Sending 4K120 and USB both ways over one cable run is the hard part

CarriesG

Member
There is a thread running where someone in Auckland wants two rooms roughly 20m apart, multiple walls between them, joined over CAT6. He wants HDMI 2.1 at 4K120 and USB running in both directions, so the PC can feed the TV in one room while the PS5 feeds the monitor in the other, with KVM peripherals reaching across as well. Today it is PC to monitor over DisplayPort and PS5 to TV over HDMI. He already knows the HDBaseT boxes that handle 4K120 and USB are transmitter to receiver only, and he is asking whether one product covers the whole thing.

Short answer as far as I can see: no, and hunting for one is how people end up with a drawer of returned boxes. HDBaseT is a one-way pipe by design. USB and control travel back upstream, video does not. If you need picture going both ways you need two links, which in practice means two cable runs, two pairs of boxes and a switch at each end to pick the source.

The other thing I would push back on is the single cable. One run for 4K120 at that distance is asking a lot, and if the walls are already open, pulling a second one now costs almost nothing next to fishing it through later. I would also price a fibre HDMI cable against the extender pair before committing, because for a straight point to point run it is often cheaper with fewer things to fail. The catch there is that it carries no USB, so the KVM half still needs its own extender.

Has anyone here actually built a working bidirectional link between rooms without it turning into a rack of boxes? I have not seen one yet.
 
Two runs. Always two runs. Every time I have tried to be clever with one cable I have ended up pulling a second one anyway, normally right after the plaster went back on.
 

JoeZhang

Member
The USB side is what kills these builds. Video over distance is a solved problem, USB at 20m with a hub full of peripherals is where it turns flaky.
 

joe603

New member
What is the real use case for KVM into a living room TV though? If it is desktop work on a 65 inch I would rethink the whole plan before buying any extenders.
 
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