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Backstory: In our venue, we have a Front-of-House booth, but we have moved our tech right outside of the booth because it is easier for our team to track the speakers during their presentation.

So far, we have been using laptops, however I would like to get a PC and place it in the booth, while still keeping our tech team outside the booth. I imagine that would be done by keeping the "body" of the computer in the booth (for noise considerations), while the periphery is outside – keyboard, mouse, monitor.

Question: What is an effective way I can do this setup? The distance between the booth and current periphery is less than 5 meters. I can run the monitor over longer DisplayPort cables, however for the keyboard and mouse, should I use an USB hub?

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The max length for a usb 2.0 span is 5m. so, yes, using a hub with a 5m cable would be a good solution.

If you need more reach there are longer cables cable that have an active repeater (effectively a hard-wired single port hub) mid-span.

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For that distance, direct connection of USB cables might work - it's on the borderline of USB 2.0, and (strangely) beyond the specification of USB 1.1.

A powered USB hub and a good quality USB cable would solve that problem. And the lengths of the USB cables from the hub to the keyboard and mouse wouldn't be a problem.

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  • A couple of things to note with USB, expanding on some points in this answer: (i) the 5m per segment cutoff is hard, regardless of cable quality: It's a signal-timing issue; (ii) a 5m cable never connects 2 points 5m apart tidily; you always need to go round bends; (iii) hubs and powered extensions work well for many devices, such as keyboards and mice, but for anything requiring more power (webcams) a powered hub really will be needed at the far end from the PC.
    – Chris H
    Commented Aug 5 at 8:40
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You could have a look at a CAT5e KVM extender. These transport HDMI video and USB over a single run of twisted pair cable (CAT5e UTP works fine).

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  • I've used similar devices in the past, up to 100m (so +1). But the ones I've used have always been either USB or video, each of which uses a full CAT5. These may end up cheaper and easier to troubleshoot than combined devices, which weren't available when I used them
    – Chris H
    Commented Aug 5 at 8:42

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