Hi everyone, I’m looking for some help with a project I’m thinking about doing. First, my router and modem are in my living room, which is where my TV is as well. I am routing a 50ft or 100ft (I don’t know the exact length; I would have to search to find the order) ethernet CAT6 cable from the living room to my bedroom, with my PC in it. Technically, my PC is about 60ft away (I know the 50ft cable part doesn’t match, but these are rough estimates), but at that time that was my only option. I am routing the ethernet cable under my crawl space, so I have lots of room to move cables. My goal with this project is to be able to play video games on my TV, so connecting the mouse, keyboard, controller, and audio is a must. I’m not trying to play multiplayer games but single-player and co-op games with my brother/family. Any entertainment I can also do would be great, like watching movies/TV shows. Any advice and tips would be very helpful and much appreciated.
50 feet is around the point where HDMI begins to experience signal loss. If you get a reputable brand cable I think it would be worth running that and testing out how it works. As for peripherals, LTT has talked about thunderbolt docks in the past, but they are often expensive.
Do you have any means to use something such as Steam link?
fiber optic HDMI cables can go a few hundred ft. I use a 150ft cable for the past 6-7 years and it has not had any issues.
Audio can also go long distances easily. The USB though I think will require a more expensive piece of gear to send it across the longer distance. I have tried cheap “USB to Ethernet” converter things that basically signal convert data packets back and forth and it is supposed to extend the range greatly, but I havent found one that was very reliable and gave up on that eventually.
What games are you looking to play? Sometimes it may just be cheaper to get a low-ish tier computer and run everything or stream it off of that on the TV
During my research I did see that a lot of people recommended fiber optic HDMI cables to connect to the TV but I’ve been having a hard time finding anything about USB. I’ve also seen people say to use USB to ethernet but I don’t know how reliable that would be. Would using an extender help in any way? And how would you extend Audio that distance?
Honestly, any single-player/ co-op games I have on Steam. My most demanding games are probably Elden Ring and Cyberpunk 2077. I would love to have the best graphics possible. I don’t have the newest and best TV, but I would like to use it to the maximum of its capacity if possible.
I personally would try a good quality HDMI cable for my display.
For USB, I likely would want a USB C dock or hub of some sort. Again, get a good quality cable to run to your TV. At that point, the hub or dock will break out into multiple USB ports for controllers, keyboard, mouse, etc.
Ya, I’m planning to go with this Display Port Cable from Infinite Cables:
Look up on Infinite Cables → DisplayPort 8K@60Hz AOC Active Optical Cable - 40Gbps V2.0Cable - CMP Plenum Rated - 75ft
As for the USB-C dock, I don’t know how likely that would be. To my knowledge, using ethernet can only give you up to USB 2.0, which is obviously not enough for USB-C. I could go with fiber optic, I think, but I am not really knowledgeable on this, so I will need some help figuring that out. And based on some LTT videos, it’s also expensive to do unless I’m missing something. A third idea I found was using a Thunderbolt 3 Optical Cable from Corning, but it is costly and only supports Thunderbolt.
I’ll add some links below since I have a limit here.
Unless I’m missing something, please let me know. The USB part of this project is pretty hard to accomplish.
Look these up on YouTube. I can’t add links for some reason:
My Computer is Everywhere - New House Office Setup
Have I been doing this the expensive way for no reason? - Replacing my Icron Raven
My GPU is 1000ft Away!
I tried 3 different USB to Ethernet converters before and all 3 were unreliable. I would definitely go the USB fiber optic route, but it seems you have to be careful with those as they have specific requirements as well. This one looks really good: https://www.heyoptics.net/products/usb-3.0-mpo-om3-fiber-optical-cable?sku=18052490187894633595533661
But it requires that the computer end be plugged into a USB 3 port. That shouldnt be hard now days as motherboards have lots of USB 3 on them.
The downstream end can work with USB 3 or USB 2 devices it says, and the images show it working for keyboards, mice, usb speakers, etc. It does NOT show a USB hub though, so it looks like it wants only a single device connection. Which means 3 of these adapter things for your mouse, keyboard, and controller.
Does the TV in your living room have display port? I didnt think any TV does. So you probably need an HDMI cable.
When I found the fiber optic USB I linked above, I noticed they also allow you to use a single MPO trunk cable to multiple adapters. So you could actually get 3 of these: https://www.heyoptics.net/products/optical-usb-cable
plus one of these: https://www.heyoptics.net/products/hdmi-arc-vs-optical
And this cable to connect it all: https://www.heyoptics.net/products/mtp-100g-cable
You can also use these wall plates and have the fiber cable run behind the walls:
Thanks so much for the advice, ya USB is the biggest pain in the butt. This project is starting to get pretty expensive from the looks of it, and it might be worth getting a cheap PC. I don’t know much about this side either. Would I be able to get really good gaming quality by doing a setup like that? How would it work anyway? Also, is Heyoptics a reliable website for buying these kinds of cables? From what I heard, you really have to watch out where you buy these cables cuz sometimes companies sell faulty cables.
Interesting. Do you know of any good tutorials or setup guides for Sunshine + Moonlight that I could look at? How well are you able to run your games? What is the most demanding game you would say you could play doing this? I don’t know much about this. Thank you for the advice as well.
