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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

I really love the idea of having all the PCs in some place far away from where I, the human am sitting, but I don’t know how to do that. HDMI and USB cables can’t work over more than a few tens of feet can they? Or maybe these are special shielded cables, or sent down shielded cat6 cabling? Would love to have even more details on how to do this.

Also, since saying goodbye to my dad in hospital last year, whenever I hear about people enjoying time with their own fathers I feel really happy. I would have loved to build a house with my dad!

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You can get ultra-long HDMI and USB extenders that use fiber optic cables.

Monoprice.com in particular sells these under their "slimrun" line -- that's what I used in the house.

They are often technically not spec-compliant but work just fine in practice.

> ultra-long HDMI and USB extenders

No extra latency from these?

HDMI over fiber is readily available. USB is more annoying depending on the speeds you desire, but again USB over optical exists.

And then of course once it's over fiber, nearly any length desired is easily achieved

USB 4/Thunderbolt explicitly supports fiberoptics-based USB-C cables and can carry 4K video, regular USB, and more.

do you know of any that actually exist? All I can find are active cables that go up to 15 feet which is a lot better than the 3ft of copper but still a far cry short of running to another room easily

I don't have any personal experience with them, but Amazon and Google are full of options going up to 30m.

I don't see why they shouldn't work; all the translation logic is in the active circuitry at each end, and the low-level protocol and USB-C spec was designed with this use case in mind, so nothing expects a continuous copper connection between both ends. Obviously power delivery doesn't work over that type of cable.

I've used Corning's Thunderbolt 3 fibre cable in the 25m length (~80'). It's eye-wateringly expensive, and it works perfectly.

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