are arranged, you may only be feeding one branch, or you may be backfeeding through multiple splitters in directions they were never meant to go.

Think of the coax like plumbing. If you want water everywhere, you don’t hook the pump to a bathroom sink and hope it spreads. You connect it at the main manifold. Same idea here. Once the modulator is feeding the main splitter, the system behaves like it was designed to.

The other subtle piece is channel numbering. The channel you dial into the modulator is really just a frequency choice. When a TV scans, it may decide to label that frequency as something completely different. That’s not a failure. That’s just how tuners map channels. The important thing isn’t what the modulator claims the channel is. The important thing is what the TV actually finds and remembers after a scan.

Once you wrap your head around those two ideas — inject at the splitter, trust the TV’s scan instead of the modulator’s display — the whole system stops feeling weird and starts feeling obvious.

How to build your own 24-7 home TV channel

This walkthrough assumes you already have coax in the walls and a splitter somewhere central. If you don’t, it’s still possible, but now you’re running new cable and the project turns into a different beast. The goal here is reliability. Once this is set up, it should just sit there and work.

Step 1: Prep your media and VLC

Start by deciding what your “channel” actually plays. This works best when everything lives in one folder. Think of it like a TV station’s library, not a playlist you’re constantly tweaking. If you need help building your library from discs, use this DVD ripping tutorial first, then come back here.

• Create a single directory on your laptop or PC and put all your shows or movies in it.
• Open VLC and drag that entire folder into the playlist window.
• From the Playback menu, enable Loop so it never stops.
• Enable Shuffle if you want it to feel like random TV instead of the same order every day.

Once this is running, let it play for a few minutes and make sure VLC isn’t throwing pop-ups, subtitles you don’t want, or on-screen controls. You want clean video, just like a normal channel.

Step 2: Set up the computer for 24-7 use

This part matters more than people expect. A lot of “my channel died overnight” problems come from power settings.

• Set the computer so it never sleeps, hibernates, or turns off the display output.
• If it’s a laptop, configure it so closing the lid does nothing.
• Disable system notifications that might pop up over video.

Once that’s done, reboot the machine and confirm VLC starts clean and keeps playing for at least 15-20 minutes without intervention.

Step 3: Configure the RF modulator

Now you turn your computer into a TV station. Connect HDMI from the computer to the RF modulator and power the modulator on. If you want the exact model I used, here’s the RF modulator link.

• Choose an output channel on the modulator that’s unlikely to conflict with anything else in the house.
• If the modulator allows output level adjustment, start in the middle of the range.
• Make note of the channel number the modulator claims it’s using. You’ll need this later, but don’t trust it blindly.

At this point, the modulator should be generating RF continuously as long as VLC is playing.

Step 4: Inject the signal into your house coax

This is where most installs either work perfectly or get frustrating. Find the main coax splitter that feeds the rooms in your house. This is usually in a closet, basement, garage, or structured wiring panel.

• Disconnect the incoming cable provider line if it’s still connected.
• Connect the RF modulator’s coax output to the input side of the splitter.
• Leave all room runs connected exactly as they were.

You’re now feeding your channel into the same wiring that used to carry cable TV.

Step 5: Scan and identify the real channel number

Turn on a TV that’s connected to the house coax and run a full channel scan. When it finishes, scroll through the channels until you find your video.

This is where reality shows up: the channel number on the TV often does not match what the modulator says. That’s normal.

• Write down the channel number the TV actually displays.
• Check a second TV in another room to confirm it’s consistent.
• Label it somewhere obvious so you remember later.

Step 6: Final checks and long-run testing

Let the system run for a few hours. Walk the house. Check different TVs. If the farthest room has noise or dropouts, you may need better splitters, cleaner connectors, or a small attenuator if the signal is too hot.

Once it survives a full evening without touching it, you’re done. At that point, you don’t really “use” the channel anymore. It just exists, like TV used to.

Tools and parts (what to buy, what to reuse)

You can do this with surprisingly little. The only truly “special” hardware is the RF modulator. Everything else is normal home AV stuff and a little coax management. If your house wiring is a mess, plan on spending 10 minutes tracing cables and labeling them. Future-you will be grateful.

• Computer: old laptop, mini PC, or even a spare desktop (HDMI out required)
• Software: VLC (free)
• RF modulator: HDMI in, coax out (the one I used)
• Coax patch cables (short RG6 jumpers are easiest)
• Optional: attenuator pad if the modulator output is too strong for your TVs

Testing and troubleshooting (the stuff that usually trips people)

If you power it up and nothing shows up during a scan, don’t panic. Most failures on this project are boring: wrong injection point, wrong channel mode, or the TV doesn’t support the signal type you’re generating. This is also where the “modulator channel doesn’t match TV channel” thing shows up. It’s normal.

Start with one TV close to the splitter. Scan. Find the channel. Once that works, move to the farthest TV in the house. If the far TV struggles, you may have old splitters, too many splits, or poor connectors. It’s the same story as any RF distribution problem. If you’ve ever chased loss and noise in a coax-fed scanner antenna, you already get the vibe (and if you haven’t, our Radio side of the site is full of those battles).

Practical tips that make it feel like a "real channel"

Once you see it working, the temptation is to declare victory and walk away. Do that and it’ll probably still work... right up until the first time the laptop decides it’s sleepy, VLC throws an overlay at the worst moment, or you forget which “channel 16” setting is the one that shows up as “channel 7” on your TVs. The difference between “cool demo” and “this runs for weeks” is a handful of boring tweaks that make the setup behave like an appliance instead of a computer project.

Start with power behavior. Your computer is the head-end of this whole thing, and computers love to save power in ways that are great for battery life and terrible for a 24-7 broadcast. Go into your power settings and make it aggressively dumb: no sleep, no hibernate, no “turn off display after 15 minutes.” If it’s a laptop, make sure closing the lid doesn’t put it to sleep. The simple goal is this: if you shut the closet door and ignore the machine for a week, the HDMI output should still be alive and VLC should still be playing.

Next, clean up anything that can pop on-screen. VLC is usually fine, but it can still flash overlays like the volume bar, track title, or pause indicator depending on your settings and keyboard shortcuts. Those little pop-ups are the fastest way to break the illusion of a real channel. Same goes for system notifications. A random update toast or “low battery” warning right in the middle of an episode makes the whole thing feel like you’re watching a laptop, not a channel. Kill notifications, disable “focus assist” popups, and if you’re using Windows, make sure it doesn’t decide to reboot overnight for updates.

Then do the thing that feels unnecessary until it saves your sanity: label the channel and the wiring like you’re building a tiny cable system, because you are. Modulators lie (or at least they disagree with TVs). The number on the modulator’s display is not a promise. After you scan a TV and find the real channel number it lands on, write that down somewhere you’ll actually see it later. Put a label on the RF modulator that says something like "MOD SET: 16 / TV FINDS: 7" and you’ll never have to re-learn it at 11 PM when you’re trying to show somebody your “house channel.” While you’re at it, label the coax runs at the splitter. Even a little masking tape with room names is enough. If you ever add a second modulator for another channel, those labels turn a two-hour guessing game into a five-minute plug-in job.

Finally, give it a “real channel” shakedown. Let it run for a whole evening. Flip around between TVs in different rooms. Turn one set off and back on. If you notice the picture is noisy on a far TV, you’ve learned something about your coax network. Maybe there’s a crusty old splitter, maybe a connector is loose, maybe the signal level is too high or too low. Fixing that now is what makes the system feel like it belongs in the house, not like a fragile experiment.

What to do next (multiple channels, schedules, and fun upgrades)

Once you’ve got one channel, the obvious next thought is: can I do more than one? Yup. You can run multiple modulators on different channels and combine them into the same coax distribution. Just keep the channels separated and be mindful of RF levels so one channel doesn’t stomp another.

If you want to get fancy, you can build themed folders (cartoons, holiday movies, comfort shows) and swap the playlist by time of day. You can also treat it like a “house info channel” with slides, photos, or a calendar loop. It’s basically local broadcast, but with your own rules.