My snakes nest is not even close to that. I have steadily worked at reducing cables but as with everyone I believe the main snarl is at the receivers. I only have one ribbon cable plus 2 RG6 coming into the house. Ribbon on the 8.5' dish for the 4DTV receiver and
C Band feed to the Fortec. 1 RG6 to feed the Fortec from a 4X DiSeQC that is fed on 3 ports at the time. 1 Ku from a 90cm (Sadoun Fortec) dish, 1 for C Band from the 4DTV dish that was split at the lnb and the final C Band circular from the other 8.5' dish. The other RG6 is coming from an OTA antenna that feeds the OTA
HD box, VCR's (2) and TV.
The DVD, both VCR's and OTA HD box are ran through a 4 port switch box (manual) and down into video 3 of the surround sound. Video 1 is the Fortec and Video 2 is the DSR922. Audio is fed via optical from the Fortec and via digital coax and RCA from the DSR922 as analog C band does not pass audio through the digital audio port (common sense).
The surround sound receiver passes to the TV via AV. The 2 sat receivers also feed the VCR's RG6 ports. I had the thing set up before to use the TV/Sat button (source) on the DSR922 along with the old BEC receiver. The TV/Sat button did not work on the
Platinum and I have not tested the
Mercury II remote. It was a convenient option and reduced cabling a bit.