So, you want to send HDMI video around your house? Maybe you want to use your office computer on your living room TV without a proprietary streaming solution like AirPlay or Chromecast? Share a cable or satellite box between your living room and bedroom? Or you're crazy like me and you want to put all of your computers into the basement, and connect to any of them from any desk in the house?
Traditional video distribution methods which support many-to-many configurations usually require expensive matrix switches, either for HDMI or HDBaseT. With lower cost IP-based equipment, we can use the network infrastructure we already have in our home networks to send HDMI video across the network, at the cost of video compression. If you can tolerate 1080P/60 video for your application, this is far cheaper than other alternatives in a many-to-many configuration.
I've tried running a thicc HDMI cable through the wall at my house. This will work, but over a limited distance (and the workable distance gets shorter with the higher bitrates of each HDMI spec). You can't repair an HDMI cable realistically, so if you break it you're going back in the wall or attic. I have a few places in my house with floating TVs (I absolutely hate cable cluttter) and running HDMI from the TV down to a media cabinet is as far as I'd go with a physical cable.
There are also solutions like active optical cables and HDBaseT which are suitable for higher bitrate uncompressed applications like home theaters, but I'm primarily concerned with workstation tasks which aren't as demanding of the video stream. These are also point to point solutions, not many-to-many matrices. However, these solutions might be right for you in your application.
Follow-up video answering a lot of the questions from this video:
[ Ссылка ]
Link to the product I showed in this video:
TESmart HKE12MMA20 KVM over IP - [ Ссылка ]
Or on Amazon: [ Ссылка ]
While this is limited to 16 transmitters and 253 receivers (which is *A LOT*) and control via the front panel button, IR remote, and keyboard hotkeys, I'm working on an IP-based solution to 'tune' each receiver from Home Assistant and allow even more transmitters, in case your use case works better with that sort of automation. Stay tuned for that video.
If you find my content useful and would like to support me, feel free to here: [ Ссылка ]
Blog post which really just sums up the video:
[ Ссылка ]
My Discord Server, where you can carry on the discussion or suggest future topics:
[ Ссылка ]
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
00:42 - HDMI over Long Distances
05:44 - HDMI over IP Hardware
08:42 - Basic Setup
11:27 - IP Snooping / Multicast
15:05 - Gaming Test
17:32 - Multipoint Test
21:15 - My Use Cases
Some links to products may be affiliate links, which may earn a commission for me.
#hdmi #networking #video
