So. you want to send HDMI video all over
your house? Maybe you're crazy like me, and you want to put all your computers in your
basement server rack, and then connect to any computer from any desk in the house? That's my
goal, but maybe you have simpler needs. Maybe you want to share a cable or satellite TV box with
a couple TVs in the house? Or maybe you want to stream content from your office to your living
room without a proprietary solution like AirPlay or Chromecast and you don't want to pull any new
wires, just use the Ethernet that you already have? In this video I'm going to cover a couple
different methods for sending HDMI video over long distances using Ethernet wiring. So if you want
to send HDMI video around your house you really have about six solutions. Your first option is to
get a long cable and run it through the wall. This is probably the cheapest but depending on how far
you're going it might not be ideal. If you just want to put your media cabinet or your computer
a few feet away and hide the wiring in the wall that's perfectly fine, do that. But when you start
running HDMI through the attic then you're asking for a bad time. HDMI was not designed to go
super long distances, so you need thicker and thicker cables and eventually it just won't
work at all Also you can't repair an HDMI cable. Ask me what it's like to go back in the attic and
put a new cable in after you already ran a cable because I've broken an HDMI connector off trying
to mount a TV on the wall. That was not fun, very very sad day. Your next option is an active
optical cable. These are HDMI cables with fibers built in. They do all of the fiber translation
for you so they look just like a regular HDMI cable (some of them need power too). These can
absolutely go the distance but they're also relatively expensive and also they're fixed at a
certain HDMI standard and bandwidth, so when newer HDMI revisions come out you can't just replace the
ends, you have to replace the entire cable through the wall. There are, or at least there used to
be, passive adapters, that would split up an HDMI into more than one RJ45, but these are pretty
awful because you're relying on an HDMI signal, designed to run over a carefully made cable, and
instead you're sending it over Cat5e or Cat6, which is not really something it was designed
to do. But at least you can use Cat6 that's already in the wall if you have it. Then we get to
solutions that convert HDMI into RJ45 to run over CAT5 or Cat6 cable. All of these will absolutely
work you can use the Ethernet wiring already in your house, but it's important to remember that
these are not based on Ethernet so you can't use your Ethernet switches and you can't usually
carry Ethernet over the same wiring. There is a standard for this called HDBaseT, and HDBaseT
is currently able to send 4K 60 frames per second with 444 chroma sampling (which is 18 gigabits
per second of video) over a single cat 6A cable. But it's important to note that I said Cat6a,
not Cat6. The standard doesn't officially allow you to do that over Cat6, so if all you have is
Cat6, you're limited to 420 chroma sub sampling (which is still probably fine but something you
should be aware of). So these solutions are able to push beyond gigabit because they're not using
standard Ethernet infrastructure and that means there's still point to point. You're connecting
one transmitter to one receiver. So if you're building the ultimate home theater, HDBaseT or an
active optical cable or conduit is probably what you want to go with. But I'm not doing that,
in fact I barely even watch TV. I get my news from Reddit. I care about desktops, workstations,
and gaming, all things I can do on my computer. And actually I have a couple of computers. I have
some that run Linux like my test system over here. I have my thin clients that I play with. I have
my big gaming desktop that heats up my bedroom. What I'd really like to be able to do is
put all of those in the basement where they can use all the power and make all the
noise they want and stay out of my life, but then when I want to use one for my living
room or my bed or my office or another office, I can choose which computer I want to be
connected to, and use it like I'm sitting at it, without all the hassle of running a whole bunch of
HDMI wires from every computer to every display. So that means I need a switch. I need all of
my sources to come in and get distributed to all of my displays, with the ability for the
display to select which source it's coming from. So given my goals in mind I was specifically
looking for the sixth option. HDMI over IP. What this does is it compresses the HDMI
video stream down to a bandwidth that fits within gigabit Ethernet and then it carries
it over standard gigabit Ethernet Hardware. This means I can use the network wiring and also
the network switches I already have in my house, and because I can use the network switches, that
means that I can switch where the video goes. Now, the hardware I've chosen does actually
support 16 transmitters and 253 receivers, and any of the receivers can connect to any of the
transmitters (potentially all of them connecting to the same transmitter if you want to do that),
and that means I can now have 16 computers in my house connected to a whole bunch of displays, and
choose from the display which computer I want to be using. And on the back end my network switches
cost the same as any other network switches, which is not that much. It's a whole lot cheaper
than buying an HDBaseT Matrix I'll tell you that. The hardware I'm using for this video is sold by
and was provided to me by TESmart. While they did supply me with the hardware,no money changed
hands, and I reached out to them asking for these products to do a video. So, hopefully you
can jump in with me as I explore HDMI over IP and how using standard networking protocols can
drastically reduce the cost of HDMI distribution. So, this is the box I got let's take a look
at what's inside. So we got a user manual We got a piece of foam two units, I'll take a look at these in a second under that we've got We'll see what that is in a second, and another one Looks like an IR receiver, IR transmitter,
and a remote with 16 buttons I'm guessing that corresponds to the 16 transmitters you can
tune to. So this one I believe is a power supply Sure is so it looks like we've got 5 volt
2 amp, it's got a pretty standard Barrel Jack I didn't measure it but doesn't look oddly sized
it's not USB but that is the same voltage as USB so if you want to power it off like a TVs USB port
or something I'm sure that's possible and I guess this one is another power supply, yeah same thing
So one for each side and star of the show itself Receiver Transmitter. So this is everything we got here in
the box so we got the transmitter, transmitter's power supply, the IR Blaster because IR goes from
receiver to transmitter, transmitter blasts it on whatever device uses IR, the receiver, this is where
the TV goes, receiver's power supply, IR receiver if you need, IR remote if you need it, taking
a look at these boxes, so they got 5 volt in, it's labeled UTP but it is Ethernet, so you can connect
this to Ethernet switches and Ethernet devices, it will work and the bandwidth it uses isn't even
that high as we'll see later, and then HDMI input so if you just need HDMI you just have to use
this one side of the device. On the other side we have the infrared out USB, out that's a full-sized
USB B, so it's not USBC or micro, and then there's a seven segment display for what address it
is one through 16 and a button to change it. The receiver is similar,
interestingly this side has Ethernet and this side has it on the receiver
so it almost looks kind of upside down receiver you got the same story, power, Ethernet,
HDMI out, so if that's all you need you don't have to mount it with the other side accessible.
And on the other side we have IR in, keyboard and mouse, this is strictly for keyboards and mice
it is not passing through raw USB data it's just passing through the hid keyboard and
mouse data, and the address of the receiver So to do the most basic test of these HDMI
extenders I've got a pretty basic setup here we can test with. This is a Thin Client I
reviewed in a previous video, it has a DisplayPort output that's going to monitor with an HDMI input,
so I have a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter cable I've got this little keyboard and mouse plugged
in over USB. so you can see it's booted up it's running Ubuntu it's working so now we're
going to bring in the pair of extenders here so we've got the HDMI input side, and the HDMI
output side, so let's put them like this so this is HDMI from The Thin Client we're
going to go into the input on the transmitter power both of these from the ugly
purple power strip power okay the USB keyboard this is USB to my keyboard, I'm going to plug it into
the receiver. Here is a USB cord I have. Important to note if you're actually going to use USB it
doesn't come with one of the USB cables in the box so I have to buy one they're not super common
anymore even though it is a USB standard connector and it has been for decades. Now HDMI,
so HDMI to the monitor going to the receiver so I've got everything connected except
ethernet. So this little logo came up that means we have no connection, they
wouldn't connect anyway because this one's a five and that one's a one. Let's
plug in the network and see what happens tiniest little ethernet cable here so now we need to match their addresses so I'm
going to put the transmitter on address two so just keep clicking the button until we're on
two, and I'll put the receiver in two as well There's my Thin Client! Keyboard connected to
the receiver, monitor connected to the receiver ethernet connected to the transmitter, USB
to the Thin Client, HDMI to the Thin Client so this is the most basic setup you could do, you
could take this cable and extend it hundreds of feet, gigabit Ethernet supports 100 meters which is
330 feet, if you need to go that far that's a thing but the real advantage that these things
propose is that they should be able to use ethernet switches to hook up more than one of
these, so we should be able to share a network with our existing home network and not have
to run all new cabling just for this HDMI So now we brought this little thing in
intercepting our traffic this is a Mikrotik hEX and it is basically a low-cost router switch, and
it can act as a network switch or as a router and do a couple other things, and I'm going
to use it to measure how much bandwidth is going across this link because in theory these
things could be using a full gigabit per second which would mean they're not compressing
the image a whole lot, but they could also be using something like h.265 compression and
compressed to go down to a few megabits, so we will see. The reason it's important to know
how much bandwidth they're using is because if we want to connect a bunch of these all over
our house, and we want to use the same cabling that we're already using for our home network
and for our Wi-Fi, we don't want a gigabit of bandwidth from one of these to start causing
problems for our Wi-Fi. So I've got Winbox (Mikrotik GUI) pulled up and I have the transmitter connected
to Ether 4 and the receiver connected to Ether 3. so we can see the transmitter sending about two to three megabits per second which is not outrageously high but the screen
isn't really doing anything, so what happens if we play back a video is the bandwidth going to
go up? So I've got a video playing full screen and it looks like our bandwidth is jumping up to
between four and five megabits per second here 5.5 is roughly the peak that I've seen and this isn't
a super intense video so I guess that makes sense Another thing to note about this is this uses
IP multicast, so what that means is instead of broadcasting this video from the transmitter to
the receiver, or from the transmitter separately to each receiver it's sending it out to the group
the multicast group and letting the switch decide which receivers it should send it to, and
if your network supports igmp and multicast then the bandwidth of these devices can easily
be shared across the network, so if you're using unmanaged switches that don't support igmp, or
multicast you'll end up flooding the network with a bunch of data because this is running at like
five megabits per second and five megabits per second from each of your transmitters broadcast
out to everyone is not a great thing, so you might want to have separate switches if you're
going to go that approach. Another approach you can have is to use managed switches or smart
switches that do support igmp and then the switch will know which receivers would like to receive a
certain multicast group and only send it to those destinations. So in this case this device I'm using
from Mikrotik does support igmp and it is enabled, so it's only sending data to the receiver on Ether
3 because that's the only one that's subscribed to it. And this is not anything fancy this is a pretty
common internet standard for multicast, so it should not be hard to find equipment that supports
multicast and igmp to build a network out of this. okay if any of you are really curious how
it does IP, it looks like the devices are self-assigning IP addresses in the 192.168.167
region, so hopefully you're not using that region for your network, but if you're not that won't
really conflict, because you can have more than one IP subnet on the same Layer Two
they just won't be able to talk to each other. And in general it's using the
multicast group as I expected it would It looks like it's using two different
ports, but I guess that's for it to decide And then occasionally we'll see unicast
traffic as well, and I believe that is USB data Ao now that we know these things do work, and they
do work with standard Ethernet hardware let's set up a bit of a more real world test. So I've got
the transmitter hooked up to my desktop computer it's mirroring this screen on the HDMI output
to the transmitter. I have USB connected back to the desktop and ethernet is connected to
my home network, so I'm relying on my home Network's wired ethernet switches to transmit
video. I'm going to try gaming on this setup from another office around the house. So for the receiver side of this experiment got the IP KVM extender, it's hooked up to
a network cable it goes all the way down to the basement to my network switch, I've got a
monitor attached over HDMI, I've got my keyboard my gaming mouse, this is a wireless mouse but it's
not Bluetooth, it has a dongle and it's plugged in to one of the keyboard and mouse ports. For audio
I have a pair of earbuds they're plugged into the monitor, the monitor supports HDMI audio but
doesn't have speakers, so I have to plug into an output from the monitor, or otherwise separate
the audio out of the HDMI because this does support audio but it only over HDMI. So as you
know I've used Portal for testing in the past I'm pretty good at it I like to think, I guess
you'll be the judge of that, let's see how this goes It's my favorite part of the game, the old
section, I love this section. We gotta go up there not letting you guys hear the audio because
I don't want any copyright strikes here It feels fine to play on, I've usually done
60fps gaming, I don't do high frame rate gaming but if you're comparing this to something
like Steam remote play or moonlight it's on par with those for sure It seems like the volume keys on the keyboard aren't getting passed through, something to be aware of if you need those. So for this test I wanted to throw in a lot of the
features that it's supposed to support all at once so we've tested directly linking them, we've tested
them over my home network, now we're going to test multiple transmitters, multiple receivers. So this
TV here has the second receiver and as you can see it's connected to my gaming PC of my bedroom
but using their infrared remote that came with it you can switch over to the TiVo. TiVo is down
in the cabinet, it's got its own transmitter transmitting ID 2 so when I click 2 on the remote
I get the TiVo. Now if you're like me you probably had a really hard time finding devices that use
infrared, and the TiVo is the only device I could find in my house that use an infrared remote. I
normally use the Apple TV which has an RF remote so I tried to test if the infrared
forwarding works through the system and it didn't work with the TiVo. That doesn't mean
it won't work with anything else, but if I aim my TiVo remote at the receiver here, I've got an IR blaster
facing into the TiVo and I don't get anything but if infrared's important to you compatibility
might not be perfect, I don't have any other devices I can test with really so this is what
it is. Now I can game from down here on the couch because why not? So I'm back up here at another
TV in the house and I have the second receiver The first receiver was downstairs, the first
transmitter is connected to my gaming desktop the second transmitter is connected to the TiVo
and the second receiver is connected up here so you can see I'm able to see the
TiVo over the network, I did confirm also that the TiVo is using HDCP and
it has negotiated HDCP so I'm not sure what the requirements are for that but it
works. I've got the IR receiver here again can switch back to the gaming desktop. So all of
these little HDMI boxes are just connected to my home network with wired Ethernet. I'm not doing
anything special. I have a switch that does support igmp snooping, it is a managed switch but other
than using a managed switch. I'm not segregating them with vlans, I'm not using a separate switch,
they're just plugged into regular network drops around my house, they go down to the basement,
they get switched, they come back up everywhere so the cost of cabling to set up
something like this is the same as setting up a home network, you don't
have to pull HDMI through the walls it's pretty great if this is what you care
about. So for the next trick I've hooked up the Apple TV. So the Apple TV is one of the
most modern devices I have and it is working I use its RF remote good stuff one test I wanted to try was to see if
I could use the TVs remote over HDMI CEC so CEC is a protocol that's part of HDMI
that allows the TV to send commands to devices downstream or devices downstream
to send command back upstream to the TV so for example the Apple TV uses this when you
say "sleep all connected devices" it's using CEC to turn off the TV. But likewise the TV can share
its remote buttons with other things over HDMI which unfortunately is not working over the HDMI
over IP Bridge, so another feature to consider if it's important to you Now for using the computer
none of this matters you'll use a keyboard and mouse probably some sort of wireless
keyboard plugged in there all will be good So thanks for coming along on my tour of HDMI
over IP. These units specifically have worked very well for a lot of the use cases that I
care about, specifically, working with computers keyboard and mouse support is just fine the
latency is very low and I can do general desktop office work, video editing, gaming, all
that good stuff. In addition, while working with these I found a bunch of use cases that
I hadn't expected going into this video so in addition to running a YouTube channel I
also mentor a lot of Elementary through High School robotics teams, and I run competitions
for them. During these competitions, I often have to set up a dozen Windows laptops to show
rankings and statistics all around the event and that's a giant pain. using these extenders I can
connect all of my screens around the event to my network that I'm already running, and use one
HDMI output on my desktop to drive all of them I didn't think of that before I started this
video but now I want to use these for that too There are also some business use cases, if you're the
kind of business that likes having screens all over with information or advertising whatever your
business is into you can drive them all with this instead of having a little Raspberry Pi (which
you can't buy anymore!) at every single display and since they're based on IP you can trunk
them over fiber long distances like you would with any other IP traffic. So what about downsides?
If you're using them for media they don't support HDMI CEC, so you can't use the remote control on
your TV to send commands to devices over HDMI now this was not advertised as a product feature
but it's a feature that would be useful to me I also wasn't able to get infrared to work with my
TiVo now that doesn't matter to me because I don't use TiVo I use Apple TV which has an RF remote
but if you still like using infrared something to consider. These are also limited to 1080p at 60
frames per second which is clearly advertised in the product page and it's perfectly fine for my
office use cases but if you're trying to do 4K or high refresh rate gaming it won't work for you.
I've got a huge list of projects coming up doing all sorts of weird stuff, so like and subscribe
if you want to see more of that in the future if you want to chat directly or have suggestions
for future videos you can slide into my Discord link down in the description below. I do always
love hearing from subscribers about how they've used my videos to develop something cool in their
life and I would love to hear from you as well so hopefully you can come along for my future topics
and as always I'll see you on the next adventure
