But that became kind of limiting for my preferences. For a while it wasnt really practical, unless you could accept this pretty low bandwidth stream.
But now fiber-optic display cables are readily available. My first purchase was a 100ft/30m 32Gbps DisplayPort cable, for $55! To be honest, I couldnt believe it worked; I assumed it was a scam.
It's indeed excessively long... too long! I can make it out my room & up to the roof & compute from there with less than half the cable. It's way harder to unroll & reroll than any cable I've ever had before, but also way longer. I have since gone back and bought shorter cables.
Thankfully active extension cables are pretty good & tend to just work. Newer models have an inline 1-port usb-hub every 25ft/7.5 (used to be every 5m), and then a wall-wart at the end to power the hubs (to honest that feels like it should be unnecessary; a dc-dc booster mid-span & bus power should be fine, albeit leaving nearly no power available at the end).
Also beware, there's a 7 tier limit from root-hub to device, so 5 hubs maximum * 7.5m, if you only plug in a single thing (a wireless keyboard/mouse dongle).
If you’re only looking to do low-bandwidth (keyboard, mouse, audio, maybe a webcam or game controller) at the display, you can get inexpensive USB-over-CAT5 adapters. The one I have terminates into a 4-port powered hub, and latency is low enough I can’t detect it in normal use.
Latency would be super interesting to test for both. I tend to think 4-5 usb hubs are still under 1ms latency. I'd expect the DisplayPort digital->optical->digital path takes less than 1ms too. But I'm guessing, for sure.
But that became kind of limiting for my preferences. For a while it wasnt really practical, unless you could accept this pretty low bandwidth stream.
But now fiber-optic display cables are readily available. My first purchase was a 100ft/30m 32Gbps DisplayPort cable, for $55! To be honest, I couldnt believe it worked; I assumed it was a scam.
It's indeed excessively long... too long! I can make it out my room & up to the roof & compute from there with less than half the cable. It's way harder to unroll & reroll than any cable I've ever had before, but also way longer. I have since gone back and bought shorter cables.
Thankfully active extension cables are pretty good & tend to just work. Newer models have an inline 1-port usb-hub every 25ft/7.5 (used to be every 5m), and then a wall-wart at the end to power the hubs (to honest that feels like it should be unnecessary; a dc-dc booster mid-span & bus power should be fine, albeit leaving nearly no power available at the end).
Also beware, there's a 7 tier limit from root-hub to device, so 5 hubs maximum * 7.5m, if you only plug in a single thing (a wireless keyboard/mouse dongle).