I wish there was a latency test with each options. I'm guessing there isn't much or even noticeable to the users, but still would love to see the data.
Well I've pinged my router when it was connected to my PC over 90m of Cat6 and it was 1ms, so that gives you an idea. Media converters e.g. MoCa adapters typically add 1-2ms. So probably 2ms of extra latency, totally negligible.
@@QuantumBraced Except that is theoretical. Some cheap hardware may introduce more latency, just by using underpowered processor to convert. So quick latency test would be really nice.
Even 10m on 4K60 DP was a challenge to keep on budget. The standard phantom cable did work, but I couldn't get 4K120 HDR working. To get more bandwidth from 4K60 at 10m, from what I've seen when I looked at it 2 years ago prices really skyrocketed. USB was really the easy part.
I'm going to assume you meant to say 50ft, as that is the theoretical 'hard' limit on *active* HDMI cables. But there are a lot of options out there now for fiber HDMI cables extending much further than the 50ft active mark. One of the best brands is RUIPRO. Be careful though as there is a lot of cheap stuff out there and usually these long runs are being put in areas that wont be accessible after install.
Not covered but not a problem today, huzzah!!!! 4k@144 optical DisplayPort cables of 30m/100ft are ~$120 and work astoundingly. Longer ranges (50m) use the exact same chips, but is now at a boutique price point, and cost $400, but work fine too. These are considerably easier efforts than sending USB since it's a one-direction data flow, rather than a complex bidirectional system. I have three utterly no-name cables I bought years ago (May 2011) for super cheap (first was not-so-no-name CableCreations 100ft for $55.99, half the price today) and honestly my only problem so far as been how hard it is to coil stupid-long runs of fiber. I'd ignore the scare quote comments about things not working: the no-names work great. Just buy whatever is cheap & test it at high-bandwidth right away & return it if it doesn't work.
IDK cat5 cable is very rigid and it's unshielded, maybe its ok-ish for home, some club installations and DMX. Oh btw, there's soft cat5 for digital snakes but it's not cheap as PC cat5 or audio cable. Anyways let me know! =)
I would say anything by Radial or Whirlwind would be a reliable bet for XLR over ethernet. I might also recommend shielded cat6, but it's always best to read the manual to find a suitable cable. You could always go with a digital console with a matching stage box but those get expensive quick.
others have mentioned the Radial stuff, i just wanna point out that that can carry four balanced signals if you're okay sharing the ground pin between all of them and you use a shielded network cable. the one linus showed only had one channel
If you're going to use a twisted pair for analog audio, I would be cautious as most speaker wire is somewhere between 12 and 16 guage and a twisted pair is only about 23 guage making some serious resistance at higher volumes. For just some light background music it may not be a big deal though.
True, its best used for line level instead of speaker level. But it's also very good at that, what linus doesn't mention is that twisted pair is actually very good at noise rejection. Not perfect but better than most RCA cables... much better
There are 6 wires in a cat 5/6 cable. You only need two to run speakers. Just bridge the cables to effectively decrease the guage. 3x 0.3 mm2 = 0.9 which is nearly the same as 17 guage (1 mm2) so you are 2/3 of the way to 16 guage (1.5 mm2)
Theoretically it should be impossible. They are connected cable to cable, with the only point that breaks the chain being power delivery. Since they don't store data, it needs to be travelling at standard electricity speed, meaning there wouldn't be any latency.
I was thinking the same thing. If you want to get rid of heat and noise (as they say at the start of the video), then the PC is doing more than just moving the mouse pointer. So, gaming... What's the input lag/latency like on all of the solutions they tried out?
He doesn't mention it but optical HDMI or display ports about $100ish for 20m from Amazon that's what I'm doing for my house super easy super cheap and then wireless peripherals over ethernet cable like they talked about
@@soaringspoon definitely - I have moved to optical HDMI and DP cables. I used to run 36ft copper DP cables until I needed much higher res and refresh rates. I am still looking for a non-$1000 solution for peripherals. Thunderbolt + corning optical cables still seem like the best high speed option. Running modern machines with long passive USB 2.0 extensions is getting a bit old. All of it is a bit problematic.
I was also looking into this last week. I was trying to get a computer closer to a work bench with sawdust and thought hey, I am fine gunking a keyboard/mouse and monitor, but I want a decent computer here. Why not just put it in a different room.
As an ELV engineer which 50% of work is in the field of CCTV systems installation. Let me just say that this is a whole game changer which will solve they issue of CCTV rack being in one room and the reception/security guard monitor being at the main entrance. Before we used to either use HDMI extender which won’t provide any sort of controlling (footage checking, zooming, etc.) or we used ro install a dedicated PC at the reception disk with software of the CCTV system in order to have controlling over the system. With this we can now avoid any of these issues and also have a clean setup at the reception disk with only monitors and mice.
I actually love Ezcoo as a somewhat obscure brand. Most of their stuff is rebadged between a ton of brands so I have no idea if their stuff is original. But they do make a bunch of niche little boxes like that ranging from HDMI audio extractors, HDMI splitters/mirrors, KVMs, and I guess USB extenders too
I recently used one to extract the audio from a Firestick (Kodi) to pass it onto some old but very good Sony wireless, surround sound 'phones. HDMI ARC refused to work from a very new and expensive TV where as one of these extractors works perfectly.@@WowReallyWhoDoesThat
There is. As Slot1Gamer mentioned you can use PiKVM. Combine PiKVM with something like an optical to copper/media converter and you got optical. You could also combine the PiKVM with a managed KVM switch so that you can use one PiKVM for multiple devices. I think EZCOO also has a switch that's working with PiKVM. Without the switch, you'd probably land way below $300$.
Probably not what looking for, but I do like my Aten 4 way kvm switch. It had a slight issue running control over 4 servers where one of them wouldn't detect the keyboard for Bios. I think it was because of a power hungry keyboard and and a low power usb port on that server, otherwise it was pretty effective for my needs. Sidenote - would always have some really basic old Dell kb & mouse near the rack for when would run into those types of issues.
i worked in a theater and ran their video department. the entire building was built in 08 and was wired with cat5e everywhere, like in a good way. i had my video control room on the 3rd floor and the stage was on one. i needed a slide advancer that would work across that kind of distance and the only solutions were 4-6 hundred dollars. i got that same exact monoprice adapters and used the built in cabling and patch bay to put the receiver for our cheap logitech slide advancer on stage with my playback machine still up on 3. saved the company hundred of dollars.
The cheapest way to have remote USB/HDMI to computers around your house is to have a sponsor give you many times $1,500.00 USB fiber boxes, of course. 😆 (I know even his employees would be like: "Sure, Linus, sure...." *eyes roll*)
As someone else mentioned, i wouldve liked a latency test. Would like to move my gaming gaming pc elsewhere because of the heat situation. Also maybe connecting a hub to end and plugging the rest of peripherals wouldve been awesome. Something like linus’ home setup
You're not going to have latency on the order of anything you can perceive. Copper delay scales with length, and while optical cables are comically faster, the fixed overhead of the signal conversion makes them worse than copper over short distances. One study found that for each meter of copper, you incur just under five nanoseconds of delay. Not great for transnational infrastructure, perfect for domestic use.
I work for AV services at a college in the US. We have those Icron USB extenders all over our campus in any room that has built in cameras and we run Cat6A cables through the walls and ceiling between them. They're super reliable and perfect for our use case where we have 1080p cameras that need to be connected over such a long distance. Awesome to see a video on this kind of stuff! We used to use little powered HDMI to RJ45 adapter boxes for our old cameras (for when we have to livestream events). But we found that to be extremely unreliable, no matter how much we spent on those adapter boxes. Some of them literally caught fire. Thankfully we got new cameras that are much better and have SDI so we can just run SDI over those long distances. We also use HDBaseT for all of our built-in projectors and Extron systems that are all PoE. It's really cool how things exist for all kinds of longer-distance cabling for different use cases. Obviously some work better than others.
@@leoncraftmcI would rather LMG go back to the casual style of making non -data driven videos with an emphasis of fun, vs making videos that are data driven, but boring and sometimes inaccurate. There are other media channels out there for that content, and I think LMG should focus on what built their brand in the first place rather than trying to do too much for their size.
We use these at work for a number of our meeting rooms. A PC is in a rack on the other side of the room, we use extenders for USB and HDMI to get signal to USB cameras and wall mounted TV's. If we have multiple inputs for video to go to the TV's, just throw an HDMI matrix in the rack. The most recent meeting room I re-configured actually had a patch panel for the amount of cat cables that came back to the cabinet from these extension devices. We would put a receiver or transmitter on one side of the connection, which would then go to the cat cable, back to the rack patch panel, out to a cat cable to the other receiver or transmitter. Really cool solution for a setup of that scale.
Those Ezco usb extenders are really sweet, I used them in my capstone engineering project to connect cameras over a long distance. You can use passive poe injection on the cat5 lines to power the receiver too which is a nice bonus (if your injecting higher than 5V youll need an active splitter on the other end to get it back down to 5V).
Why that instead of PoE IP cameras though? Both solutions would roughly be in the same price range. (Unless you already had a bunch of existing equipment.)
You can also skip half of that process by buying Digi modules which virtualize USB ports. The receiving computer just needs to have their software installed and configured and then your USB devices are seen as such on the target computer. So basically, you can turn USB cameras into IP cameras in a sense.
could you explain how you can power the hub with PoE? not sure i understand completely. can i use a PoE injector and then go straight into receiver without their 5v adapter?
@@azzybishThat's exactly how that works indeed. You can inject at one end and it will power the device at the other end. And in the case of a small hub, you don't really have to case about what power PoE injector or switch you have.
yeah, is no for no reason, but youtube will delete this comment for the real reason. Is a word that almost caused LTT to be cancelled, but that almost happened anyway, but describes Linus thinking very well
Akshually, 12:00 the cable does care what runs over it. Depending on the TP twist rate, inter conductor distance and jacket material, the characteristic impedance changes and may be out of spec for whatever signal your trying to run. It just so happens that both USB and ethernet can run on similar cables. USB being 90 Ohm+-15% and Ethernet being 100+-15 Ohm. Also shielding doesn't really protect a twisted pair, the TP itself makes the signal mostly immune to EMI, the shielding is for EMC reasons, protecting other non-TP conductors from the EMI of the TP cable.
Ngl I'd love to see a video on KVM switches for the home user. Like with the devices in this video, they're either cray expensive, or cheap and yet you have little ability to really figure out ahead of time if they're worthwhile or not (some are better than others in terms of documentation and feature and setup explanation).
Yeah, I don't understand the point of taking the mouse all the way to where the screen is no longer visible. We've seen tech demos of extenders before.
@@JFHeroux I wouldn't say cheap. If you don't care much for the quality then sure, but assuming its for gaming and you want at least HDMI 2.0, its around $200 or more for a transmitter and receiver unit.
We use one of those devices for a videocall setup. There is a tv and a Lodgitech meet camera on one side and a docking station on the other side. It transfer hdmi for the tv and usb for the camera. It works great and didn't cost much. The ports each go to the server room and we just connected the ports in the patch pannel with a small cat6 cable. When someone has a videocall meeting, they can just plug their laptop in the docking station and turn the tv on.
I think the video was more intended as exploring the peripheral options than a comprehensive how-to of a remote PC, but active HDMI is both more common than active USB, and the tight signaling requirements plus more conductors than network cable mean you can’t really run it over alternative cabling without an expensive encoder.
At work we needed some analog audio connections to a location where we had no infrastructure... but we had some unused cat cables to a network cabinet for both places. So I whipped out the soldering iron, cut a 5m Cat5 cable in half and soldered some XLR-Jacks/Plugs to the open ends. Works like a charm! With the added benefit, that now I can get analog audio over the whole complex if I really needed it! 👍(as long as I can directly patch them to that place...)
i am sorry, but what kind of real world application would it be to just run a mouse/keyboard combination without a videofeed to a monitor over long distances? :)
The only thing I could think of. Add the HDMI to the mix. In that way, you could have your PC connected to your room but use it in the living room and make your TV your Display and Mouse and Keyboard wherever you go. If there are others, I guess am not that linus tech sawy
@@BoscoValdenegro They specifically mention moving your whole PC several times, but the HDMI is sort of a separate issue. It has more conductors than network cable and tight signaling requirements, but also active cables are more common.
1:59 Really glad you all have started going back and doing audio corrections, I was waiting to see results on your promises to do better, and how this video was handled is a great second step. Thanks.
The RJ45 female-to-female also adds a solid 10 meters worth of cable in signal loss. If you had a proper 100m cable I wouldn’t be surprised if it still worked given what we saw here
I only needed something that could reach the next room and this worked great. For the display, a 25ft HDMI cable was long enough for what I need,and it's great working in silence now. Much better than running multiple powered USB extensions underneath the doors.
I was kind of hoping he'd bring up the thunderbolt docking system he was using a while back and if he was still using it or not. Was really curious about the pros and cons from it; otherwise, great video for some alternatives.
I use one of these (Corning TB3, 50 meters) and it has been very solid. Plugging it in may not immediately work, so you may have to retry, but after that it’s totally fine. However, this issue is almost certainly due to the Thunderbolt driver for my motherboard, so I am very hesitant to blame the cable. Could even be my CalDigit dock instead. Works very well once everything initializes, though. I only do 1080p60, but I doubt I’ll have issues once I move up to 4k. I have the computer in the basement and everything else upstairs in my room.
I had the living room PC in a closet. It was connected to the TV with a 15m HDMI cable and I chained a bunch of USB extension cables for other devices up to 18m of length. The cheapo fiber HDMI lost signal for a few seconds once or twice a day but other than that no issues. 120hz 4k worked, I had USB3 speeds and even oculus link worked flawlessly. Total cost wasn't even too bad, around 100€. It would've been cool to see this kind of setup taken to the extreme and presented as an alternative to netwok cables.
For line-level signals the cable resistance doesn't matter. If you're running speakers directly, put strands in parallel. 4 pairs of 24awg Cat5 cable is about equivalent to 2-conductor 18awg which is certainly fine for shorter speaker runs. For longer runs the series resistance will mainly decrease volume but will also slightly affect the frequency response due to non-ideal speaker impedance. Unless you need super-high fidelity this is probably fine. If all the runs to one area are similar length you probably won't be able to notice, and you can largely eliminate the effect with an equalizer if needed.
The thing that makes me leery of these things - particularly when mentioning the wires in the wall - is to just make sure you're plugging the right thing into the right thing when they all have the same RJ45 connector. You probably don't want power-over-ethernet hitting one of the USB adapters by mistake
Would this not have been a perfect moment to use the cable signal tester too? see if anything funky happens? Would be nice to see some more in-depth stuff, given that the lab has the equipment now
I just finished building out my closet under my stairs for my server. Looking at possibly moving our computers out of our bedroom into the server rack. We will need just about 40ft total of cable length for everything but I really want to try and make it work. My wife has a dual stream pc setup so it might be a bit more complicated to get working right. Going to try with my computer first and see what happens. Planning on using powered cables for just about everything and keystones for the usb, hdmi, and DisplayPort. We’ll see what happens! This video should be helpful in helping us evaluate different solutions.
Capacitance of the copper cable would maybe a good thing to add when it comes down to length. At a certain stage there is just to much signal loss, besides issues with noise etc.
capacitance isn't very important, what's important is square root of capacitance times impedance (speed of light in cable). I don't know about twisted pair, but standard BCA coax is about 1/3 of c, which gives nanosecomds of latency (i even did such experiments during my degree) for 50m wire. Impedance is important for signal reflection. I guess impedance matching is what magic box does.
@@janmarucha9138 Correct, although if the capacitance of the cable becomes to high, the signals themselves will be very low because of the lowpass filter effect. Impedance matching is always a must.
I’ve been using USB over ethernet box for around 7-8 years with zero issues. Latency is not noticeable to me at all and I have it on a 100ft Cat 5 cable. Pretty sure I only paid about $30 back in the day. Then I ran a separate 100ft fiber optic HDMI 2.1 cable. At the time, that was $450 for the off-brand cable. Yes it still hurts how much it costed me but at least it still works. I play games on my 4k 120hz OLED tv in the living room no problem.
I tried putting my PC in another room and it worked till my cats started eating the cables and my bedmate tripped once. I used a 25 foot HDMI Cable and a powered USB3 extender to a USB3 4 to 1 hub all for about 40 bucks.
I have used RJ45 for my RGBW "build-in" lights in my living room. I couldn't drill holes in the ceiling, so I had to 3D print a mount and the control box would make the light way too extruded, so I cut the wire between the lamp and the controller and put a keystone on either end and ran a flat RJ45 cable to the controller. Works like a charm and the power draw are within specs of the RJ45 cable for those wondering.
Linus! I've noticed on a few video's where for some reason the audio drops down then comes back up. I'm sure you have noticed but I wanted to share... 2:22. thank you for all your hard work!
While the Corning optical cable didn't support USB 2, some optical cables can do both USB 3.2 Gen 2 AND USB 2.0, such as the Logitech Strong USB cables. Admittedly they can also be pretty eyewateringly expensive, but I picked up a couple of used 10m cables on eBay a while back for £80 each. There are also non-optical cables that can run pretty far with repeaters (basically hubs) built into the cable. One such brand is MutecPower and I have a 10m and 20m cable from them that work for USB 3 Gen 1 and USB 2. Just be aware with these that you can't reliably operate with more than 5 hubs on a cable, and some ports on your computer may be connected to additional hubs internally that prevent the longest repeater cables from working properly.
There’s a pretty big omission in the ending of this video. Cables are not just cables and running audio over straight ethernet is not a good idea. You have to consider the impedance of the cable and shielding. I’ve tried RCA audio connections over a 10m Cat6 cable and there was severe mains hum. Active devices, like those you showed at the start do exist and they will get around it. However, like you’ve alluded to with this setup, it adds cost.
okay real quick, hold up. 5:30 to 5:45. Well fricken done Linus, you took the time to actually cover this properly and covered your bases with this video. This is a very positive sign in the right direction from what we were worried about before. You rock dude.
@@thomasphillips885 Basing off the fact they're using a 2 month old version of USB Tree Viewer. (They're using 3.8.7 The latest is 3.8.9) I would say so.
For work I actually deploy a lot of Aten USB Extenders. The ability to use off the shelf parts at over 100' away it becomes actually feasible for an IT department to use in real life.
I've been considering moving my pc to my closet, but I'd be concerned that mouse/keyboard input would have notably added latency or choppiness. I think this is a much more realistic use case for most people and I'd love to see some testing or commentary on latency, reliability, and general feel of these different methods.
We’ve got some pricey units at work that do AV, Ethernet, and USB and the latency is basically 0ms. Haven’t messed with any of the super cheap USB ones in quite a while but I can’t say I’ve ever noticed latency with the powered units.
electricity moves at almost the speed of light, so long as the signal is strong enough, it's not going to be a issue in terms of latency. the biggest issue is always the display. Mouse\keyboard uses almost no data, even usb 2 is overkill for them, the display on the other hand uses a TON of data. While hdmi and displayport both spec 50 foot max, it seems the practical limit is 25, and that has to include cable routing.
@@Wooble57 hmmm. The speed at which energy or signals travel down a cable is actually the speed of the electromagnetic wave traveling along (guided by) the cable. In copper wire, the speed of electricity is approximately 3.2 m/s at 60 Hz. The speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. Disregarding that, isn't the ICRON solution doing some coding/de coding of the signal? Doesn't that processing introduce some latency?
Have the sound insulated room with computers directly next to the room you'll use them from. Then, stay within the manufacturer specs for HDMI cables and USB cables. (Just get plain extension cables.) It will be "boring" without fancy $1,500.00 boxes, but your wallet will thank you.
@@HrvojeMikovic not much, i did a google for speed of electricity and it was 90% the speed of light in copper. The 3.2m\s you suggest i don't think could be right in the context we are talking. If that were so even a 3m cable would introduce a full second of delay. The shortest common monitor cable i know of is 3ft, or 300ms of delay if that were true, then you would have to add another 300ms for the usb cable on the keyboard\mouse. I get where your coming from, but the hardware is just so much faster than you think. I live on the west coast (NA), i just pinged a server in the EU and got 150ms. That's many thousands of km and who knows how many switch's and servers and such (dozens at least)
An important disadvantage of the cheaper options you didn't mention is that they won't work with a network switch in the line. Many households only have one RJ45 connection per room, so if you want wired ethernet and USB you need an expensive protocol transpiler. 😕
I built out the tech in a lounge once years ago and used Cat5 to extend RCA video cables around a room so that a single DVD player could be broadcast to multiple separate TVs around the room at the same time.
Well, I've been doing it for years but no extra long cables needed. I keep my pc on enclosed balcony and I drilled a slot for cables through the wall and filled the gap with glass wool and the desk is in front of the window looking at the balcony. So in winter, PC is cool. In summer, I'm not hot because of it, I dont need fancy expensive case because I don't see it, it's quiet .only down side is i need to open door and go on balcony to start it.
to continue the USB adventures i wonder if you could use those massive USB hubs and tons of flash drives to make a flash drive raid array and see how fast it can go.
Actually put one of those Ezcoos in a screening room because the more fancy one we had, used multiple hubs and we were hitting our hub limit in the chain. All good now though with the Ezcoo. :D
You guys inspired me to do something similar, but on a smaller scale. I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but I plan to put my computer in the closet, and run a USB 3.2 cable to a docking station on my desk, along with a Displayport cable for my main monitor. Bye-bye rat's nest, hello leg room.
Make sure the closet has good ventilation or a good size to it, or you will leave performance behind… I wanted to do the same thing, but my closet had no breathing room.
The civil engineering firm I worked for had me spec out a new building in 2005. I had 2x Cat 5e drops on every single wall in the building. I got pushback for it being excessive, but I stuck my ground. Two years later the boss was setting up a flat screen TV on the far wall in his office. He was able to do it with a HDMI to Cat5e adapter. He called me to say thanks for insisting on wiring it that way (I no longer worked there) because it saved him a ton of headache.
I've had my gaming PC in the other room for years to accommodate PCVR. 2x 15 meter fiber DP extensions and a 10 meter active repeated USB 3.0 extension. It was only like $250, probably cheaper now. The original idea was to keep the PC at my desk and run extensions to the VR, it was fine at first but eventually the headset showed visual noise artifacts. Turns out my monitors don't mind the extensions though so I turned the setup around with the PC near the VR, smooth sailing ever since.
My tower is in the next bedroom directly on the other side of the wall. All I did was cut a standard size wall outlet on both sides of the wall directly across from each other, install a pass through box and then ran my DVI, USB's, audio cable for speakers, etc. straight through the wall where my desk sits. It's the same as if the PC was sitting on the side of the desk, it just happens to be in on the other side of the wall in a guest bedroom that rarely gets used.
I would love to see a detailed video on how to move your PC to another room and have your workstation just be a keyboard,mouse,monitor, and speakers. I imagine it would need thunderbolt and a few other things. I have looked into this but have never found a definitive guide on how exactly to do this.
The audio has been better lately. I loved the video because I've been doing this for ten years. Just gonna mention Gamers Nexus is your competitor and you guys did well with the criticism. Thank you for improving all around.
Yep, the defacto broadcast industry standard for audio interconnect is called Studiohub+, and it's literally just audio on cat5. Super cheap, super easy, and the twists in cat5 ensure high quality isolated signals over long distance. For analog audio, balanced audio, and AES digital audio. We don't really run XLRs or 1/4 inch jacks to anything except old equipment.
A long time ago, I wired a couple of cat6 cables into usb 2 terminations so I could still plug usb storage devices into my server from my office/living room. I used a powered hub on the server side. Worked very well.
In DIY Solution u can use two cable tor each one instead, use reverse polarity in same colors for maximum distance for example: the power + connected to Blue and brown and power - to blue/white and Brown/white and same for the data lines, this will reduce the interference form outside sources.
What about a wireless solution? I could see a small box on the desk that has 4 USB inputs + HDMI + BluTooth and its correspondent box in another room. 10m range through 1 Gyproc wall would suffice, 20m (2 walls) would be really nice. Then a PC station would be quiet - keyboard, mouse, monitor (wireless KB+Mouse at that (BT)). The hardest part would be the HDMI, obviously, and that would demand some hard encryption on the fly as would the keyboard.
I actually use this for my setup! I have a long HDMI cable coming from my room to the living room and my usb 2.0 hub over ethernet. I'm glad Linus made a video on this because only a very niche crowd needs this and the answers on reddit and such are never straightforward.
Currently doing this with display port. Current setup is thunderbolt 4 pcie adapter with corning usb-c cable connecting to thunderbolt 4 hub. Gsync works with this set up too. One cable to rule them all.
RCA/audio over CAT5 adapters aren't just a cable. They have an impedance matching and isolation transformer in them called a balun. Short for balanced-unbalanced. You can run DMX over CAT5 with no issues, same for RS-232 or RS-485, but audio should be using a balun.
11:22 Tanner was correct (Linus was wrong). You need (2) packs of two (so the cost comes out to around $25) if you plan on using both your mouse AND keyboard.
Having my gaming pc in another room or, like I prefer, my cool basement close to my ISP hookup. I have done this for 20 yrs, not because I hate the noise or heat or ... other. I have always been a minimalist and do not like a lot of clutter. As of now, I sit in a recliner with a dual monitor setup swing arm. With currently, just a couple of 3.1 usb and one dp, and two HDMI cables from the basement. Attached to my gaming pc, and currently used console. 2.1 sound system under the recliner, and along the swing arm. Great setup.
We used a USB to Ethernet converter to send data signal to and from an Arduino along a 60ft tether for an underwater ROV. They work great for certain use cases!
What's most frustrating is that all of these solutions shown seem to rely on a dedicated cable. If only I'd had the foresight to run THREE Cat6 cables to my attic. I assumed that one with a switch upstairs would be sufficient for my networking needs. I guess that a dongle that has a proper network card would get too expensive? Without that, however, I can't run any of this communication through switches or routers or firewalls.
I work in a school district, those Monoprice USB Extenders are super hit or miss in my experience. We had a TON of problems with them… They work great when they work, but they seem to dislike working correctly.
In my undergrad playing with some things that go fast, I wanted to transmit data over ethernet from a box to my laptop. The board in the box only had USB and IO pins and the guys couldn't get ethernet working on it. So we found 3 100' powered USB cables. We didn't know where the power supplies or connectors were for the little powered hub bits, so we tested it without power. 300' of USB and the data transferred flawlessly. Granted it was just a stream of text data like 7 numbers at 100 Hz, but at 300 feet, we were stunned. It worked great out in the desert midday Sun too.
Hey look! An LTT video i actually have a lot of experience with. Those USB 2.0 cat6 hubs are well worth the $60, especially because i bought three pairs of those cheapo direct adapters and not a single one worked. So if anyone else is interested, that is definitely the way i would do it again (in fact i did it that way again when i needed more i/o). Also, im writing this while watching the video but, I wish it was mentioned that the reason usb3 over copper/fiber is much harder to find/expensive is that i found discussions about patents being held by icron for this 🤷 not sure the validity but definitely might be something worth discussing
I do this for a job. The cheaper extenders have massive issues with sleeping and waking of peripherals. You will find after your PC sleeps some stuff like webcams just won't work until a restart. Even the Icron rangers you consider expensive have issues. The Pro version which is another $500ish on top provides better power management and mitigates these issues. The cheaper extenders ALWAYS fail.
What I did was drill a hole in the wall of my office, build a shelf on the other side and plonked my PC there and ran cabling through the wall. It's not complete silence with some resonance coming through the wall or the odd spike in performance draw, but generally if there's anything on the speakers, you can't hear the PC.
So... If copper is copper... Could I increase(well, decrease) the size (AWG) of my cable to reduce the overall resistance in the wires? Because I'm assuming the reason why it doesn't work over a certain distance, is because of the higher resistance (resistance of a wire is something like (the material x the length) / the surface (area) of the wire. ) Meaning, if I take 8 x AWG 12 wires, of, say 100m, terminate them on both side on some terminal blocks and then connect a standard ethernet wire to the blocks to connect into the hubs using the cheap method... would it work? It would be : USB hub PC.
I wish there was a latency test with each options. I'm guessing there isn't much or even noticeable to the users, but still would love to see the data.
You can calculate that yourself, speed of em waves in copper is roughly 2/3*c (speed if light)
@@zxy7529the more interesting part is to see whether potential delay due to the conversion/boosting circuits is present.
What about the cheaper usb 3.0 over fiber? There is lower priced alternatives over fiber
Well I've pinged my router when it was connected to my PC over 90m of Cat6 and it was 1ms, so that gives you an idea. Media converters e.g. MoCa adapters typically add 1-2ms. So probably 2ms of extra latency, totally negligible.
@@QuantumBraced Except that is theoretical. Some cheap hardware may introduce more latency, just by using underpowered processor to convert. So quick latency test would be really nice.
This was neat but I wish they’d covered more about HDMI & DisplayPort. That’s the bit that seems most difficult over 50m.
Without fiber, anything above 1080 is still limited.
And you are looking at 750+ per side for professional AV gear
Even 10m on 4K60 DP was a challenge to keep on budget. The standard phantom cable did work, but I couldn't get 4K120 HDR working. To get more bandwidth from 4K60 at 10m, from what I've seen when I looked at it 2 years ago prices really skyrocketed. USB was really the easy part.
I'm going to assume you meant to say 50ft, as that is the theoretical 'hard' limit on *active* HDMI cables. But there are a lot of options out there now for fiber HDMI cables extending much further than the 50ft active mark. One of the best brands is RUIPRO. Be careful though as there is a lot of cheap stuff out there and usually these long runs are being put in areas that wont be accessible after install.
Not covered but not a problem today, huzzah!!!! 4k@144 optical DisplayPort cables of 30m/100ft are ~$120 and work astoundingly. Longer ranges (50m) use the exact same chips, but is now at a boutique price point, and cost $400, but work fine too. These are considerably easier efforts than sending USB since it's a one-direction data flow, rather than a complex bidirectional system. I have three utterly no-name cables I bought years ago (May 2011) for super cheap (first was not-so-no-name CableCreations 100ft for $55.99, half the price today) and honestly my only problem so far as been how hard it is to coil stupid-long runs of fiber. I'd ignore the scare quote comments about things not working: the no-names work great. Just buy whatever is cheap & test it at high-bandwidth right away & return it if it doesn't work.
why would you need over 50m? Thats 165ft, enough to reach all the way around most houses from one side to the other on the outside!
I'm an audio engineer and musician and when you pointed out the potential to terminate to XLR my eyes got real big. I've got ideas now.
Tons of XLR over CAT6 cable snakes already exist and they're great.
IDK cat5 cable is very rigid and it's unshielded, maybe its ok-ish for home, some club installations and DMX. Oh btw, there's soft cat5 for digital snakes but it's not cheap as PC cat5 or audio cable. Anyways let me know! =)
I would say anything by Radial or Whirlwind would be a reliable bet for XLR over ethernet. I might also recommend shielded cat6, but it's always best to read the manual to find a suitable cable. You could always go with a digital console with a matching stage box but those get expensive quick.
@@DavidMyers0 it's digital signal btw, adapters are just straight audio instead
others have mentioned the Radial stuff, i just wanna point out that that can carry four balanced signals if you're okay sharing the ground pin between all of them and you use a shielded network cable. the one linus showed only had one channel
If you're going to use a twisted pair for analog audio, I would be cautious as most speaker wire is somewhere between 12 and 16 guage and a twisted pair is only about 23 guage making some serious resistance at higher volumes. For just some light background music it may not be a big deal though.
wouldn't this be solved if you combined multiple wires in that jack for one speaker? (wire 1-4 = red speaker port, wire 5-8 for black speaker port)
@@invinciblegod I suppose you could run the pairs in parallel, but I've never tried it before. That might be a decent idea.
True, its best used for line level instead of speaker level. But it's also very good at that, what linus doesn't mention is that twisted pair is actually very good at noise rejection. Not perfect but better than most RCA cables... much better
If they just run at least 1 if not 2 pairs in series to get the impedance up to at least 16 ohms if not 32 even, it will be ok -ish
There are 6 wires in a cat 5/6 cable. You only need two to run speakers. Just bridge the cables to effectively decrease the guage. 3x 0.3 mm2 = 0.9 which is nearly the same as 17 guage (1 mm2) so you are 2/3 of the way to 16 guage (1.5 mm2)
It would be awesome if you could test latency with this. See if the repeaters introduce any major or noticeable latency
Theoretically it should be impossible. They are connected cable to cable, with the only point that breaks the chain being power delivery. Since they don't store data, it needs to be travelling at standard electricity speed, meaning there wouldn't be any latency.
I was thinking the same thing. If you want to get rid of heat and noise (as they say at the start of the video), then the PC is doing more than just moving the mouse pointer. So, gaming... What's the input lag/latency like on all of the solutions they tried out?
Holy timing, batman! Just moved into our first house and I'm facing this issue LITERALLY TONIGHT.
Don't fail me, LTT.
He doesn't mention it but optical HDMI or display ports about $100ish for 20m from Amazon that's what I'm doing for my house super easy super cheap and then wireless peripherals over ethernet cable like they talked about
@@soaringspoon definitely - I have moved to optical HDMI and DP cables. I used to run 36ft copper DP cables until I needed much higher res and refresh rates. I am still looking for a non-$1000 solution for peripherals. Thunderbolt + corning optical cables still seem like the best high speed option. Running modern machines with long passive USB 2.0 extensions is getting a bit old. All of it is a bit problematic.
Well this is cool and all, but what if I want to run video as well? Preferably at 4k60
@@rustler08 Damn you are HILARIOUS
I was also looking into this last week. I was trying to get a computer closer to a work bench with sawdust and thought hey, I am fine gunking a keyboard/mouse and monitor, but I want a decent computer here. Why not just put it in a different room.
As an ELV engineer which 50% of work is in the field of CCTV systems installation. Let me just say that this is a whole game changer which will solve they issue of CCTV rack being in one room and the reception/security guard monitor being at the main entrance. Before we used to either use HDMI extender which won’t provide any sort of controlling (footage checking, zooming, etc.) or we used ro install a dedicated PC at the reception disk with software of the CCTV system in order to have controlling over the system. With this we can now avoid any of these issues and also have a clean setup at the reception disk with only monitors and mice.
When Linus picked up the keyboard and said mouse 😂😂
I think they should've filmed the whole video over again. Not sure if the annotation was satisfactory for all his viewers to understand the difference
Wait till Gamers Nexus sees this
this is informative and unfortunate
And picked up mouse and said keyboard
@@cwise6102 hours video about Ltt inaccuracy incoming!
Did you notice how he held the mouse? Clearly interests involved!!
I actually love Ezcoo as a somewhat obscure brand. Most of their stuff is rebadged between a ton of brands so I have no idea if their stuff is original. But they do make a bunch of niche little boxes like that ranging from HDMI audio extractors, HDMI splitters/mirrors, KVMs, and I guess USB extenders too
HDMI audio extractor? That does seem niche. Duo you have a use case for that? Does that work with hdcp? I'm assuming the splitters don't.
I recently used one to extract the audio from a Firestick (Kodi) to pass it onto some old but very good Sony wireless, surround sound 'phones. HDMI ARC refused to work from a very new and expensive TV where as one of these extractors works perfectly.@@WowReallyWhoDoesThat
@@WowReallyWhoDoesThat If it's like mine, yes it does.
I would have liked to see remote KVM that can be either ethernet or optical for around 300$
you could do that with PiKVM and ethernet possibly, maybe even go old school and use crossover
I wish I have 1 billion... :')
There is. As Slot1Gamer mentioned you can use PiKVM.
Combine PiKVM with something like an optical to copper/media converter and you got optical. You could also combine the PiKVM with a managed KVM switch so that you can use one PiKVM for multiple devices. I think EZCOO also has a switch that's working with PiKVM. Without the switch, you'd probably land way below $300$.
Probably not what looking for, but I do like my Aten 4 way kvm switch. It had a slight issue running control over 4 servers where one of them wouldn't detect the keyboard for Bios. I think it was because of a power hungry keyboard and and a low power usb port on that server, otherwise it was pretty effective for my needs.
Sidenote - would always have some really basic old Dell kb & mouse near the rack for when would run into those types of issues.
TinyPilot, if you can get raspberry pi within the price..
i worked in a theater and ran their video department. the entire building was built in 08 and was wired with cat5e everywhere, like in a good way. i had my video control room on the 3rd floor and the stage was on one. i needed a slide advancer that would work across that kind of distance and the only solutions were 4-6 hundred dollars. i got that same exact monoprice adapters and used the built in cabling and patch bay to put the receiver for our cheap logitech slide advancer on stage with my playback machine still up on 3. saved the company hundred of dollars.
Linus 9 days ago: ive been doing this the cheap way now im going to fix it
Linus today:
Hey, this only will bring more content!
On the contrary, I enjoy these sort of contents from Linus. I’ve now put Ezcoo on my Amazon shopping cart
You left off the punchline.
The cheapest way to have remote USB/HDMI to computers around your house is to have a sponsor give you many times $1,500.00 USB fiber boxes, of course. 😆
(I know even his employees would be like: "Sure, Linus, sure...." *eyes roll*)
As someone else mentioned, i wouldve liked a latency test. Would like to move my gaming gaming pc elsewhere because of the heat situation. Also maybe connecting a hub to end and plugging the rest of peripherals wouldve been awesome. Something like linus’ home setup
...also I saw some benchmarks were USB3 had better latency then USB2 ... but is it "noticeable" is a different question.
You're not going to have latency on the order of anything you can perceive. Copper delay scales with length, and while optical cables are comically faster, the fixed overhead of the signal conversion makes them worse than copper over short distances. One study found that for each meter of copper, you incur just under five nanoseconds of delay. Not great for transnational infrastructure, perfect for domestic use.
I work for AV services at a college in the US. We have those Icron USB extenders all over our campus in any room that has built in cameras and we run Cat6A cables through the walls and ceiling between them. They're super reliable and perfect for our use case where we have 1080p cameras that need to be connected over such a long distance. Awesome to see a video on this kind of stuff!
We used to use little powered HDMI to RJ45 adapter boxes for our old cameras (for when we have to livestream events). But we found that to be extremely unreliable, no matter how much we spent on those adapter boxes. Some of them literally caught fire. Thankfully we got new cameras that are much better and have SDI so we can just run SDI over those long distances.
We also use HDBaseT for all of our built-in projectors and Extron systems that are all PoE.
It's really cool how things exist for all kinds of longer-distance cabling for different use cases. Obviously some work better than others.
Love the "Let's try it within spec first"
He learned the hard way already lol
These are my favorite types of videos that you guys make. Good to have you back Linus!
But what was the latency? cheap is good and all, but if it adds a heavy input lag then none of them are worth it imo
I'm surprised he didn't touch on it
Yeah, not using this to game or for a full setup is kind of missing the trees for the forest.
@@leoncraftmcso now it's not about bad data?
Yeah that’s exactly why I went with a USB 3.1 fiber optic cable instead.
@@leoncraftmcI would rather LMG go back to the casual style of making non
-data driven videos with an emphasis of fun, vs making videos that are data driven, but boring and sometimes inaccurate. There are other media channels out there for that content, and I think LMG should focus on what built their brand in the first place rather than trying to do too much for their size.
the part were they are running inside combined with the sound of their footsteps got me good 9:29
Same 😂
Yes, this is the type of content you guys gotta keep making!
I can't wait for the any time now secret shopper series.
agreed! Love this content!
We use these at work for a number of our meeting rooms. A PC is in a rack on the other side of the room, we use extenders for USB and HDMI to get signal to USB cameras and wall mounted TV's. If we have multiple inputs for video to go to the TV's, just throw an HDMI matrix in the rack. The most recent meeting room I re-configured actually had a patch panel for the amount of cat cables that came back to the cabinet from these extension devices. We would put a receiver or transmitter on one side of the connection, which would then go to the cat cable, back to the rack patch panel, out to a cat cable to the other receiver or transmitter. Really cool solution for a setup of that scale.
Those Ezco usb extenders are really sweet, I used them in my capstone engineering project to connect cameras over a long distance. You can use passive poe injection on the cat5 lines to power the receiver too which is a nice bonus (if your injecting higher than 5V youll need an active splitter on the other end to get it back down to 5V).
Why that instead of PoE IP cameras though? Both solutions would roughly be in the same price range. (Unless you already had a bunch of existing equipment.)
You can also skip half of that process by buying Digi modules which virtualize USB ports. The receiving computer just needs to have their software installed and configured and then your USB devices are seen as such on the target computer. So basically, you can turn USB cameras into IP cameras in a sense.
@@fitybux4664 we had existing cameras that we borrowed to keep in budget, otherwise this would’ve been a better solution
could you explain how you can power the hub with PoE? not sure i understand completely. can i use a PoE injector and then go straight into receiver without their 5v adapter?
@@azzybishThat's exactly how that works indeed. You can inject at one end and it will power the device at the other end. And in the case of a small hub, you don't really have to case about what power PoE injector or switch you have.
Just saying, this video felt like an original LTT video. I appreciated all the work that went into this. and look forward to more in the future.
Linus - Have I been doing the expensive way for no reason?
Also Linus - I spent 10 grand on my wifi!
.... $10k on wifi is not outrageous for a Ruckus system...
yeah, is no for no reason, but youtube will delete this comment for the real reason. Is a word that almost caused LTT to be cancelled, but that almost happened anyway, but describes Linus thinking very well
@@keomg4718uh, what?
Akshually, 12:00 the cable does care what runs over it. Depending on the TP twist rate, inter conductor distance and jacket material, the characteristic impedance changes and may be out of spec for whatever signal your trying to run. It just so happens that both USB and ethernet can run on similar cables. USB being 90 Ohm+-15% and Ethernet being 100+-15 Ohm.
Also shielding doesn't really protect a twisted pair, the TP itself makes the signal mostly immune to EMI, the shielding is for EMC reasons, protecting other non-TP conductors from the EMI of the TP cable.
And in that situation, the cable still doesn't care. The signal does, but the cable doesn't.
I love this video! But I would like to see cheap options that have HDMI/DP and USB
Ngl I'd love to see a video on KVM switches for the home user. Like with the devices in this video, they're either cray expensive, or cheap and yet you have little ability to really figure out ahead of time if they're worthwhile or not (some are better than others in terms of documentation and feature and setup explanation).
Yes same for me
Yeah, I don't understand the point of taking the mouse all the way to where the screen is no longer visible. We've seen tech demos of extenders before.
There are cheap options for HDMI over Ethernet.
@@JFHeroux I wouldn't say cheap. If you don't care much for the quality then sure, but assuming its for gaming and you want at least HDMI 2.0, its around $200 or more for a transmitter and receiver unit.
We use one of those devices for a videocall setup. There is a tv and a Lodgitech meet camera on one side and a docking station on the other side. It transfer hdmi for the tv and usb for the camera. It works great and didn't cost much. The ports each go to the server room and we just connected the ports in the patch pannel with a small cat6 cable. When someone has a videocall meeting, they can just plug their laptop in the docking station and turn the tv on.
Why not test display options? The video speaks of putting a computer in another room, but then only keyboard/mouse was tested
Its explained at the beginning of the video
I think the video was more intended as exploring the peripheral options than a comprehensive how-to of a remote PC, but active HDMI is both more common than active USB, and the tight signaling requirements plus more conductors than network cable mean you can’t really run it over alternative cabling without an expensive encoder.
At work we needed some analog audio connections to a location where we had no infrastructure... but we had some unused cat cables to a network cabinet for both places. So I whipped out the soldering iron, cut a 5m Cat5 cable in half and soldered some XLR-Jacks/Plugs to the open ends. Works like a charm!
With the added benefit, that now I can get analog audio over the whole complex if I really needed it! 👍(as long as I can directly patch them to that place...)
i am sorry, but what kind of real world application would it be to just run a mouse/keyboard combination without a videofeed to a monitor over long distances? :)
The only thing I could think of. Add the HDMI to the mix. In that way, you could have your PC connected to your room but use it in the living room and make your TV your Display and Mouse and Keyboard wherever you go. If there are others, I guess am not that linus tech sawy
@@BoscoValdenegro They specifically mention moving your whole PC several times, but the HDMI is sort of a separate issue. It has more conductors than network cable and tight signaling requirements, but also active cables are more common.
1:59 Really glad you all have started going back and doing audio corrections, I was waiting to see results on your promises to do better, and how this video was handled is a great second step.
Thanks.
Got here so fast i couldn't even find the video in the LTT YT directory
the cut to the cctv footage timelapse was a very fun cutaway! do more! they are neat : )
The RJ45 female-to-female also adds a solid 10 meters worth of cable in signal loss. If you had a proper 100m cable I wouldn’t be surprised if it still worked given what we saw here
0:47 😆 Exactly. This whole time he's been pushing a product that costs 3x the cost of a rig, just for sound reasons. 😆
Linus choosing the expensive over the jank?? I never thought id see the day😢😢
Makes more money off the affiliate purchase with the higher priced option… 😂
The expensive option was provided to him for "free". (Well, at the cost of shilling it to you, the viewer.)
@@fitybux4664Not like we can afford it anyway nor would we have a use for it unless we owned a business
I only needed something that could reach the next room and this worked great. For the display, a 25ft HDMI cable was long enough for what I need,and it's great working in silence now. Much better than running multiple powered USB extensions underneath the doors.
I was kind of hoping he'd bring up the thunderbolt docking system he was using a while back and if he was still using it or not. Was really curious about the pros and cons from it; otherwise, great video for some alternatives.
Same. I use a thunderbolt dock with my tiny GPD laptop and it works well with a 2 meter cable. However I would like something a little bit longer.
I use one of these (Corning TB3, 50 meters) and it has been very solid. Plugging it in may not immediately work, so you may have to retry, but after that it’s totally fine. However, this issue is almost certainly due to the Thunderbolt driver for my motherboard, so I am very hesitant to blame the cable. Could even be my CalDigit dock instead. Works very well once everything initializes, though. I only do 1080p60, but I doubt I’ll have issues once I move up to 4k. I have the computer in the basement and everything else upstairs in my room.
I had the living room PC in a closet. It was connected to the TV with a 15m HDMI cable and I chained a bunch of USB extension cables for other devices up to 18m of length. The cheapo fiber HDMI lost signal for a few seconds once or twice a day but other than that no issues. 120hz 4k worked, I had USB3 speeds and even oculus link worked flawlessly. Total cost wasn't even too bad, around 100€.
It would've been cool to see this kind of setup taken to the extreme and presented as an alternative to netwok cables.
Remember the resistance in copper cables before using TP for audio. It's not just as easy as switching between IP and analog speakers.
For line-level signals the cable resistance doesn't matter. If you're running speakers directly, put strands in parallel. 4 pairs of 24awg Cat5 cable is about equivalent to 2-conductor 18awg which is certainly fine for shorter speaker runs. For longer runs the series resistance will mainly decrease volume but will also slightly affect the frequency response due to non-ideal speaker impedance. Unless you need super-high fidelity this is probably fine. If all the runs to one area are similar length you probably won't be able to notice, and you can largely eliminate the effect with an equalizer if needed.
The thing that makes me leery of these things - particularly when mentioning the wires in the wall - is to just make sure you're plugging the right thing into the right thing when they all have the same RJ45 connector. You probably don't want power-over-ethernet hitting one of the USB adapters by mistake
Shouldn't be a problem, PoE only turns on when it senses a device that supports it on the other side
thats why its important to label your jacks
Would this not have been a perfect moment to use the cable signal tester too? see if anything funky happens?
Would be nice to see some more in-depth stuff, given that the lab has the equipment now
I just finished building out my closet under my stairs for my server. Looking at possibly moving our computers out of our bedroom into the server rack. We will need just about 40ft total of cable length for everything but I really want to try and make it work. My wife has a dual stream pc setup so it might be a bit more complicated to get working right. Going to try with my computer first and see what happens. Planning on using powered cables for just about everything and keystones for the usb, hdmi, and DisplayPort. We’ll see what happens!
This video should be helpful in helping us evaluate different solutions.
Capacitance of the copper cable would maybe a good thing to add when it comes down to length. At a certain stage there is just to much signal loss, besides issues with noise etc.
Impedance
capacitance isn't very important, what's important is square root of capacitance times impedance (speed of light in cable). I don't know about twisted pair, but standard BCA coax is about 1/3 of c, which gives nanosecomds of latency (i even did such experiments during my degree) for 50m wire.
Impedance is important for signal reflection. I guess impedance matching is what magic box does.
@@janmarucha9138 Correct, although if the capacitance of the cable becomes to high, the signals themselves will be very low because of the lowpass filter effect.
Impedance matching is always a must.
I’ve been using USB over ethernet box for around 7-8 years with zero issues. Latency is not noticeable to me at all and I have it on a 100ft Cat 5 cable. Pretty sure I only paid about $30 back in the day. Then I ran a separate 100ft fiber optic HDMI 2.1 cable. At the time, that was $450 for the off-brand cable. Yes it still hurts how much it costed me but at least it still works. I play games on my 4k 120hz OLED tv in the living room no problem.
I tried putting my PC in another room and it worked till my cats started eating the cables and my bedmate tripped once.
I used a 25 foot HDMI Cable and a powered USB3 extender to a USB3 4 to 1 hub all for about 40 bucks.
as a firmware engineer I love getting some mentions of fpga in the tech youtube sphere, even if its only a quick one
0:27 no onscreen "this is a mouse" correction label. Unacceptable error, video unwatchable.
I have used RJ45 for my RGBW "build-in" lights in my living room. I couldn't drill holes in the ceiling, so I had to 3D print a mount and the control box would make the light way too extruded, so I cut the wire between the lamp and the controller and put a keystone on either end and ran a flat RJ45 cable to the controller. Works like a charm and the power draw are within specs of the RJ45 cable for those wondering.
I loved these style videos. I love networking and seeing you work with fiber and copper. Keep up the good work!
After quite literally searching for a solution last night, this video could not have come at a better time for resolving my USB challenges.
This channel is like a dream come true to my nerd brain. Thank you for everything you have given us over the years, we love you Linus!
Linus! I've noticed on a few video's where for some reason the audio drops down then comes back up. I'm sure you have noticed but I wanted to share... 2:22. thank you for all your hard work!
While the Corning optical cable didn't support USB 2, some optical cables can do both USB 3.2 Gen 2 AND USB 2.0, such as the Logitech Strong USB cables. Admittedly they can also be pretty eyewateringly expensive, but I picked up a couple of used 10m cables on eBay a while back for £80 each.
There are also non-optical cables that can run pretty far with repeaters (basically hubs) built into the cable. One such brand is MutecPower and I have a 10m and 20m cable from them that work for USB 3 Gen 1 and USB 2. Just be aware with these that you can't reliably operate with more than 5 hubs on a cable, and some ports on your computer may be connected to additional hubs internally that prevent the longest repeater cables from working properly.
There’s a pretty big omission in the ending of this video. Cables are not just cables and running audio over straight ethernet is not a good idea. You have to consider the impedance of the cable and shielding. I’ve tried RCA audio connections over a 10m Cat6 cable and there was severe mains hum. Active devices, like those you showed at the start do exist and they will get around it. However, like you’ve alluded to with this setup, it adds cost.
okay real quick, hold up. 5:30 to 5:45. Well fricken done Linus, you took the time to actually cover this properly and covered your bases with this video. This is a very positive sign in the right direction from what we were worried about before. You rock dude.
I wonder if this was filmed before the production break
tape delay my dude
@@thomasphillips885 who knows
@@thomasphillips885 Basing off the fact they're using a 2 month old version of USB Tree Viewer. (They're using 3.8.7 The latest is 3.8.9) I would say so.
For work I actually deploy a lot of Aten USB Extenders. The ability to use off the shelf parts at over 100' away it becomes actually feasible for an IT department to use in real life.
I've been considering moving my pc to my closet, but I'd be concerned that mouse/keyboard input would have notably added latency or choppiness. I think this is a much more realistic use case for most people and I'd love to see some testing or commentary on latency, reliability, and general feel of these different methods.
We’ve got some pricey units at work that do AV, Ethernet, and USB and the latency is basically 0ms. Haven’t messed with any of the super cheap USB ones in quite a while but I can’t say I’ve ever noticed latency with the powered units.
electricity moves at almost the speed of light, so long as the signal is strong enough, it's not going to be a issue in terms of latency. the biggest issue is always the display. Mouse\keyboard uses almost no data, even usb 2 is overkill for them, the display on the other hand uses a TON of data. While hdmi and displayport both spec 50 foot max, it seems the practical limit is 25, and that has to include cable routing.
@@Wooble57 hmmm. The speed at which energy or signals travel down a cable is actually the speed of the electromagnetic wave traveling along (guided by) the cable. In copper wire, the speed of electricity is approximately 3.2 m/s at 60 Hz. The speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s.
Disregarding that, isn't the ICRON solution doing some coding/de coding of the signal? Doesn't that processing introduce some latency?
Have the sound insulated room with computers directly next to the room you'll use them from. Then, stay within the manufacturer specs for HDMI cables and USB cables. (Just get plain extension cables.) It will be "boring" without fancy $1,500.00 boxes, but your wallet will thank you.
@@HrvojeMikovic not much, i did a google for speed of electricity and it was 90% the speed of light in copper. The 3.2m\s you suggest i don't think could be right in the context we are talking. If that were so even a 3m cable would introduce a full second of delay. The shortest common monitor cable i know of is 3ft, or 300ms of delay if that were true, then you would have to add another 300ms for the usb cable on the keyboard\mouse.
I get where your coming from, but the hardware is just so much faster than you think. I live on the west coast (NA), i just pinged a server in the EU and got 150ms. That's many thousands of km and who knows how many switch's and servers and such (dozens at least)
i moved my pcs upstairs a few months ago, no more heat or fan noise, so peaceful,
normal usb hubs are plenty if your run is short :)
Isn’t this exactly what one of his employees did in the extreme tech upgrade? Just put it in a different room
Yes this is very similar you are right.
Its that concept explained
I bought a couple of StarTech USB3AAEXT10M active USB cables, 32 feet long. They work great.
An important disadvantage of the cheaper options you didn't mention is that they won't work with a network switch in the line. Many households only have one RJ45 connection per room, so if you want wired ethernet and USB you need an expensive protocol transpiler. 😕
"Here at LTT we're very sorry for our mistakes. But do you know who isn't sorry? Our sponsor for this video"
4:06 I'd love to see these devices and the HDMI extenders tested in your fancy cable tester @LTT
Yeah funny isn't it? They get a fancy cable tester then made something like two videos using it and maybe a little cameo from time to time.
I built out the tech in a lounge once years ago and used Cat5 to extend RCA video cables around a room so that a single DVD player could be broadcast to multiple separate TVs around the room at the same time.
y’all have other rooms?
Well, I've been doing it for years but no extra long cables needed. I keep my pc on enclosed balcony and I drilled a slot for cables through the wall and filled the gap with glass wool and the desk is in front of the window looking at the balcony. So in winter, PC is cool. In summer, I'm not hot because of it, I dont need fancy expensive case because I don't see it, it's quiet .only down side is i need to open door and go on balcony to start it.
to continue the USB adventures i wonder if you could use those massive USB hubs and tons of flash drives to make a flash drive raid array and see how fast it can go.
Actually put one of those Ezcoos in a screening room because the more fancy one we had, used multiple hubs and we were hitting our hub limit in the chain. All good now though with the Ezcoo. :D
Hide your system in another room so you don't have a big box sitting on your desk ... only to put a bunch of other boxes on your desk. 🤪😜😝
What about for monitors? Is there something similar, or do I just need a really long displayport 😅
You guys inspired me to do something similar, but on a smaller scale. I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but I plan to put my computer in the closet, and run a USB 3.2 cable to a docking station on my desk, along with a Displayport cable for my main monitor. Bye-bye rat's nest, hello leg room.
Make sure the closet has good ventilation or a good size to it, or you will leave performance behind… I wanted to do the same thing, but my closet had no breathing room.
The civil engineering firm I worked for had me spec out a new building in 2005. I had 2x Cat 5e drops on every single wall in the building. I got pushback for it being excessive, but I stuck my ground. Two years later the boss was setting up a flat screen TV on the far wall in his office. He was able to do it with a HDMI to Cat5e adapter. He called me to say thanks for insisting on wiring it that way (I no longer worked there) because it saved him a ton of headache.
Best video I've seen in a while! Also testing if the time stamp on your metrics is send time or "initiate text" time. Do you get these metrics?
Been using the Ezcoo for over a year for my mouse / keyboard / headphones. Haven’t had any issues with it.
I've had my gaming PC in the other room for years to accommodate PCVR. 2x 15 meter fiber DP extensions and a 10 meter active repeated USB 3.0 extension. It was only like $250, probably cheaper now. The original idea was to keep the PC at my desk and run extensions to the VR, it was fine at first but eventually the headset showed visual noise artifacts. Turns out my monitors don't mind the extensions though so I turned the setup around with the PC near the VR, smooth sailing ever since.
My tower is in the next bedroom directly on the other side of the wall. All I did was cut a standard size wall outlet on both sides of the wall directly across from each other, install a pass through box and then ran my DVI, USB's, audio cable for speakers, etc. straight through the wall where my desk sits. It's the same as if the PC was sitting on the side of the desk, it just happens to be in on the other side of the wall in a guest bedroom that rarely gets used.
I would love to see a detailed video on how to move your PC to another room and have your workstation just be a keyboard,mouse,monitor, and speakers. I imagine it would need thunderbolt and a few other things. I have looked into this but have never found a definitive guide on how exactly to do this.
The audio has been better lately. I loved the video because I've been doing this for ten years. Just gonna mention Gamers Nexus is your competitor and you guys did well with the criticism. Thank you for improving all around.
Yep, the defacto broadcast industry standard for audio interconnect is called Studiohub+, and it's literally just audio on cat5. Super cheap, super easy, and the twists in cat5 ensure high quality isolated signals over long distance. For analog audio, balanced audio, and AES digital audio. We don't really run XLRs or 1/4 inch jacks to anything except old equipment.
A long time ago, I wired a couple of cat6 cables into usb 2 terminations so I could still plug usb storage devices into my server from my office/living room. I used a powered hub on the server side. Worked very well.
In DIY Solution u can use two cable tor each one instead, use reverse polarity in same colors for maximum distance for example: the power + connected to Blue and brown and power - to blue/white and Brown/white and same for the data lines, this will reduce the interference form outside sources.
What about a wireless solution? I could see a small box on the desk that has 4 USB inputs + HDMI + BluTooth and its correspondent box in another room. 10m range through 1 Gyproc wall would suffice, 20m (2 walls) would be really nice.
Then a PC station would be quiet - keyboard, mouse, monitor (wireless KB+Mouse at that (BT)).
The hardest part would be the HDMI, obviously, and that would demand some hard encryption on the fly as would the keyboard.
I actually use this for my setup! I have a long HDMI cable coming from my room to the living room and my usb 2.0 hub over ethernet. I'm glad Linus made a video on this because only a very niche crowd needs this and the answers on reddit and such are never straightforward.
Currently doing this with display port. Current setup is thunderbolt 4 pcie adapter with corning usb-c cable connecting to thunderbolt 4 hub. Gsync works with this set up too. One cable to rule them all.
We use those ezcoo kvms in our OB truck, allows us to access the different computers in the engineering racks from anywhere in the production suite
RCA/audio over CAT5 adapters aren't just a cable. They have an impedance matching and isolation transformer in them called a balun. Short for balanced-unbalanced.
You can run DMX over CAT5 with no issues, same for RS-232 or RS-485, but audio should be using a balun.
11:22 Tanner was correct (Linus was wrong). You need (2) packs of two (so the cost comes out to around $25) if you plan on using both your mouse AND keyboard.
Having my gaming pc in another room or, like I prefer, my cool basement close to my ISP hookup.
I have done this for 20 yrs, not because I hate the noise or heat or ... other. I have always been a minimalist and do not like a lot of clutter.
As of now, I sit in a recliner with a dual monitor setup swing arm. With currently, just a couple of 3.1 usb and one dp, and two HDMI cables from the basement. Attached to my gaming pc, and currently used console. 2.1 sound system under the recliner, and along the swing arm.
Great setup.
We used a USB to Ethernet converter to send data signal to and from an Arduino along a 60ft tether for an underwater ROV. They work great for certain use cases!
What's most frustrating is that all of these solutions shown seem to rely on a dedicated cable. If only I'd had the foresight to run THREE Cat6 cables to my attic. I assumed that one with a switch upstairs would be sufficient for my networking needs. I guess that a dongle that has a proper network card would get too expensive? Without that, however, I can't run any of this communication through switches or routers or firewalls.
this showcase felt so homey and good vibes, loved limit testing all the way out in the plot!
I have one of the cheap options, the black metal case one,and I have to note that it only works with direct cables, if it's crossed it won't work
I work in a school district, those Monoprice USB Extenders are super hit or miss in my experience. We had a TON of problems with them… They work great when they work, but they seem to dislike working correctly.
You know it’s a good video when Linus is explaining what wires are.
In my undergrad playing with some things that go fast, I wanted to transmit data over ethernet from a box to my laptop. The board in the box only had USB and IO pins and the guys couldn't get ethernet working on it. So we found 3 100' powered USB cables. We didn't know where the power supplies or connectors were for the little powered hub bits, so we tested it without power. 300' of USB and the data transferred flawlessly. Granted it was just a stream of text data like 7 numbers at 100 Hz, but at 300 feet, we were stunned. It worked great out in the desert midday Sun too.
Linus is a good example of "We made a mistake and we fixed it" we can see the changes
Hey look! An LTT video i actually have a lot of experience with. Those USB 2.0 cat6 hubs are well worth the $60, especially because i bought three pairs of those cheapo direct adapters and not a single one worked. So if anyone else is interested, that is definitely the way i would do it again (in fact i did it that way again when i needed more i/o).
Also, im writing this while watching the video but, I wish it was mentioned that the reason usb3 over copper/fiber is much harder to find/expensive is that i found discussions about patents being held by icron for this 🤷 not sure the validity but definitely might be something worth discussing
I do this for a job. The cheaper extenders have massive issues with sleeping and waking of peripherals. You will find after your PC sleeps some stuff like webcams just won't work until a restart. Even the Icron rangers you consider expensive have issues. The Pro version which is another $500ish on top provides better power management and mitigates these issues. The cheaper extenders ALWAYS fail.
What I did was drill a hole in the wall of my office, build a shelf on the other side and plonked my PC there and ran cabling through the wall. It's not complete silence with some resonance coming through the wall or the odd spike in performance draw, but generally if there's anything on the speakers, you can't hear the PC.
So... If copper is copper... Could I increase(well, decrease) the size (AWG) of my cable to reduce the overall resistance in the wires?
Because I'm assuming the reason why it doesn't work over a certain distance, is because of the higher resistance (resistance of a wire is something like (the material x the length) / the surface (area) of the wire. )
Meaning, if I take 8 x AWG 12 wires, of, say 100m, terminate them on both side on some terminal blocks and then connect a standard ethernet wire to the blocks to connect into the hubs using the cheap method... would it work?
It would be : USB hub PC.