Among the myriad connections, cables and equipment that make up a home theater, one remains misunderstood: HDMI. At times it gets a bad rap for being too expensive. Other times it’s praised for its ease of use and ability to de-clutter the back of your equipment rack. Even though in most cases HDMI works perfectly, there are some shortcomings to this wünderkind cable.
High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) was launched in 2002 as a partnership between Sony, Panasonic, Hitachi, Toshiba, Philips, Thomson and Silicon Image. Designed to be the one cable to rule them all, HDMI has been hampered by confusion around its multiple versions and the wide range of prices for cables.
While it has enjoyed a tremendous adoption rate among manufacturers, there remain questions in consumers’ minds. I talked to Steve Venuti, President of HDMI Licensing, LLC, the group in charge of the HDMI spec, about the issues facing HDMI and how his group is working to resolve them.
Versions
Much like Blu-ray is suffering from the multiple profiles associated with it, HDMI has created consumer confusion with its many versions and sub-versions, the latest being HDMI 1.3c. “From a consumer standpoint, the versions are meaningless,” Venuti says. “We want people to look for features. If you want deep color, look for a component that supports deep color, not for a version number.”
To combat this, the HDMI Licensing Group is working with manufacturers to reduce the emphasis on versions and highlight features instead. The confusion really expanded with version 1.3, when a lot of different features were added. The problem was, 1.3 could differ from manufacturer to manufacturer. If equipment supported just one of the items from the 1.3 spec, such as deep color, they could claim HDMI 1.3. Seeing this, the licensing and trademark guideline was changed last year, and as of Oct. 17, 2008 you can’t claim version support unless you clearly list all the features of the spec that are supported, such as “HDMI (V.1.3 with Deep Color).”
Price
A check of two national retailers’ websites shows cable prices between $40 and $299. At Amazon.com you can find nearly two pages of four and five-star rated cables for less than $10. “Price differences are not untrue in any product category, although it might be more egregious in the world of cables,” Venuti says. “Our main concern is compliance. If a cable meets compliance and sells for $10, while another similar cable sells for $100, we don’t get into that. Certainly consumers could be surprised by the cost of cables at retail, but that’s a market factor that we don’t get involved with.”
The wide price gap leads to the question: is a cable a cable? If you’ve bought equipment with HDMI recently, you were likely encouraged to purchase the latest cable featuring high-density triple-layer shielding and gas-injected dielectric sheath for reduced signal interference and improved signal consistency and strength (that’s an actual product description from an HDMI cable). But are you getting anything more with that than if you drop $10 online?
Since HDMI is an all-digital cable, it’s simply sending 1s and 0s from one place to another. Problems that plague analog cables such as interference and signal loss have no effect on a digital signal, it either gets there or it doesn’t. If a cable works, it should provide the exact same image as any other cable.
That said, HDMI compliance testing doesn’t factor in things like durability or in-wall use. Especially in longer runs, quality manufacturing is extremely important. Always look for cables marked with the HDMI logo to ensure they have been tested, but when it comes to buying your cable, my suggestion is to save the some money and buy a couple extra Blu-ray discs.
North, you seem to have missed the point. By making the source device need to negotiate resolution/rate with the display device it makes the possibility of flexible signal routing tedious. All devices have to be _carefully_ selected to ensure they can all support the outputted res which is generally negotiated with the first display device attached to the matrix. It is ugly when the idea of a matrix is a one to many route provider.
Distance is absolutely crap and too hit and miss for the average consumer. To get over 5 metres is not bullet proof (even some 5 meter cables are crap). This happened again for me the other day with standard 10m cables (the type one can buy out of the stores). They worked fine on everything upto 1080p/24, but above that (1080p/50 or 60) the signal would glitch about once every five seconds.
Oh, and the whole intense negotiation thing requires stupid sync-up times (e.g. 5 seconds).
The only real solutions to complex (hi-end) home video distro systems in my opinion will be:
A) A custom matrix/extender solution that uses fibre and provides end to end (source device to display device) hook-up - HDCP maintained throughout. It will need to have display emulation to trick all source devices into outputing the format required by the displays.
B) Display devices with two HDMI input ports that both have seperate decoding/negotiation subsystems that keep the HDMI stream live so that switching between ports doesn’t cause the source/display connection to drop sync. It will then need two feeds from the matrix (not one… so it at least doubles the price). Then it needs an advanced automation controller that will flip-flop the matrix outputs in a cyclic fashion so that seamless switching between inputs can occur (i.e. no 5 seconds of black resync).
We used to be able to do this with component video switchers but they have removed that option from us with ICT (image constraint tokens - the thing that force downscaling on the analog outputs).
Basically, like I said, HDMI is a f’ing nightmare unless you want to plug your bluray player through a 2 or 3 metre cable into your telly.
Oh, and bluray players… why does it take 20 seconds for them to eject a disc? What possible reason do they need? Just dump the program and eject the tray… the user obviously wants nothing more from the disc…
All of this stuff is pathetically under engineered and lacking well thought out direction. Forget all the Java add on Bull Sh*t. Just give us players that work as fast as DVD players but with 1080p/24…
“It only provides transport for audio and video. What about closed captioning ? Why was it omitted from the specs ? “
Closed captioning is a feature of a device not the cables.
“1.) The source device must output at a resolution the display device wants.
2.) The copper output is extremely distance dependant. “
1) All ‘source devices’ are capable of outputting a res. any display device can use. So what does it matter? You can’t display 720p on a 480i tv just like you can’t display 1080p on a 720p tv. Its called progression.
2)Yeah, just like ALL cables. Course, you can just go with a cheap certified hdmi type 2 cable from monoprice and be all good without any problems. You don’t need fiber.
“DRM is always a nightmare for users. “
Wouldn’t say always. With hdcp you’ve had a bad experience? I’ve and others have not had one.
To quote Fairings “Nothing like in the old days just 2 wires and cheap price.”
You can buy a high quality hdmi cable for $5 and have 1 wire with a picture and sound quality that blows your socks off verses that 2 wire and the tv that went with it.
It if was any cheaper it would be free. You can give these things away - they’re that cheap.
HDMI is appalling. Copy protection is fair enough but all of sudden we have lost all flexibility with these systems… I put it down to two big mistakes:
1.) The source device must output at a resolution the display device wants.
2.) The copper output is extremely distance dependant.
These issues could have been avoided by:
1.) Having the source device output native format and let the display device sort it out. This would make HDMI matrixing to multiple displays far more workable.
2.) Use a serious fibre optic interface or a coax interface like HD-SDI. Personally I like the idea of fibre as I am sick of consumer grade devices firing ground noise into each other and fibre will by default act as an opto isolator. Sure, fibre is going to add to the device cost and the cables are going to be expensive, but the current generation of HDMI cables worth their weight are expensive anyway (particularly if you want a 20m cable that works at 1080p).
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My friend prompted me to look through your article and that used to be good enough.… 
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i am hving a problem with the hdmi setup going from my cable box to the hdtv,when u switch from the anolog channels to the digital channels there is a popping noise,is this caused by hdmi cables only sending digital audio?