A/V over ethernet?

[Michael Butash]

Good question, but hard ask...

I've not looked in a bit, but a few years ago there were some janky-ish
chinese source/destination media converters that took in hdmi and used
ethernet for A/V source in and out at the receiving end device.  Some
poking at the devices showed they just used ethernet and hard-coded ip's to
talk between source and destination units, which if you adapted an
interface of a computer to talk over, one could attach directly to the
source unit and stream from using vlc for said source A/V feed, but hardly
gets you the usb side of things too.

There are kvm hats for rpi's now too, so video in + usb to your pi, and
then you can remote-control what it's attached to like a server, but not
exactly a dumb extension as you'd just remote desktop to the pi and hit
it's local app ui for the kvm, or via web hosted on the pi.

There is also usb-over-ip kernel features that have been around for a
while, but I've never used them.  Years ago Belkin had what looked like a
usb hub with an ethernet port, say you'd throw that in some corner of your
house without a pc, and maybe hook up a usb mic, and it had windoze drivers
that made a remote usb device show as a local usb device to your system
connecting to it.  It was pretty broken with crap drivers circa xp era and
probably the hub device too, but not seen anything like this in a decade
and a half.  I wish actually someone would again with modern linux and
other os support.

There are poe hats for a rpi too, but it's still fairly limited what
devices I see come with poe, and then of course you need poe switching at a
suitable power output most of your older switches can't output over 15/30W
of 48VDC.

I don't think you'll still find a magical one-for-all device out there as
described, but I gave up looking purposefully long ago.

-mb


On Sun, Oct 31, 2021 at 3:12 AM David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss <
plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

> I’m shooting in the dark here wondering how to solve this. Looking for
> ideas.
>
> Think about multi-port USB hubs for laptops with only a few USB ports . . .
>
> A guy I’ve been talking with said he's looking for something like that but
> plugs into the ethernet, not USB, and uses PoE for power.
>
> It’s basically a break-out box that uses wired ethernet to send data to
> some remote spots about 100 M away through a 1GB switch.
>
> His requirements include: audio (mic, headphone), USB video in, USB video
> out, some digital I/Os to turn lights on and off, a couple of spare USB
> ports
>
> The video is streaming 4k, probably H.264; he has the camera and a display
> device, and both work via USB. (There’s a reason he has chosen USB!)
>
> I don’t know if there are simple chips in these sorts of USB “splitters”
> or if they have a CPU like what’s in a Raspberry Pi.
>
> Is this something that an R-Pi can be made to support with some HATs?
>
> In my mind, it should be fairly simple. It’s mostly just acting like a
> router, right?
>
> A separate audio stream on the ethernet could go to a USB port with a
> common “USB Sound Card” where the mic and headphone can be connected.
>
> It’s just “audio over ethernet” and “video over ethernet”, no?
>
> What does that take? Is there hardware that already does it?
>
>
> (Dante has a small A/V board to embed in equipment, but you need one on
> each end of a one-way circuit, meaning 4x per connection, and he needs up
> to 8 of these channels.)
>
> -David Schwartz
>
>
>
>
>
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