RCA to CAT5 Converter Box – Extend Your Consoles

Ever wish you could have your video game consoles further away from your TV? For some older consoles this maybe be especially useful if you don’t have wireless controllers or extension cables availible.

At this point you may be wondering why you wouldn’t just buy long RCA cables. Well, you could, but it would be significantly more expensive and also more diffidult to route all three cables through walls.

ElephantStaircase has put together a relatively simple way to build an inexpensive converter box to change normal RCA/Composite video cables into a standard CAT5 networking cable.

You will need two have one of these boxes on each end (one by the TV and one by your console) and then a single CAT5 cable connecting the two.

I’m not sure if this same concept will work for other video cables like S-Video or Component, but it may be worth looking into.

Also, I’m not thinking that you could use this technique with a LAN switch or wireless network as those use TCP/IP protocol, which I’m almost sure is completely different from what this project is accomplishing. While the CAT5 cable may be the same, the data transfer is different.