When I first got my Xbox One, on launch day, I set it up in my office which just had a giant tv sitting on a stand with all of my various consoles in it. The kinect cable easily reached to the top of the tv and everything was fine… and then we found out we were having a baby.

Having the baby meant that my office now had to turn into a room for said baby, which also meant that my video game consoles had to move.

I ended up selling the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3, along with the surround sound system and the tv and stand, so all that was left was the Xbox One, which I moved into the living room. The problem with being in the living room is that our tv is mounted above the fireplace on a free standing wall so when we set it up we ran all of the cables through the ceiling/walls into a closet which is where the cable box is, and where the Xbox One would have to go. The pro to the whole setup for me, not so much my wife, was that I could now run the tv through the Xbox and easily jump back and forth between tv and gaming; the con was that the kinect cable would no longer reach through the wall to the closet.

Unfortunately Microsoft does not offer any sort of supported Kinect 2.0 extension cable that reaches far enough for most media closet uses, so people have had to get creative.

I had been following a couple various forum posts about guys with the same problems trying to figure out a solution and last week I bit the bullet and tried one of them, and it works. So to keep you from having to weed through the bullshit of those forum posts, here’s exactly what you need.

What You Need to Extend the Xbox One Kinect 2.0 Cable

If the cable above isn’t working for you, here are some alternatives that might also work.

That’s it, that’s all you need to extend the kinect 2.0 cable… well, of course you still need the cable that comes already attached to the kinect and you’ll need an outlet near the kinect for power, and a free USB port on the back of the Xbox One system itself.

Basically a USB 3.0 cable can’t give the Kinect enough power that it needs in order to function, so the Kinect Adapter for Windows allows you to get that power from a wall outlet instead, and then the Tripp Lite cable allows you to extend the data connection back to your Xbox One.

WARNING: If you plan to feed the Tipp Lite cable through the wall, be aware that about half way through the cable there is a small module in-line in the cable. It adds about an inch of girth to the cable itself at that point. So if you’re fishing through conduit or small holes or anything, just be aware that you may run into some issues. This is one thing the forums I was reading did not mention, so I wanted to be sure to give everyone a heads up.

But the setup itself seems to work just fine. Voice commands and the camera itself seem to work well, but I have not tried the IR blaster at all since I’m already using IR blaster eyes in the closet to allow the xbox to change the cable box if I need to. I had to setup the system so if my wife uses it, the Xbox turns on and goes right to TV and she can just use the normal remote to do the tv functions instead of having to mess with the xbox interface so we hardly use the actual OneGuide for tv show stuff.

After figuring out how to get my kinect to work, the next step was figuring out which external hard drive would work best with the Xbox One since I decided to go all digital in order to game share with a buddy of mine.

If you have any questions about the setup, please feel free to leave comments and I’ll help out as best I can.

Update 9/28/16 – It seems as though some people are having problems getting any extension setup to work correctly/consistently after the latest summer update. Some people have no problems, others it just plain doesn’t work. A couple solutions that people are mentioning is to make sure you’re plugged into the USB port on the back of the console, closest to the HDMI port. Try a hard reset of your Xbox One (hold on the power button for 10 seconds until the console shuts down). And also, don’t try to extend the cable more than 25′. I’m not sure if these will help alleviate any of the issues some people are having, but it’s worth a shot before returning the cables.

If you’re having problems with your setup after the latest updates let us know in the comments. Let us know which model of Xbox, if you are (or are not) in the Preview Program, and what setup you’re using to try to extend your Kinect.