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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

> you can't extend that in any practical way beyond about 15 feet

For passive cables, that makes sense. But with repeaters, wouldn't you be able to go further? Maybe cable repeaters like that are newer than I imagine.

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I bought an expensive 10m (30ft) active HDMI cable for connecting my PC to my TV. It said it was UltraHD rated, but could never get it to work reliably beyond 1080p.

You need fiber for that -- I have a pair of them (100' to my desk, 30' to my TV), and they've been rock-solid for 4 years.

So the issue was more that dual-link DVI was very rare, and getting hardware to encode/transmute it reliably and at high bit-depth was almost impossible.

By about 2014 hardware encoders were good enough to send decent quality video over gigabit.

Somehow those didn't show up on my searches, though it was a few years ago.

Thanks though, will keep it in mind. These days Steam Link is decent enough for what I wanted, but ya never know.

> I bought an expensive 10m (30ft) active HDMI cable

I think what I was referring to are repeaters you put between cables, that amplifies the signal. You connect that device between two HDMI cables (say 5m) + connect it to power for it to actually extend the distance the signal can travel.

I'm not sure what an active HDMI cable would be, maybe circuitry inside the cable that draws power from the HDMI port?

> maybe circuitry inside the cable that draws power from the HDMI port

Pretty much:

https://www.cablematters.com/Blog/HDMI/how-do-active-hdmi-ca...

Perhaps they're better now but, yeah, for me it didn't work out as intended.

I've not had any issues getting full bandwidth (4k60hz) from my active HDMI cable.

Also I believe there are displayport cables that do the data transfer over optical fiber for long runs as well.

Sounds like hocus pocus to me (like gold plated connectors), maybe you get like half a meter of extended distance or something with those? If I had to I'd go the repeater way (or as others mentioned: fiber, but sounds expensive and not maintenance free)

I think "active" HDMI is similar to the expensive USB3 cables, which are basically fibre optic cables in disguise

https://www.chargerlab.com/the-way-to-metaverse%EF%BC%9Ftear...

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