November 20, 2007

Tributaries HXC5 Streams HDMI Over Ethernet

A company called Tributaries Cable has released a very cool product to help people solve the issue of getting their HDMI signal to carry a rather long distance. Often when you are setting up your home entertainment center in an older house you are limited where you can put the TV since you need to located it relatively close to where the cable feed comes in. Well now their new product the HXC5 will let you use standard Ethernet cable to bring that signal much further then standard HDMI cables will let you.

Standard HDMI cables stop being effective around 5 meters or so, but using a technique utilizing dual Cat 5 Ethernet cables they have been able to attain a distance of 164 feet. Now many people don't have the problem of having their TV 164 feet away from where their line comes in, but the fact that you can, with this product, carry your HDMI signal basically anywhere in your room opens up a lot of possibilities as to where you can place your TV to fully maximize your room layout.

As you can see from the picture there are two boxes. The boxes communicate with each other over Ethernet while their input/output is HDMI. One to your source and one to your TV. A very nice solution for people that have had to ditch the HDMI option because of poor location or where their cable enters their house. Now of course since this solution cost $600 it might just make sense to pay an electrician to move where the cable enters your house and bypass the need to run HDMI over Ethernet, but hey, sometimes you just need the easy and more expensive way to solve a problem and not deal with drilling and contractors.

via gizmodo