How do I capture video from another room?

[ajv]

I don't think this is specific to Windows, but I see no non-OS-specific support board. Sorry if this is the wrong place.

I have some game consoles in room A. My workstation is in room B. I want to capture the HDMI signal from the consoles and stream it.

It feels like this should be possible with an HDMI-to-ethernet converter. There is a network jack near the consoles, and my workstation is connected to another. Presumably an appropriate capture device could take the HDMI signal and send it to my workstation's IP address, where OSB (or something else) could listen for it and treat it as input for streaming.

My initial googling found several HDMI extenders that work over ethernet. Trouble is, all of them either say not to use them over your regular LAN (and dedicated cabling isn't an option for me), or they assume conversion happens on both ends. It seems silly (and expensive) to convert the IP data back to HDMI only to re-capture it, instead of the workstation listening for it directly.

Is there a known Right Way to do this?

 

[R1CH]

Unfortunately you can't simply take the HDMI signal and encode it into Ethernet. HDMI can run at up to 18gbps, far more than your typical 1gbps Ethernet network and cabling system can handle. That's why these extenders (HDBaseT) don't work over an existing IP network, the signal is no longer Ethernet compatible.

There are NDI converters that take HDMI and convert it into NDI which runs over IP, which can then be imported directly into OBS via the NDI plugin, but they are quite expensive.

 

[ajv]

Thanks. Not the answer I wanted, but it's what I needed to know.

I discovered the NDI option after posting, but yeah, it's almost as expensive as just getting an extra laptop to park next to the TV. Meh.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

*If* you are in a position to run your own cables, running a high quality HDMI cable from room 1 to room 2 and then into a capture card connected to streaming PC might work. (what I'd do in my house, where I ran my own Ethernet cable, etc... but not everyone is in such a situation).
Depending on scenario and situation, if in-wall cable routing isn't an option, is draping a cable during a stream an option? [no little kids that would trip over cable, or roommates/significant other that would frown upon such a thing..etc .. not ideal, but until I got around to my CAT6E cable runs, I had a 75ft Ethernet cable I'd run from the router upstairs to a device downstairs on the rare occasion when needed]... just thinking outside the box

 

[Reaby]

Well, if you don't need nothing near 0-latency and you're not afraid to do some extra hours of work and aquire a cheap hdmi capture card and a raspberry pi 3... Basically get a video for linux compatible HDMI capture card and raspberry 3 or raspberry 4.... then use this tutorial (https://siytek.com/raspberry-pi-rtsp-to-home-assistant/#Install_v4l2rtspserver) to make the raspberry a RTSPserver.... skip the home assistant tutorial after server setup and just add a mediasource or vlc source at OBS. I tried it over raspberry 3 native wlan and works nicely. Though it's not real time it has some few seconds delay.

Good thing is you can get this things quite low price. It's a cheap solution, but you get it working some what easily and no need other cords than hdmi and power for the raspberry, for little better solution you could attach ethernet cable... but yeah... it's do-it-yourself and not very pro solution, but i've setup one of those myself so it's proven to work. most simpple solution maybe just get a long hdmi cable or hdmi-over-ethernet or hdmi-over-sdi adapters as suggested here before... those costs alot more than raspbi+hdmi input, but are more robust as well.