I’ve got this MythTV box I’m building, only it sits in another room of the house. Since I need all the coax going to that room for inputs to my tuner card, I am left with CAT-5 wiring for my video output.

After some poking around the Internets, I found some stores selling video baluns just for this purpose. Only problem is I didn’t want to spend $300 to do this.

More digging and I found some specs for building jacks for sending S-Video and stereo audio over CAT-5. I bought pair of S-video connectors and two pairs of male RCA jacks to add to my existing CAT-5 cabling and connectors. A half-hour of soldering the RCA jacks onto the CAT-5 and I had my jacks. Cost was $20.

I was quite surprised at the quality of the video. I’m pushing composite video over 25 feet of UTP CAT-5 cable and it looks great (I had to drop the S-video since my output card didn’t support it). Problem solved. Next time, though, I’ll skip the male RCA jacks in favor of female ones, since I can buy jacks which don’t require soldering.

I’ve heard of people putting all kinds of things on their CAT-5 cable. Looks to me that its true.