HDMI Over...The HUMAN BODY?!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,815 words · ~9 min read
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okay so we've all been there you need to run a video signal like really far away
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but you don't have a long enough cord well easy right just
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buy a longer HDMI cable wrong
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if you need to go more than about 40 45 feet you're gonna have to get an
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expensive active cable or you're gonna have to get a booster from someone like
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sewell direct that'll give you another 175 feet but what if
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you lived in a world where your shed was like two miles away first of all good on
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you great property you got yourself there second of all we gotta get HDMI
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out there introducing
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this jank cheap wire that we found in a bin
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we're going to use this also the hd link hl24
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to send HDMI well it's not two miles but
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however long this wire we found is speaking of wires none
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Corsair's line of unplug and play wireless peripherals lets you game with
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no compromises and no wires check them out now at the link in the video
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description
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so let's gather up everything we're going to need for our demo first my
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lovely assistant james thank you james james is equipped with
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aside from a stunning intellect you really wouldn't know looking at him he's
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got the hdlink hl24 sender so this is
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the base unit he's got our video source
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a wet lg gram because it's raining today
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he's got a battery pack to power our hd
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link sender outdoors because we're doing this outside for some idiotic reason and
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a big spool of wire for my end i'm gonna
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need the extender receiver unit
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another battery pack mine bigger than his and a monitor because i have to
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power a monitor i need to find some cover here
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ah needs to be bigger all right
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i think there's really only two words to describe what i've done here
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stable and genius
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there we go let's go to the other end only
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one small problem our wire doesn't go to the shelter
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so these just look like kind of standard almost like a speaker connection so you
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can either just go through the side like this or you can use a banana plug
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so you can tell it's already engaged because of this blinking green light
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that means it's sending data okay there's another light on the other side
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that's going to blink when it's receiving enough data okay
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all right trudging through the wilderness
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no sign of civilization
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anywhere but i gotta watch my tv
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and thank god i got this wire oh man that uh
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that 4x4 really is gonna smoke me if it falls
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guys don't bump that
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why does he run like that okay
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does it go on the black one or the red one black
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main screen turn on
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james i've got a signal
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yes yes with this technology the sand people could watch television
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now you can probably even tell through a
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video of a screen of a youtube video
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that we have got some serious compression issues here
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marquez's uh crispiness is not up to its
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usual level of crisp so here it is working we've got video
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and audio this is at 1080p 60 hertz which is pretty darn impressive
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over a single wire here but it should be noted that i wouldn't recommend a
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solution like this for gaming for example it's fine for
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watching tv but there are going to be some compression artifacts if you look
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up close there's some color depth loss and most importantly there is some added
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latency so the compression that happens in the box on that end and then the
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decompression that happens on this end does add a significant delay to the
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video signal okay now you're probably thinking to yourself
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sureliness and also james pretty impressive demo but this seems
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like fairly ideal wire as far as wire goes
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well first of all no not really because something insulated would be a little
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bit easier to work with we had some issues with this making contact with the
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wet ground causing us to have some signal drop off
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and second of all to prove that you could really use not
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just any wire but any conductive conductor we are taking it to the next
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level this is water regular
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tap water and we are going to send an HDMI signal
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through it so to conduct
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this phase of our experiment james took the included banana plugs and then
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electrical taped them to some cable that we had lying around and all we've got to
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do is plug this into here
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run my end into the ordinary tap water
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no it's working
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so now that we've got the laptop and the monitor a little bit closer together
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this gives us a better look at the delay between the source and the output
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it's not that bad but like we said before it's not
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something that you'd be able to game on but of course if we can get a video
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signal running through regular tap water
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over a span of about six inches
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then with salt water which is about a million times as conductive we should be
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able to go much further shouldn't we all right james
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let's do this so we've got here
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two water cooling reservoirs
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and a ten foot tube you might be thinking to yourself this is probably
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some kind of like weird drinking game with like the butt
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but it isn't
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not yet not on camera no we won't need a funnel no no we got this here line of spill
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tips check this out check this out how much water is on the counter put that on
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the floor is that one vented
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i don't think it's vented no it doesn't need to be it's fine you gotta um
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you gotta spread it out a little more though i think this video already has enough
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assault in it wait what are we talking about okay okay
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is that enough salt jesus
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no no i'm just regular Linus you're thinking of my cousin
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he lives in mexico
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are we getting the salt down there wow you can really see the salt moving
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there it's a salt migration
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it's like basically opaque over here this hasn't dissolved at all
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look at that
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oh lordy saturated the entire volume
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so we want to see 10 feet
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of HDMI through water oh crap keep that away from the laptop
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that will kill it for sure oh mine's leaking now too
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this million times more conductivity is not uh
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giving us million times better results i was thinking we could do HDMI over the
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ocean oh we're close we're close
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we just need more salt
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sticking them further in did not seem to
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actually generate better results
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okay should we shorten it just a little bit more
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wait wait oh
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it's so close
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still no clean signal
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come on i thought for sure a million
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times more conductivity okay here's an idea
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oh crap that wasn't the idea
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what if we just go right into the tube maybe something about the reservoir
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that's a lot of blinking there we go
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hey we got it 1080p
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60 hertz five feet through a tube now for our last trick
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we're going to take it to another level
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if it can pass through 100 water plus some salt then it should be able to
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pass through 60 water
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laser james
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oh come on no just put on your hands no they're
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salty enough no
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i had a cut it's like split now
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let's try let's try this one on like the ring
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will that work
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there it is hey not bad there it is there it is HDMI through humans
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yeah let's get that thumbs up in there yeah
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what i'll bow i'll bow
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i'll shake hands no oh it's weird
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okay so that was a lot of fun but if you've stayed for this long you probably
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deserve some kind of explanation as to
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legitimately why this exists honestly
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it seems pretty niche to us too for most
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long distance HDMI applications you would probably use HDMI over Ethernet
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since Ethernet is available in all kinds of different
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configurations for indoor or outdoor use it has multiple conductors and it also
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has quite a significant range but in an application like a digital
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signage billboard out in the middle of absolute nowhere literally two miles
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away from the source
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this could make sense another potential pitch is to use them as an emergency
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backup in the event that a cable gets severed and you like
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absolutely have to connect the two ends together
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the hl24 could be used for that as well
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so nice within a niche but definitely
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