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.
Um, why don’t you just put another computer running just the myth frontend at where you want it to be viewable? You could even put multiple front ends in different locations! Or even use a Hauppage MVP box.
I’m not working through the MythTV part as of yet. I’m just using the dvbapps to tune the tuner card. The prior versions of Myth didn’t do what I wanted with the DVB-S stuff. The dvbapps do.
I updated the Myth software yesterday but didn’t try it yet. Once I verify the tuner card does what I want then I’ll fire up Myth.
If you ever think about fishing new wire through the walls (for video or for anything else), let me know and I’ll show you some of the tricks I’ve learned from doing this professionally.
One tip, just in case you didn’t already know: RG-6 is the coax cable that most structured wiring companies use when doing a new home. It is fantastic for broadband applications, such as digital cable and internet service. It is terrible for carrying baseband signals, like composite or component video signals. For that, you need the copper core that comes with RG-59, the “old school” coax cable. Once you’re back in this copper core, though, it’s about the best cable you can use for the job. The composite and component video cables you buy at Best Buy, etc are usually coaxial cable (though a much thinner variant) with an RCA connector molded straight onto it. You can also get adapters that go from the ubiquitous “F” connector on most coax cables to an RCA connector. Those are probably what you need. If you want something like that, let me know. I get them in bulk from my cabling vendor. One last thing: if you ever run component video, it is essential that all three cables are the same length.
Regarding the setup you just finished, sounds cool. It’s amazing the kind of performance you can get over CAT-5. It might be an elementary principle of physics that makes it tick, but twisted pair still seems like magic to me.
Thanks for the word from the field, Justis! One question, though: RG-6 has a copper core just like RG-59. RG-6 also has improved shielding as it was designed to handle the higher frequencies that satellite signals (and broadband cable) provide.
I would think you would have as much success (or more) with RG-6 cable as with RG-59. Guess I need to try it myself.
I think that, to some degree, I may be parrotting a misconception here. The only thing I can say confidently is that RG-6 made my composite video look horrid and RG-59 solved the issue. After researching it a bit more, I think I’ve deduced that most RG-6 has only a steel center conductor with a copper coating. The reason I probably succeeded with the RG-59 is because most of it uses solid copper.
According to the wikipedia article on RG-6, there are other variants of RG-6 that have a solid copper core, perform excellently on baseband signals, have the shielding that everyone loves about RG-6, and is used primarily in professional video applications. This sounds like exactly what you want and is probably what our company will begin stocking instead of RG-59.
Kind regards,
Justis