I wanted to be able to control my Myth box (Backend only) from my living room. I cut my Happauge IR cable in half and just for giggles and because I had 281 ft of Cat5e lying around I spliced it in the middle.
I was so suprised when it worked.
It continues to work. Now I have been thinking of my USB to CAT5 extender.It works up to 100
Meters. If USB only uses 4 of the wires in CAT5 cable and the IR
sensor uses 3.wires. I should be able to extend my DVD player and IR
sensor to anywhere in the house.
Why would I need a frontend?
I do this for my frontend. Cable wise, my "interface box" is about 15m away from my frontend computer.
Physically, it's the shell from a DVD player. It works quite well.
It contains:
Power supply
USB2 hub
USB -> RS232 converter
20x2 VF Display
USB2 -> IDE converter
Slot loading DVD drive
USB2 -> Multi card reader (SD, MMC, CF, etc)
USB2 socket (For keyboard, camera, external HD, etc)HOWEVER. The USB2 spec says (rightly, due to timing restrictions) that you should not exceed 5m. I have done this previously and have random read issues on the DVD drive. Solution is to use multiple hubs along the run, so no section is > specification. I find that tetrahubs tend to work the best - Relatively expensive, but reliable.
Cheers,
Allan. _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
