AV link over cat 5/6

[djw1981]

At a local church I've been asked to help set up a video link from the main church to the creche. Handily, at the back of the church is an unused balcony, which is also their amp land, so we have audio signal being sent already to the ideal site for the camera. They want the output to be plugged into a 30-40" LCD flatscreen (not bought yet) such that turning it on and selecting a specific input will make audio and video come on together - user friendly hopefully. Cable route is not that difficult, easily achieved with a 50-60m run of ethernet cable.

 

The camera and any box of tricks at that end will take power from the amp rack, thus once the main system power is on, the system will be powered.

 

It is about 20m from the balcony to the main stage area, and they require that we can manually adjust the camera on installation for focus and zoom etc - some iris control may also be handy as there are 4 source 4's and 4 fresnels pointing onto the stage area which can look quite bright. PTZ not required in day to day usage.

 

In an ideal world, I;d love a box, into which I plug audio and video, then a cat 5/6 cable and another box at the other end. I've seen similar for VGA, but not for other video formats.

 

So ideally I want a stand alone, set up and leave system. We have a budget for up to £1k including flatscreen (I;m guessing that is gonna be £3-400). Do I look at CCTV cameras? I;d like to avoid camcorders due to OSD and non secured conenctions.

 

Any thoughts?

[david.elsbury]

Find a nice camera you like, with HDMI output, and get a HDBase-T sender/receiver pair (HDBase-T lite would be more than adequate). No specific brands to recommend sorry. HDBase-T is, for all intents and purposes, a long HDMI cable. You may need to get a HDMI audio embedder if the camera doesnt have audio ins. Could look at a security camera with a Blackmagic analog to HDMI or an SDI to HDMI - these will embed the audio.

 

David

[AHYoung]

Vga is a video format.. if you are happy with the vga over cat 5 solution, just use that... vga has 3 video lines so you can use all three for component, 2 for yc or one for composite with rgbhv {ie 5 bncs} to vga adaptors It will work absolutely fine and its something ive done many times.

My advice is dont use any products that need to do scaling as part of the conversion, and most importantly make sure the flatscreen actually has an analogue video in as these are getting less common. a decent quality composite video CCTV camera should do the job, theres been any number of threads here about camera relays which pretty much cover it... Its also not really that long a cable run for either composite video or line level audio, so maybee you are overthinking this and just need to run cable from a to b without any faffing about.

 

Also Dave your Blackmagic analogue to hdmi convertor doesnt actually exist which will limit its usefullness somewhat.

[sleah]

Sounds like a sledge hammer to crack a wallnut... <img src='http://www.blue-room.org.uk/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/laugh.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':** laughs out loud **:' />

 

Also, I don't think many cameras have vga out so a vga>cat5 won't be much use :blink:

 

Erm.. AV over CAT5 :D Assuming composite is suitable of course.

[top-cat]

Actually you can get very good quality full colour CCTV cameras which go directly onto Ethernet so you don't even need a converter... just Cat5/6 straight into the camera. Then a small control unit which will feature a VGA monitor out, and you're done. We are having 40 such things installed and the sales guy was showing me last week... pretty cool stuff.

[djw1981]

What is the latency of that central unit though, and I assume that still means a separate audio line being run?

[top-cat]

What is the latency of that central unit though, and I assume that still means a separate audio line being run?

 

Latency - dunno. does it matter, if it's in the creche, if they're a little behind the main gig?

 

No audio at all, I'm afraid. But VGA o/ Cat5 wouldn't carry audio either...

[timsabre]

Wouldn't use IP/ethernet cameras for this, they do have a delay, or anything with hdmi which can be tricky to extend over a distance. As AHYoung says a simple analogue composite video cctv camera would work best. You can get simple balun adapters to send composite video and audio down a single cat5.

[J Pearce]

Forget anything complex, get a composite video plus audio balun, stick a colour CCTV camera up and go straight into the analogue in of a flatscreen tv. Simple and easy. Stick a vga and hdmi lead in the tv while you're at it, it can double up for second room bits then.

I've done this in a few places and not had an issue, except where an odd contractor had wired the network outlets with only two pairs to save on cable...

[AHYoung]

Composite video and audio will run fine using a vga& audio over cat 5 solution, obviousy you need a rgbhv convertor cable to access it but thats hardly rocket science. Theres no real latency as we are talking about a completely analogue system ... cctv over cat 5, - now you mean ip based video and thats a completely different thing to implement with issues all of its own, but as long as latency doesnt matter, its a solution but obviously relies on a device to decode it at the other end which could be a pc, but its another point of failure and complication so I stand by the fact that if you want a camera plus injected audio into a single monitor within 100m,good old composite video and audio over cable is the way to go.

[djw1981]

sorry should have been clearer - I was meaning video vs audio latency - to avoid lip sync issues on tv - I;m aware that there is camera processing, and screen processing so want to minimise any delays from processing in between.

[top-cat]

I stand by the fact that if you want a camera plus injected audio into a single monitor within 100m,good old composite video and audio over cable is the way to go.

 

 

I do agree, I was just putting out there that such things do exist. The IP cameras we are having installed have power, control and video all going down the same cable, so it's a very neat solution.

[dosxuk]

Composite video and audio will run fine using a vga& audio over cat 5 solution, obviousy you need a rgbhv convertor cable to access it but thats hardly rocket science. Theres no real latency as we are talking about a completely analogue system ... cctv over cat 5, - now you mean ip based video and thats a completely different thing to implement with issues all of its own

 

There's plenty of composite video over cat5 solutions targeted at the CCTV market which don't have anything to do with IP.

 

Likewise, you don't need a VGA+audio balun + RGBHV converters to send composite video. There are literally thousands of products available which will take the composite video and l/r audio on three phono connectors to send it down on cat5.

[AHYoung]

to tie up a fairly complex non argument. The Op asked about using video on a vga over cat Like system, - you can. Top cat mentioned camereas with a rj45 output - thats a ip cctv camera, sends video over a network , different thing altogether. There are thousands off passive baluns for running video and audio over cat 5 cable , but not ip, and they work, but for 50m cable where the cable needs specifically run, theres little point in doing anything other than running composite video ove rg59 cable with the audio running seperately over fst or similar, There seems to be an obsession on the forum about converting one thing to another and back again, but then thats the nature of a technology forum. in reality get a decent camera and plug it into a display with a suitable input - theres may be a slight video delay, but it will be minimal and im assuming that its going to be a wide shot thats used so its unlikely that lipsync will be an issue...if it is a real problem.