[tonycooling]

OK I'm thinking of doing a small home network but I have some question.

1) if I install cat5 face plates in the locations I require, I can get a network cable to my internet router from the PC, but how do connect the cat5 faceplate to HDMI on the tv (if this is how its done)?

2) how do I get windows to sent the film etc down the network to the TV? Do I need to use windows 7 or will Vista do?

3) do I need to ports to transfer HD (I have a Humax PVR and would like to send this upstairs to a second TV through the net work), or perhaps share a DVD player.

I'm very confused

Regards
Tony

[paddy01]

Tony - In order to send HDMI over CAT5 (or preferably CAT6) you will need :

1 pair of HDMI balluns.
2 x lengths of CAT6 cables terminated in the desired fashion required for the balluns you buy (there are different ways of crimping the ends)
2 x HDMI cables (short ones I'd imagine).

The connection would go :

HDMI output from device via HDMI cable into the 'sending' ballun.
2 x CAT6 cables from 'sending' ballun to the receiving ballun.
HDMI cable from 'receiving' ballun to HDMI input on the display

It is recommended not to use face plates / patch pannels and unless you want to start spending quite a lot of cash, using the router (or rather what would be the switch part of it) is out of the question.

So in order to output video from your pc over CAT6 cabling you'd need the equipment above plus a graphics card on the PC that had HDMI output (if it's got DVI then you can go dvi -> hdmi but DVI doesn't carry sound unless it's an ATI graphics card that comes with a dvi -> hdmi adapter.

To play back a video you'd simply play it on the PC as normal.

Hope that helps some.

Cheers

Paddy

[tonycooling]

WOW....thats making it very expensive then......bought an 8800GT card a couple of years ago...don't think they were doing HDMI then, so I'd need a card, then the balluns...

Think I'll stick with the DVD player

Thanks for the education though.


Regards
Tony

[paddy01]

Well you might not need a card, you could use a regular DVI to HDMI adapter on the card (or use specific DVI balluns instead of HDMI) however this wouldn't carry audio, but you can get baluns that have seperate inputs for analogue audio using phono or 3.5mm connections.

There are cheaper bits of kit out there (HDMI to CAT6 wall panels etc) but my personal opinion (and that's all it is, I've no particular expertise on this) is that there are enough reports around of problems with the cheap solutions that for me personally I'd be going with balluns from a quality recognised supplier. Especially for longer runs.

Paddy