# In-house tv monitor upgrade



## Mr. Manager (Dec 16, 2019)

Hi friends,
Looking for a cost-effective way to upgrade this old system. There is currently a system that takes an analog camera signal, encodes it to channel 3 (analog) and sends it down coax cable to a few different TVs. The TVs have all been upgraded recently enough that they have HDMI inputs. My thought is to try to use an SDI camera and send the signal trying to use the existing cable, and convert from SDI to HDMI at each monitor. I know RG9 is the preferred cable, but have read that it can work over RG59, and since this is only for back of house monitoring, I'm not too worried about making this perfect. Any thoughts? Equipment suggestions for an inexpensive camera, etc?


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## rphilip (Dec 16, 2019)

Is signal latency/delay a problem, will people ever be where they can hear both the TV and direct sound from the room? Is 1-2s ok, what about 10-20?

If 1-2s is ok look into some sort of QAM modulator, Thor, Contemporary Research, PVI, Blonder Tounge, all make products for this. If you go this way you should be able to reuse all existing cables.


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## Mr. Manager (Dec 17, 2019)

rphilip said:


> Is signal latency/delay a problem, will people ever be where they can hear both the TV and direct sound from the room? Is 1-2s ok, what about 10-20?
> 
> If 1-2s is ok look into some sort of QAM modulator, Thor, Contemporary Research, PVI, Blonder Tounge, all make products for this. If you go this way you should be able to reuse all existing cables.


This should work on TV'S from prior to the switchover to digital broadcast, right? Putting the TV on CATV mode should work? This may be the most cost effective solution. This is for video only. We route or audio separately. So I'm not worried about a tiny bit of latency.


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## rphilip (Dec 17, 2019)

Mr. Manager said:


> This should work on TV'S from prior to the switchover to digital broadcast, right? Putting the TV on CATV mode should work? This may be the most cost effective solution. This is for video only. We route or audio separately. So I'm not worried about a tiny bit of latency.


Most modrn TV's support both analog and digital Cable and over the air signals. In the US that's ATSC for over the air and QAM for cable. The wiring, splitters and any amplifiers will still work with an new digital QAM signal.


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## eadler (Dec 17, 2019)

Mr. Manager said:


> Hi friends,
> Looking for a cost-effective way to upgrade this old system. There is currently a system that takes an analog camera signal, encodes it to channel 3 (analog) and sends it down coax cable to a few different TVs. The TVs have all been upgraded recently enough that they have HDMI inputs. My thought is to try to use an SDI camera and send the signal trying to use the existing cable, and convert from SDI to HDMI at each monitor. I know RG9 is the preferred cable, but have read that it can work over RG59, and since this is only for back of house monitoring, I'm not too worried about making this perfect. Any thoughts? Equipment suggestions for an inexpensive camera, etc?


Good RG-59 works fine with SDI and can get you 200m easily (for SD, that is). RG-6 and RG-11 are better. Cable explicitly designed for (HD/3G)SDI signals are even better. Bad RG-59 might get you a few feet. 
RG-9 is 51 ohm characteristic impedance and likely not a good choice for SDI with its 75 ohm impedance. 

You won't be able to split SDI in the same way you split modulated analog TV and expect a usable signal. 


Cable manufacturers often provide spec sheets showing the range of transmission of various SDI signals on their cables. An example from Belden: https://info.belden.com/hubfs/resou...tal-video-distance-chart-product-bulletin.pdf

Note that bend radius matters a lot more with 270Mbps SDI or 1.485 Gbps HD-SDI than with an analog decode of a 6 MHz wide 66 MHz channel.


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## Joshua Schoeneck (Dec 31, 2019)

Mr. Manager said:


> Hi friends,
> Looking for a cost-effective way to upgrade this old system. There is currently a system that takes an analog camera signal, encodes it to channel 3 (analog) and sends it down coax cable to a few different TVs. The TVs have all been upgraded recently enough that they have HDMI inputs. My thought is to try to use an SDI camera and send the signal trying to use the existing cable, and convert from SDI to HDMI at each monitor. I know RG9 is the preferred cable, but have read that it can work over RG59, and since this is only for back of house monitoring, I'm not too worried about making this perfect. Any thoughts? Equipment suggestions for an inexpensive camera, etc?



Are you trying to reuse your RG59 to save money or because it is hard to access? If you can afford all the converter boxes and cameras needed to pull of what you have described, I'd think upgrading cable or parts of it wouldn't be too much of an additional expense.

We are in the process of adding backstage monitors on a budget in our HS theater. We have HDMI TVs and tried a QAM modulator, but the output quality was poor and delay was high. We ended up purchasing several long HDMI cables, several HDMI splitters and had to use a CAT6 HDMI extender in one place, but our investment into these pieces was pretty low compared to buying a converter for each TV. In our case, the distance from one TV to the next was never more than 75' and we had access to run cables without too much difficulty.


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## rwhealey (Jan 3, 2020)

Mr. Manager said:


> Hi friends,
> Looking for a cost-effective way to upgrade this old system. There is currently a system that takes an analog camera signal, encodes it to channel 3 (analog) and sends it down coax cable to a few different TVs. The TVs have all been upgraded recently enough that they have HDMI inputs. My thought is to try to use an SDI camera and send the signal trying to use the existing cable, and convert from SDI to HDMI at each monitor. I know RG9 is the preferred cable, but have read that it can work over RG59, and since this is only for back of house monitoring, I'm not too worried about making this perfect. Any thoughts? Equipment suggestions for an inexpensive camera, etc?



Does this system need to be HDCP compliant (will you ever display presentation content on it)?


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## Mr. Manager (Jan 4, 2020)

rwhealey said:


> Does this system need to be HDCP compliant (will you ever display presentation content on it)?


Nope. Just for backstage/lobby feed. Static shot of stage.


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## ruinexplorer (Jan 6, 2020)

Depending on your budget, HDBaseT might be a good option. Yes, you would need to replace the co-ax with Cat-6 and get HDMI adapters at the TVs. However, you will have next to no latency which could be a bonus later on.


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## jtweigandt (Jan 7, 2020)

I've been pretty happy with my qam converter from PVI I feed to it direct from the camera via hdmi.. Canon 300 buck HD camera. convert to digital cable signal... multiple splitters and cable runs to 7 different backstage locations and 1 for the folks in the box office. 
cheap 90 buck Tv's a couple of years ago. PVI has boxes with multi channel capability too.. Turns out the TV's I got have the wonderful feature of powering down 20 minutes after loss of signal. (Sceptre brand) Makes closing up a lot simpler. We have about a 2 second delay.. so I keep the volume down for sanity in the dressing room, which has good earshot of the stage.


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## rwhealey (Jan 13, 2020)

ruinexplorer said:


> Depending on your budget, HDBaseT might be a good option. Yes, you would need to replace the co-ax with Cat-6 and get HDMI adapters at the TVs. However, you will have next to no latency which could be a bonus later on.



That would work - however, HDBaseT is expensive to DA. Atlona does make a 1x4 HDMI to HDBaseT transmitter (UHD-CAT-4ED) but it's $1,700 and each HDBaseT receiver would be around $300. A major advantage to this approach would be the ability to carry a control signal, but it might not be worth the price.

My thought is to replace the coax with Cat 6A, buy a H.264 camera, and use cheap signage players as H.264 decoders.


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## macsound (Jan 13, 2020)

Can you expand on what H264 cameras and signage players? Something I've always been interested in but the documentation always seemed to be lacking so I never figured it out.


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## rwhealey (Jan 14, 2020)

macsound said:


> Can you expand on what H264 cameras and signage players? Something I've always been interested in but the documentation always seemed to be lacking so I never figured it out.



Here is a guide from BrightSign on using 2x Axis cameras with BrightSign players: https://brightsignbiz.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/Dual IP Camera Streams Tech Note.pdf

I imagine that setting up a single camera would be simpler - I also believe that you could do this with multiple other camera/signage player combos, but this is the first guide I was able to find quickly.


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## jtweigandt (Jan 15, 2020)

If you are considering h264 ip, either wired or wireless, then you can display on a raspberry pi using the motioneyeos project.
Have to do some poking around to find out what the http or rtsp stream for your camera would be, but I have 2 installs for security cameras in 2 veterinary clinics. 1 has 7 cameras and the other has 9. so it certainly is robust enough. Each tv or monitor would need about 40 bucks worth of hardware to display. Each display could be customized to show it’s own choice of camera or cameras that you have in the facility. all over a cat 5 or 6 backbone.. that can be used for regular computer use as well. Motioneye can even be set to work over wifi if the distances involved are not too far. Frame rate of course would be slower, but will still show who is where and when. Can use for an actor “cue light” to show they are in place for entrances etc as well. Sample from motioneye and a 1080p 49 buck amcrest camera That shot is night time very low ambient lighting infrared reinforcement.. very adaptable camera


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