I’m looking to connect my PC in my home office to my living room TV. Right now I’m looking at unpowered usb over cat5/6 and powered HDMI over cat5/6. Both of the adapters say they’re good for ~150’ and I’d be doing a 40’ cable run with pre terminated cat6. Cost of about $70 for adapters and cable on amazon.
I’ve wired a garage and build my own PCs so I’m not afraid of the install but I have basically no networking experience. I’m aiming to play single player games from my couch and I don’t know if something like this is going to be an enjoyable experience or if there is a better way without breaking the bank.
https://a.co/d/iba2HEg and https://a.co/d/7VZjuGp
I mainly play RPGs and strategy games, Fallout 4 is the most intense game I play right now with plans for Starfield later. My TV is 1080p, don’t know the refresh rate but doubt it’s impressive. I’ve got more budget and was tossing around the idea of a raspberry pi to remote in but figured hard wire would allow for a better experience at lower cost.
Those are the devices I was thinking of. If my understanding of these devices is correct, they require a direct device to device connection and would not work with packet switching devices like a switch or router. That means you would need two Ethernet lines running from your office to your living room in order to get both usb and HDMI. In addition, you run into the bandwidth issue I was describing earlier where the HDMI signal caps out at a maximum of 1080p60 and it could be lower if the signal degrades enough over the long distance.
In my opinion your either better off going with a single fiber optic cable that can handle both usb and display (like thunderbolt or one of the newer usb standards) or using a cheap device that supports game streaming. Using a single cable is fairly expensive as the cable itself isn’t cheap and could require ancillary hardware. It could also necessitate snaking cables in your walls. As for game streaming the cost of entry can be pretty low as you primarily just need something that can decode the stream for the tv. An old laptop (I’ve even had some success with an old acer chromebook) or even a phone might be sufficient for you to give game streaming from your pc a try to see if you like it and if the latency is sufficient. My vote would be to cobble something together for free to try out game streaming to see if you like it and then go from there. RPi3’s are capable of running game streaming and don’t break the bank.
If you have money so spend, you might want to look at optical thunderbolt. Linus from LTT uses it to have his PC and all the noise and heat in another room.