Component over Cat5e


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Well I purchase some cat5e for my new project which requires about 20-25 feet of component cable. Where I live I can only obtain like 10' to 15' and I have 2 RCA video selectors collecting dust and I am in a jam on money too, so I can't just order a $25 cable + shipping + $100 component video selector.

With that said I first cut a few feet of cat5e and twisted 1 pair together with the outer and inner wire of an RCA cable I cut and then hooked up my ps2 through normal video to make sure it worked and sure enough the video came through just as clear with or without it. I also had to connect a coupler on it to join the new cat5e video adapter mod.

Unfortunetly I do not have enough time tonight to put together an entire component cable, but I did go ahead and hook up my component cable through one of my RCA video selectors and ignored the audio ports and just plugged in the two additional video plugs into the audio ports to see if it would do right. And sure enough it did! But the weird part is that my colors now appear to look BETTER, like it is more saturated but not bleeding. I am very perplexed by this, if anything I expected it to look worse but so far this is just a game I tested it with I really need to put a movie in there. Also I am using a good quality video selector made by philips.

Any explaination way my colors appear more colorful or saturated plz let me know o0.

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Your typical video signal is only 1v p-p. It can transmit easily over cat-5. Cat5 is going to offer less resistance than your standard twited pair, so that may be the reasoning behind the better signal.

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well I'm actually not sure if that is a good thing or not, it might be shifting the color towards red.... possibly. Oh well it is not to big of a deal because I can make component to Cat5 adapters for my 3 devices and then plug them in manually into a cat5 coupler that transfers it through a normal cat5 then I will use another cat5 to component adapter to bring it back out to my projector. Then at least it will be as simple as unplugging one cat5 cable and plugging in another. They should really just transfer normal tv video over cat5 anyways the cable is so cheap and people won't be askin where does this thing plug in. However component takes 6 of the 8 wires in cat5 so you would need 4 more wires for the two audio cables. Each composite/component end requires two wires(one that attaches to the metal housing and the other attaches to the middle) It is very important you wire both of them, I originally ignored the metal housing wire or what I think or thought was the sheilding and it does not like it -.- , atleast audio does not, do not know about video.

The color change isn't related to the cat5, I was only going through real component cables and a video selector meant for RCA composite cables when I saw the color change. The color change I know is because of the video selector but if RCA video selectors are really built differently? I figured the only real difference was that the component selector added two more composite/component like jacks for the two additonal video plugs.

The cat5 cable I made only adapted the normal yellow Video from the RCA composite cable and it did not have any color change.

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Does Cat5 cable have enough shielding???

I thought twisted pair cables work the way they do because they have inverse signals going through the pair to cancel out outside noise. The cable itself is not shielded that well.

And with all three component signal squeezed together don't they bug each other?

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you can go 50 feet with cat5 without it adversely effecting sound and or video. Anything further then yea you'd probably have to use some type of cat5 with sheilding if they make such a thing.

hmm actually they do make shielded cat5 with shielded modular ends.

Also I believe aslong as you keep 1 pair clean in the cat5 it reduces interference that would otherwise occur.

Edited by Deciever
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