Temporary cable runs. Best way to cover?

[SamanthaD]

Was your Cat 6 shielded?

 

For our installs using CatX cable we have to use solid core Cat6a STP with a minimum AWG of 24. The quality of the connectors matter too! Basically think about data rates, even 1080p at 60Hz is around 4.5 Gbps uncompressed.

[Gongalong]

The cable is labelled "RW System Cable UTP Cat6 4 pairs 24AWG Stranded ISO 11801 250MHz". No specific mention of shielding, but it does have the 24AWG there. I need to do more investigation as the extenders have DIP switches and having spoken to their support it might be worth changing some of those. I haven't had the time to test yet because it means some setup and then leaving it to see if it occurs. I had hoped it would be a plug and play simple solution, I hadn't considered that video and audio might drop out.

 

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Ah, UTP. Unshielded Twisted Pair?

[Andrew_C]

Yep - unshielded

[grahamd22]

What sort of range did you use it over? I found that speed decreased significantly with range, and that was only over a few metres. I'm thinking 20m away at the back of a hall, with students/parents between, mobile phones etc. could make it more of an issue for sending things like video.

 

The packaging suggests 7m and we did this successfully playing Sky News at 1080p but it was probably more like 5m.

What are you using to display as sometimes you can get away with playing from a USB direct or hooking up a device hidden behind the screen?

[SamanthaD]

I had hoped it would be a plug and play simple solution

 

Have you considered SDI? Blackmagic microconverters are fairly cheap and cabling is a lot less fussy compared to a CatX solution, plus it's thinner...

[Gongalong]

The packaging suggests 7m and we did this successfully playing Sky News at 1080p but it was probably more like 5m.

What are you using to display as sometimes you can get away with playing from a USB direct or hooking up a device hidden behind the screen?

We're playing to some huge ceiling mounted projectors. They are run over CAT5 to a wallbox at the front of the hall. Perhaps we should have added a connection at the back of the hall as well, but I have a feeling the CAT5 goes directly into the projector and it only has the one socket.

Have you considered SDI? Blackmagic microconverters are fairly cheap and cabling is a lot less fussy compared to a CatX solution, plus it's thinner...

I've not come across SDI before. Is this just a high quality video cable? I'm guessing these https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/microconverters

 

I have bought a 20m CAT6 S/FTP cable that looks the business so will test that. The only difficulty is that in initial tests all was fine with the unshielded CAT5 cable so might be difficult to know for sure that all is working until rigorously tested.

[dhicks]

I've not come across SDI before. Is this just a high quality video cable?

 

I've used the Blackmagic SDI / HDMI converters - around £30 each off Amazon, so easy enough to get hold of. They need individually powering at both ends of the link, but if the receiving end is a modern screen or projector you can often use a USB port on the receiving device to power the receiver. The Blackmagic SDI-to-HDMI has both an SDI input and output, so you can daisy-chain devices together if you want the same output on multiple devices (a set of TVs or whatever). For an event before the summer we had three devices daisy-chained together, a couple inside on a stage and one outside, probably 200m of cable run in total, no signal quality problems.

 

I'm not sure on the exact details of how SDI works, but it looks like a more "old fashioned" cable, with BNC connectors on the ends like an arial or network cable from 40 years ago.

[msi_school]

These look great, do they carry sound as well as video across the conversion?

[PotNoodleTech]

Running the main hall projector over HDMI > CAT6 about a 30 metre run - been working perfectly for years now. I am a little bit worried about the small power bricks that power the converters either end as they tend to be a cheap weak point nowadays but so far so good! (don't run sound over it we convert the sound to XLR and pipe it up to the mixing desk)

[SamanthaD]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_digital_interface

 

Various types - the distance it can travel depends on the resolution. 3G SDI is good for 1080p around 100m, 12G SDI is 4k and you can get around 40m.

 

Yes you can transmit audio on SDI, but again really your projector shouldn't be handling audio!

[msi_school]

Thanks

 

I am looking at these for distributing video to display screens in an exhibition setup.