HD TV in another room?

[ColJack]

My cousin has a skyHD box in his lounge and wants to watch in his bedroom ( bungalow ) which is about 8M from the skyHD box.. so about 14M with drops etc..

he bought a long HDMI lead and tried that.. it didn't work..
so he bought a HDMI amplifier to put on the cable.. still no joy..

no someone at the place he bought it has told him that he should use cat6 data cable...

anyone care to enlighten me on how to do this since I'm getting skyHD next month..

 

[blondini]

Any bets that your friends long cable might be unidirectional?

 

[tim west]

why not go multiroom it'll guarantee you get a picture without any losses.

 

[Donkmeister]

Has he tried plugging the cable directly between the Sky box and the TV, with no splitters in between? Just thinking if he's got a splitter in there he'll be upsetting the HDCP gremlins... Oh, and has he enabled the HDMI port in the Sky box? On my V+ box, the first time you use the HDMI port you need to enable it from the set-up menu.

A 14m HDMI cable is rather long... There is no maximum length in the HDMI spec, but it's generally inadvisable to go beyond 5-7m without buying very high grade cable.

The cat-6 route involves buying baluns (line balancer/unbalancer). You buy baluns as a pair. The first one sits near the Sky box and has an HDMI input with two RJ-45 jacks on it. The other one sits near the destination TV and has two RJ-45 jacks with an HDMI output.

An RJ-45 jack is the same sort of connector used for computer networking, i.e. an ethernet port.

You connect two Cat-6 leads between the two baluns, HDMI leads between the Sky box to input balun, and output balun to TV and the job is complete. All baluns I've seen allow transfer of HDCP information so you shouldn't have any issues there.

This works by using the "balanced line" and twisted-pair properties of the Cat-6 cable, which are more robust against signal noise than an unbalanced line such as an HDMI cable.

 

[ColJack]

2 cat6 lines?

ok. I thought it was just one as I've seen advise on putting cat6 infrastructure into new builds for "furure digital connectivity"..

 

[ColJack]

why not go multiroom it'll guarantee you get a picture without any losses.

that's an extra tenner a month, plus the cost of a phone line so that sky can make sure you're not selling the second box..

 

[tim west]

that's an extra tenner a month, plus the cost of a phone line so that sky can make sure you're not selling the second box..

Cheapskate dont forget it gives you the ability to watch different programmes in different rooms also so missus or kids can watch what they want whilst you watch the footie

 

[ColJack]

only me lives here.. and if you read my other post, there's not much chance of getting a missus and kids..

 

[kkynaston]

why not go multiroom it'll guarantee you get a picture without any losses.

that's an extra tenner a month, plus the cost of a phone line so that sky can make sure you're not selling the second box..

Thats £20 extra a month if you want HD multiroom.

Anyway, do you definitely want a HD picture on the 2nd tv? and have you tried another HDMI lead?

I have a 10 mtr HDMI lead on mine split at the back of the sky box and it is fine although you still have to run a coax to send the magic eye signals back to the box