KCHT Enthusiasts

[ND23]

Apparently, I'm an idiot.

When the new house was being framed, I was able to go in and run conduit to a variety of locations, for future wiring needs. I ran conduit for a future whole-house audio system, and in the family room, I ran conduit (two, actually!) behind the fireplace wall from the future TV location down to the basement, and another from the basement up to the location of the source components.





But I used 3/4" conduit readily available at Lowe's. I knew very well that I would want to run a long (25'-30') HDMI cable through it. For some reason, I just assumed it would fit.

Yesterday, I received my TV mount and a variety of cabling from Monoprice.com, and I started to fish my new 35' HDMI cable through the "smurf tube." And, of course, it didn't fit. I guess I was thinking HDMI cable ends were more like the size of a USB connector. I even took a utility knife to it, to scrape away some of the plastic housing of the cable end, trying to reduce its diameter. But it was not going to happen.

I did a little research, and found the RapidRun system available at CablesToGo. It's pretty expensive, but it allows you to separate the cable "head" from the "cord" at each end, to better fit through conduit. Factoring in both the cost of the wasted HDMI cable and the RapidRun replacement, this is looking like a >$150 mistake.

I can probably use the 35' HDMI cable for the theater in the basement someday, but I didn't plan on needing that kind of length. I guess I could tape it up and sell it as-is, assuming it still works.

Any other ideas, before I go spend the $$$ on the RapidRun cable?
ND

[chirpie]

I saw this a week ago and my answer's still the same now. Rapid run is expensive but for it and it's type, I really don't know of anything that's considerably cheaper. I ran 1.5" conduit for my room and even that barely got the job done.

Most of the builds I've seen say 2" if you can get away with it.

Honestly, I keep on holding out for the perfection of wireless HD but something tells me we're still quite a few years away from the consumer electronic industry gods extolling that one on us.

[ND23]

Yeah, wireless would be nice.

I did go with the RapidRun, and it did fit in my 3/4" conduit, but not much will fit in there with it.

Everything was fine with it until this week - I have been successfully hooking it up to my TV and my HTPC's HDMI output, as well as my Comcast cable box's HDMI output. This week, I bought a new upconverting DVD player (not going to jump in to Blu-Ray just yet), and it refuses to handshake with the TV when using the RapidRun HDMI cable. But if I run a Monoprice 10-foot cable between this DVD player and the TV, everything is good.

I need to decide soon how I plan to address this. I bought the DVD player and the RapidRun cable from Amazon.com, so I believe I have a 30 day window for returns. Need to do more research on the DVD player to see if there is a firmware update or anything that might help.

[chirpie]