Another great episode.

We’d love to do this at our house (between our main TV and secondary TV) but there’s not an easy way to get cable between those two rooms as we don’t have a basement :(, although it does look interesting how it works.
Isn’t the signal from the HDMI splitter being converted to a different signal or is the HDMI signal being carried over the CAT6 cable?

Keep up the great work!

I believe the HDMI is simply being carried over the Cat6 – I don’t think there’s any loss of quality. I’ll have to cover what to do if you don’t have a basement or attic.

@iyaz That’s interesting. In the video you use two Cat 6 cables, is one for audio, one for video? I didn’t quite understand why you used two into each box.

Thanks!

Hey Matt, I don’t think it works like that — one is DDC, which as far as I can tell is about copy protection, but I’ll have to do some more research. So you can’t just pull one cable for video – they both have to be connected for this to work at all.

I used to install alarm systems. There are ways to save your flooring from holes that can be seen, you may already know, but I’d like to share some tricks I learned on the job.
There are 6′ drill bits that are flexible enough to be fed through a hole in the wall to drill through the flooring behind the drywall. Where you have access to your basement, you wouldn’t need it because you can just drill from underneath. There are 6′ (I call them) glow rods. They are an electricians best friend. Mine had steel caps on each end and made of fluorescent plastic so that you could see it if you flashed a light in the wall. Use a glow rod to feed you cable through the holes. (I once used a weight tied to some yarn to feed antenna coax from the attic to a hole in the wall, worked like a charm.)
You can pull your wires through existing outlet boxes (be careful of hot wires) or you can put a hole in the wall, cover it with a plate with a small hole in the middle. Dry wall is easily repaired and plastic plates can blend in with the wall. Holes in the floor are permanent. I personally think wires in the wall are cleaner. Hope that was useful.

@David – those are all great points and I agree that wires in the wall are much cleaner. I am definitely going to try those methods in the future. Thanks for all the tips!

I think this is a neat idea, especially for smaller families or for a restaurant where you have the same feed going to multiple tvs. Larger families may want the ability to watch different live tv shows in the different rooms though.

I asked this question in the TWiT chatroom “anyone know of a good solution to take hdmi signal from my downstairs hometheater and transmit it to the tv upstairs above my fireplace” and someone suggested this exact podcast episode. I thank you for solving my problem this is by far the most helpful podcast i’ve ever seen (and I watch podcasts daily). Thanks so much for keeping my HT setup clean and simple.