Using Cat5e on consoles to output RGB into a monitor

[patastinky]

So I had a crazy idea about hard wiring a cat6 female jack to my monitor (PVM-1910Q). Then doing the same on my SNES. The idea is to get RGB over to the monitor without having to buy any kind of SCART, BNC, other cables. obviously the caps and resistors would be hardwired inside the SNES, so that one could attached any Cat6 cable.

Do you think i would have a loss in quality, even thought the female ends would be hardwired? If the concept works it'd like to do this to some other consoles as well.

[Unseen]

Do you think i would have a loss in quality, even thought the female ends would be hardwired? If the concept works it'd like to do this to some other consoles as well.

Well... A very definitive "maybe". ;) Technically, Cat6 is designed to carry four differential signals and with RGB you have four single-ended signals (assuming no audio). You could wire everything so each pair in the Cat6 cable carries one of the color signals on one of the wires of the pair and ground on the other and you will get a picture out of that.

However, the pairs in a Cat6 cable are not individually shielded, so you will likely get some crosstalk between the color channels. How good or bad this actually looks in practice is hard to say without actually trying it. I'm using even worse cable (LIYCY multi-conductor data cable) for short runs of about 1m or less and I don't notice any major image quality problems with it. I would not recommend using Cat6 for a combined audio+video cable though, you will almost certainly add noise from the video lines to the audio.

Modding various consoles to use the same AV connector is a rather useful thing though - I'm very slowly working through my own collection using DB9 connectors and I certainly do not miss the days of searching for the specific video cable when I connect a console.