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So you’ve got all that wonderful home cinema gear installed in your house, everything is looking rosy, but then you make a horrifying discovery. You installed the screen too far away from the HD DVD player and moving it would mess up your whole setup. Enter the HXC5, a box that can send HDMI-compliant video over Cat 5 cable.
Crave UK
The HXC5 claims to be able to send 1080p video signals up to 50 meters–which is about 30 meters further than a regular HDMI cable–over either Cat 5/5E or even swanky-shiny-newish Cat 6. Tributaries claims it does this with “minimal signal loss.” Obviously we hope the signal loss is very minimal indeed, because otherwise all you’re going to get out the other end is nonsense, rather than 1080p video. The good news is the system also supports HDCP–it would be useless without it.
We can see this system being popular with home cinema enthusiasts, especially people looking to set up a multi-room system. You could have a main “cinema” room, but use an AV receiver and one of these senders to move video elsewhere in the house–say the bedroom, for those lazy Sunday mornings.
The bonus of all this of course is that Cat 5 is as cheap as chips–possibly even cheaper–so you probably already have a load of it, or could get some without too much stress. Plus it’s nice and easy to run it around your house–you might even have done this for your home network.
The downside of this product has to be its frankly staggering cost. The recommended price is $600 (about 290 pounds), which is a fair chunk of cash. Of course, if you’re desperate to send an HDMI signal 50 meters, then this will no doubt appeal–you could probably get it to send 720p video a little further because of the reduced bandwidth needed. All we need now is something that can do this over power lines: Now that would be cool.
(Source: Crave UK)
