AV Over Cat5

WellyJ

Hey,

Bit of a strange one here,

Was looking to run some Component signals/with sound over cat5 cable, using homeplug adapters to make use of the power lines

If you are still reading,

Is this plausible?

The Homeplug adapters I have are 100mbit rated and work quite well for networking two PCs in seperate rooms.

Any Input on this? Any reasons why it wouldnt work out? And can anyone recommend where I could get the Component to Cat5 adapters? (Need sound too)

Thanks

bazwaldo

http://www.keene.co.uk/ have some cat5 to component av adaptors and I think some that can carry remote signals too.

I have ones that carry just video made by muxlab. You could do a search for them on the web as they also do versions for av.

steve-hosting36

http://www.svideo.com/videobalun1.html ?

Snowbat

The basic balun coupling trick won't work over homeplug - the adapters can only handle ethernet data. You'll need to use IPTV gear to get AV through homeplug adapters.

BigEejit

I have 3 devolo 200mbit aveasy adapters in my house (due to too many wireless networks in my area -16), but they only have 10/100mb ports on them. I updated the firmware on the adapters to latest (3.3.4) and used the encryption button rather than the utility to encrypt to data on the powerline network.

The devolo utility is showing almost the full 200mbit (190/185 mostly) around the house, but I only get 4.5MB/s when transferring large files. I would have expected windows xp (c2d e6600, 2GB, gigabit port on mobo) to windows xp (c2q q6600, 2GB, gigabit port on mobo) to have saturated the 100mb network....

What are the requirements for a full hd stream?

steve-hosting36

36Mbps is still respectable for most networks...

Does the XP machine show a 1Gbps connection or a 100Mbps connection on the ethernet port?

BigEejit

Both ports show just 100Mb when directly connected to the devolo adapters. I have the ports set to auto but just thinking about it they could have gone to 100Mb half duplex or something .... maybe I should set to 100Mb full at each end and retest.

/edit Argh, speed dropped to about 400KB/s with everything set to 100Mb full duplex ... needless to say everything set back to auto and speed back to 4.5MB/s

steve-hosting36

Also, if you are running the link encrypted, it will be more taxing?

BigEejit

IIRC the encryption is done in hardware on the fly so should not affect it, but obviously the link is running 100mb half duplex if it ran like a dog when set to full.. some more experimenting is needed.

_CreeD_

Networking over your power lines is a nice idea but never works well. There is electrical noise to begin with and then trying to get a quality network flow aswell? Your transfers are likely slow because of transmission errors, TCP will retransmit lost packets and also lower it's window size (the largest packet it will transmit) when it encounters loss so you still get your transfer but it is crippled by the line quality.
It's handy but that's about it.
Encryption will also add overhead to the packet size so you might also want to lower the MTU on your end devices a bit to compensate and reduce fragmentation.

BigEejit

You are correct all the noise on the line is going to play havoc with the data transmission. But with the amount of wireless AP's around me I was getting 802.11b like speeds. I did try 802.11a but as bad luck would have it so did a couple of my neighbours and transmission speeds which were not great to start with dropped quite low as well.

The slowish data transmission speeds are the only fault I have with the powerline adapters though. They are reliable and simple, no drivers, no aerial positioning... it just works.

I will however do as you suggested and try a bit of experimentation with mtu sizes to see if those numbers get better