HDMI over Ethernet

[Ray7905]

Has anyone got experience with this? I’ve these these converters that convert HDMI signal through Ethernet and then changed back to HDMI.

How’s the quality?!?
Sound still included?!?

 

[bin3]

Fairly vague question ...

In general, it's digital. Quality going in is quality going out. Sound is included in the HDMI spec.

But, then; you get converters and then you get converters ...

(Keep in mind bandwith: pushing 2k/4k through crappy copper leads to tears. High end usually go fiber)

 

[Ray7905]

Yeah that’s what I was thinking. Would a gigabit network be able to handle HD?

Have you got experience with converters and recommended brands?

 

[BigBear]

Yeah that’s what I was thinking. Would a gigabit network be able to handle HD?

Have you got experience with converters and recommended brands?

Would be a separate cable between hdmi extenders we used cat5e and works perfectly..

 

[bin3]

Yeah. 1 Gbps can handle 2k, even 4k

We tend to go for the Black Magic type devices.

 

[Ray7905]

Sweet thanks. Let me investigate further

 

[Thor]

/subcribed

Use case:
Central Plex Server -> Switch -> LAN cable in each room with an HDMI TV.

 

[Barbarian Conan]

Would be a separate cable between hdmi extenders we used cat5e and works perfectly..

Yeah, as I understand it, it's not really doing any conversion allowing it to be sent over the network. It just enables the signal to be sent via ethernet cable, from one extender to another. Not through a switch.

How about HDMI over human*?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZXxr6BbACo

*only for very short distances

 

[Ray7905]

/subcribed

Use case:
Central Plex Server -> Switch -> LAN cable in each room with an HDMI TV.

Exactly what I want to do

 

[Ray7905]

Yeah, as I understand it, it's not really doing any conversion allowing it to be sent over the network. It just enables the signal to be sent via ethernet cable, from one extender to another. Not through a switch.

How about HDMI over human*?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZXxr6BbACo

*only for very short distances

I love Linus tech videos

 

[bin3]

Ok.

So there are a few use cases here.

One is where you take a raw HDMI signal and you extend that to a device. Best quality, raw signal, usually not via a switch. Basically what you are doing is plugging in a very long HDMI cable. HDMI gets difficult to transfer longer than about 20m. For difficult see expensive.

Second is where you encode the source and either multi cast or point to point via a network. This is basically IPTV. Works well if you get it right. Sometimes is a major pain to get right. Especially multi cast you need a fairly strong network infrastructure. The source is encoded and then broadcast. The receiver needs to understand the source. Think Plex server and client

Depends what you want to do ...

 

[Gnome]

HDMI is uncompressed video and audio, even for 10G ethernet you'll quickly run out of bandwidth.

The bandwidth of HDMI is far beyond Gigabit ethernet, so the reality check is that it is either forcing lower quality, compressing (>transcoding) or dropping data.

Reading over it, the more expensive extenders are point to point and use 10G. They also only support 4:2:0 colour coding at 60Hz 4K or 4:4:4 @ 30Hz

But if you are aiming to deliver it over Gigabit ethernet, the performance will be on par with the bandwidth.

 

[Ray7905]

This is all very interesting. I’m going to pursue this further.

To start I’ve bought these cheap probably junk converters to see what happens

 

[bigboy529]

High end brands you can look at is Black Magic and DVIGear, they do HDMI to Ethernet, HDMI to fibre, HDMI to DVI and a lot of other converter kits.

 

[gfmalan]

I use Kramer for this and it “just work”.

I also use Kramer matrix 4x4, don’t know how the noname brands work.