video upgrade

[mgrober]

I have been a long time member of this board having had Control 4 installed in a new home in 2009. With the technology change in televisions I finally gave up waiting on my plasma to die and bought an OLED among other tv upgrades over the years. We have Directv and during this winter I used a wireless receiver with the new tv so I could get a better picture ie, due to HDMI.  It's summer and that wireless unit needs to go back outside.  Here is my situation and am asking for suggestions and estimated cost.  What will it take and difficulty of upgrading the video distribution to HDMI so I can take advantage in the entire house of better quality and even 4K as it gets more popular.  At this time I don't have a Directv Receiver that gets 4K.  Here is my list of relevant equipment and I am sure it will take some of you back to the old days.

EA5 controller in master closet (obviously newer than 2009)
HC 300 in kitchen
Directv HDMI to EA5 then to Audio Authority (component video)
Audio Authority unit that disperses the video thru 2 cat5's to each television
approx 11 locations (2 sets of cat5 to each location)
2 surround sound master receivers for sound distribution
approx 12 speaker sets in the house (pairs)

installation was in 2009

Lighting still works well thru control 4 and other add on items.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions. 
 

[c4toys]

avpro HDMI switcher - HDMI over single cat5/POE.. I personally have not used larger then a 8x8 but sure they have one. IF all TV's are 4k, you can use a non scaling version (less expensive). IF tv's are mixed then you will want a scaling version to down convert 4k sources.. Roku is one of your best sources for streaming 4K solution

[mujtaba.khokhar]

You could put a video matrix in or a HD over IP solution in.

 

Now days it’s usually one cat 6 per room for the video to come through, you can run 4K on cat5e providing the distances are not too long (no more than 70m for HD and 40m for 4K) and the cable is good quality stuff.

 

There’s two solutions

 

1. HDBT Video matrix - these come up to you 16x16 which means you can have 16 inputs (satellite box, roku, Apple TV etc) and they also have 16 output (1 output per tv). You mentioned ceiling speakers too, so I’m guessing you have the audio for your tv coming of them them too? If so you’ll need a video matrix with audio breakouts, this is so you can send the audio of whatever source to the ceiling speakers via an audio matrix etc.

 

2. HD OVER IP SOLUTION - the main difference with this is it’s scaleable meaning you can add sources and tvs as you wish providing you buy a big enough network switch in the first place. Also of the video over ip solutions have scaling built in too so if you do have TVs that are 4K and some that are not things will still work.

 

Ofc changing out video distribution can be expensive, but it’s totally worth is especially if you currently don’t have HDMI.

 

Thanks

M

 

 

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[ee999]

Hey “mgrober”. I’m in a similar situation to you. My house was built in 2009. A component video matrix was installed along with two rg6 and two cat5e to each tv/media location. I’ve thought about trying to upgrade but I’m skeptic as to whether 4K over cat5e will work reliably. i have a large control4 install with EA5 as controller (6 tv and 16 zones of audio, tonnes of dimmers/keypads).

in our two media rooms where we watch the majority of our television, I’ve upgraded to sony android 4K TVs. These rooms have 5.1 audio. Apart from sports, we watch most of our content on Netflix or Amazon prime so we see programming in HDR and some 4K with 5.1 audio (tv optical out to 5.1 receiver). 

for the other TVs in the house i wonder if it would be cheaper/simpler to replace them with sony 4k android TVs and local cable boxes with audio through local soundbars rather than trying to go HDMI matrix or video over IP.

Let me know what you ultimately choose and how it works out. 

 

[tdougray]

1 hour ago, ee999 said:

I’m skeptic as to whether 4K over cat5e will work reliably.

It works reliably and is rock solid as long as you choose a decent manufacturer and keep within the max stated cable lengths. They have been doing 4K over single cat 5/6 for years. 

[ee999]

Who are the decent manufacturers?

[Don Cohen]

32 minutes ago, tdougray said:

It works reliably and is rock solid as long as you choose a decent manufacturer and keep within the max stated cable lengths. They have been doing 4K over single cat 5/6 for years. 

I've been looking into this recently, and have a question:

4k/HDR requires 18 gbps bandwidth, which can be handled by conventional "Premium Certified" HDMI Cables up to 25 or 30 feet, or Fiberoptic HDMI Cables for greater lengths.  With HDBaseT, from what I've read, Cat6 can only handle 10 gbps, so there is compression on one end, and then decompression on the other end.  This has been described as "visually lossless" which implies that the compression algorithms are in fact lossy, rather than lossless.

If I'm putting together a high-end Theater, this raises doubts in my mind as to whether I would want to utilize a system that is inherently lossy, and so would be inclined towards an HDMI Cable solution.  But I haven't found any objective or rigorous analyses or comparisons to assess the real-world impact of the lossy compression/decompression.

Any thoughts or experience on this?  And if any of my working assumptions are incorrect, please set me straight!

Thanks.

[mujtaba.khokhar]

I've been looking into this recently, and have a question:
4k/HDR requires 18 gbps bandwidth, which can be handled by conventional "Premium Certified" HDMI Cables up to 25 or 30 feet, or Fiberoptic HDMI Cables for greater lengths.  With HDBaseT, from what I've read, Cat6 can only handle 10 gbps, so there is compression on one end, and then decompression on the other end.  This has been described as "visually lossless" which implies that the compression algorithms are in fact lossy, rather than lossless.
If I'm putting together a high-end Theater, this raises doubts in my mind as to whether I would want to utilize a system that is inherently lossy, and so would be inclined towards an HDMI Cable solution.  But I haven't found any objective or rigorous analyses or comparisons to assess the real-world impact of the lossy compression/decompression.
Any thoughts or experience on this?  And if any of my working assumptions are incorrect, please set me straight!
Thanks.

HDBT AND NETWORK WORK IN DIFFERENT WAYS, the signals are different.

Yes Cat6 can only handle 10gig but video is transmitted over the cable at 18.5gps, I’m not an expert in this but from what I know the way the signal is managed is different.

When the cable is used for network only a few of the cores are used depending on what sort of uplink you have. With HDBT all 8 cores are used to Transmit and Receive video which is why you can push higher bandwidth through the one cable.

This is the same for HD OVER IP AND WHY YOU SHOULDNT MIX YOUR HD OVER IP AND NETWORK SYSTEMS TOGETHER, it just opens up a can of worms.

With the compression if you go for a reputable brand (I use, Binary, Wyrestorm, Bluestream) all 3 a re great and vary in price, depending on what features you need (scaling, tiling, pip to make a few) Wyrestorm works better if the cabling is old and cat 5e (4K is achievable up to a certain distance and I find this should be no more than 40m with decent cat5e) where as some of the other brands have a minimum requirement of cat 6a @ 250mhz for you to be able to push full Phat 4K @ 4.4.4.

Matricies and HD over IP systems have settings built in for video resolution and sound profiles. There’s a lot of fine tweaking you have to do in order to get it to work to the best of its ability.

With regards to cinema room. I put an AVR locally in the room and run an optical HDMI cable to the projector. I then have my kaleidoscape plugged into the AVR and then the matrix or HD over IP system in another input. What you’ll find is not many pieces of hardware actually support 4K @ 4.4.4 many of them are 4k@4.2.0 or 4.1.0 for any good video distribution system they are more than able to process this. Heck I’ve even left a kaleidoscape in a rack hooked up to a matrix and it’s been perfectly fine with 4k@4.4.4 as long as you use the correct HDMI cables and set your EDID you’ll be okay!

Hope this helps
Thanks
M


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[tdougray]

54 minutes ago, ee999 said:

Who are the decent manufacturers?

I’m in the UK have used HDanywhere with great success but as mentioned by @mujtaba.khokhar blustream and wyrestorm have great reputations.

[mujtaba.khokhar]

I’m in the UK have used HDanywhere with great success but as mentioned by @mujtaba.khokhar blustream and wyrestorm have great reputations.

I’m in the UK too.

But for my US clients I’ve done one of two things

1. Taken stuff over with me - Mainly Wyrestorm
2. Stuck to brands more known in the US. I’ve seen a lot of JAP and Binary. Which are very expensive, but binary is much better JAP receivers just seem to fail all the time for no reason.

Bluestream is also very up and coming. Okay it’s doesn’t have 1 second switching time like JAP does (it’s more like 3 - 6 seconds) but by the time you’ve turned your tv on etc the switch has already happened. All the Bluestream stuff has scaling built in too so you can mix and match tvs to your hearts content

Thanks
M


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[mgrober]

Sounds like I have a lot of choices to look thru and now investigate pricing etc.  Thanks for all the responses and at least I will have some knowledge before contacting a dealer.