Can I plug my Mac Mini into two screens on the same desk or even different floors?
Can I plug my Mac Mini into two screens on the same desk or even different floors?
I have a Mac Mini and I want to use it for the TV on our downstairs room. I also need to send the picture to my office. Can this be done with an Ethernet connection, or how do I do it? Does this mean I can send video plus my USB keyboard and mouse over the wire? Thanks from Scandinavia!
It depends on what you mean by "ethernet." There are two types of pretty common HDMI extenders. The first one uses the same physical cable as ethernet, but sends data in a different way. It doesn't match your existing HDMI cables and is basically just a wire from point A to point B. The second type tries to run HDMI over IP. The ones I have seen that actually work are costing $500 or more. In either case, I think the sellers might be lying when they promise things like 4K at 60Hz. These signals already cause problems with longer HDMI cables, and you need HDMI 2.1 ports to use them. The bandwidth is huge because it's uncompressed. Things like 4K at 60Hz take up a lot of space on the cable (about 18Gbps). I'm not sure what kind of "ethernet" cable they think they can pass that much data through, since even cat6a only goes 10Gbits. I suspect they are compressing the data, which would make image quality drop and add small delays. Maybe there is a magic box involved, but you should read all the fine print. The thing you see more often for long HDMI cables is fiber. I never looked into how these work, but it would require running a new type of cable.
He probably just wants to be in the same room instead of on the other side over the phone.