Cat-5 VGA

on 06.05.05, 11:27am in home theater • comments (1)

[MAKE: Blog] It’s possible to send a VGA "video" signal down an ordinary Cat-5 ethernet cable. Link.

Linked because: A) This is really cool and B) I want to remind myself to look at this later on.

1 Comment

    Jeff Atwood (June 6, 2005 @ 12:30 am)

    I’ve run VGA over Cat-5 for distances of about 15 metres (50 feet). At this range, the 800×600 screen looked fine when it was displaying a coloured background; although when it was displaying black, a lighter gray region was visible, probably due to interference from the synch signals. Your mileage will vary depending on screen res and refresh rate (lower will go further), contrast and brightness in the image (high contrast and brightness will go further), and interference from other sources (running the cable in its own metal conduit is best; if you’re not in conduit, running parallel to other cables is bad).

    —

    VGA isn’t very amenable to long cable runs… although reasonably legible 8×6 at 50 feet is impressive and probably the best you can hope for.

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