Get Your HDMI Questions Answered

We pride ourselves on helping to educate our customers and support their business.  It is because of this that we are sponsoring a special webinar tomorrow, Tuesday, July 21 at 2 p.m. EDT featuring Jeff Boccaccio, president of DPL Labs and a columnist of CE Pro's "HDMI Corner". This webinar is free and not intended to sell you on HDMI.  It's designed to help you make the best cabling decisions possible. 

To sign up for the webinar please go here.  Do not miss this opportunity to have all of your questions answered.

Into the Future of HDMI

By C. I. Source

In Part 1 we discussed “In the Beginning”: specs, roadblocks, software, hardware, cables, standards, and more.  Now, let’s look Into the Future of HDMI.

Here is what we will need to do to continue to work:

Now that you are completely flummoxed and plotting your escape from the world of “CI” to a job flipping burgers, how do you salvage your career and start planning for the future? You will do this by looking forward -- great scott! For years we wired the world with coax in various forms, from one to six cables per bundle. It worked pretty much every time. Then along came HDMI. We had to switch over to Category X cables to get some distance. At first, it took Cat/X 2 cables, but now we are down to one -- or are we? Yes, there are cables that will support the UHD standard of 4K/60, 4:2:0, some even up to 100’. Ethereal Evolv cables are an example and we do have a new “true” 18 Gbps cable in the new Velox series, now shipping.

Most installers still want to install a bulk cable that they can terminate as needed. For this I recommend that they use two RG/6 cables and two Cat/6 Cables. Why two each? Right now SDI 3G (single coax) allows a dealer to push 1080P up to 300+ feet and soon they will be able to support the current UHD standard down that same cable with SDI 12G. However, that will not be enough in just a few years! By adding one more coax on the job site the dealers will be able to use the Dual 12G SDI products that will be introduced to the market soon. The same applies to the Cat/6 cables. HDBaseT may require that we double up on cables and transceivers to carry the needed bandwidth in the future.

I mentioned our new 18 Gbps Velox Cable. This product has been designed and built to go well beyond the existing HDMI 1.4 High Speed Max Cable Spec of 10.2 Gbps* which is the most recent spec available.  VELOX UHD cables are now available in lengths of one up to 12 meters and can handle anything the HDMI 2.0 spec can throw at it! VELOX UHD cables are the first-to-market cable line to combine evolutionary design and engineering techniques to support the new generation of HD, Ultra-HD and 4K video applications.

The elephant in the room HDCP 2.2:

HDCP is all content providers are concerned about -- and is the most important part of HDMI. It is what protects their intellectual property from theft by copying. HDCP has been with us since the very beginning of HDMI, in fact HDCP is the real reason for HDMI. Over the years, HDCP has gotten more sophisticated and harder, but not impossible, to hack. However, with the introduction of HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2, content is fairly secure. It is important to note, despite common thinking, having HDMI 2.0 in your product does NOT guarantee that you will also have HDCP 2.2.

OK, then when will HDCP 2.2 impact your installations? Simple! Anything that switches, processes, distributes, displays or extracts must be HDCP 2.2 if the source is HDCP 2.2. Cables and extenders as a rule are not subject to this rule.

HDMI 2.0 Cables: Who makes them and how much are they?

There is no such animal! HDMI LLC does not have a spec or a test to support any cable technology beyond the current 1.4 High Speed Cable specification.

Does HDMI 2.0 require new cables?

No, HDMI 2.0 will work with existing HDMI cables. Higher bandwidth features, such as 4K@50/60 (2160p) video formats, will require existing high speed HDMI cables (Category 2 cables).

Here is what HDMI states about cables:

http://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/hdmi_2_0/hdmi_2_0_faq.aspx#144

So are there any products that exceed this spec?

Yes, yes there are, and as usual we have them.

Our new VELOX UHD cables are the only cable as far as I know that will meet and exceed the 18 Gbps requirement without Eq. 

Hopefully this information helped clarify UHD and HDMI 2.0, so that along with Metra Home 

Theater Group’s technical support and products, you feel more confident with your gear choices and installs.

*Remember that just because it is “high speed cable,” it does not mean it reaches the 10.2 Gbps capability.

So, what do you think? Be sure to send me your questions and any feedback you may have. I’d love to hear from you!

History of HDMI: In the Beginning

By C. I. Source

Although HDMI 2.0 has been out for a while, this technology still has a dark shroud of mystery surrounding it.  Dealers and manufactures are afraid of HDMI while customer demand is looming. We’ll examine some of the issues we’ve had to deal with as we get underway with this new frontier in Part 1. Be sure to watch for Part 2, Into the Future of HDMI in our next installment.

The question is:   “As an industry, how do we salve the fears and provide the client with what they need to move forward with the new HDMI interface?”

To fully understand the new technology, let’s review. Let’s look at how we evolved, where we are presently, and where we are headed in the future:    

I

n the beginning, there was DVI created by silicon image which was intended to be a computer video interface that provided a true Digital High Speed Video connection over a relatively short distance. DVI performed as intended -- but not without problems creating a roadblock to future implementation.  Some of the issues were the lack of a single Plug/Wire standard; the inability for the signal path to travel more than 15’ consistently; no audio standard; and a very large terminal.

Not long after DVI was introduced, the movie and TV industries started looking for ways to secure their new “HD” content.  They felt motivated by and ultimately compelled to limit market availability due to what they assumed were their intellectual property rights. They would not release “HD” content to without a strict level of “Intellectual Property” protection.  To fix this shortcoming, Silicon Image (creator of DVI) took the functioning structure of DVI and the HDCP protection scheme developed by Intel and put it all together into a smallish terminal that carried the High Speed Video, Multi-Channel Audio, Intelligence and Security together as one.

The original HDMI Spec 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 (2002-2006) allowed for 5 Gbps of data transfer, this supported 1080P, 8 Bit color, Multi-channel Audio and EDID/HDCP.  In 2006 the HDMI 1.3 spec was released, this covered several new features and an expanded bandwidth of 10.2 Gbps.  This revision had the first actual cable performance change (from 5 to 10 Gbps) since the introduction of HDMI and is where we still are almost 10 years later! The HDMI 1.4 spec introduced in 2009 added features to the electronics but did not have any cable changes except for the “not yet used” Ethernet support.

This brings us to HDMI 2.0 and the new 18 Gbps standard. When HDMI 2.0 was introduced with much Fanfare in September of 2013 (wow time flies!) there was a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation. This new version of HDMI made a giant leap in bandwidth and now calls for 18 Gbps bandwidth capability.

Whoa….wait a minute, did not HDMI LLC say that they would not need to institute a new cable spec to support this? Yes, HDMI stated, numerous times, that the current 1.4 “high end” cable spec will do everything that is needed for this new format.

And that brings us to the reason for this article: How is this going to work? More importantly, how do we plan for the future?

Here (in HDMI LLC’s opinion) is how it is supposed to work:

Equalization! HDMI assumes that if you have a “true” High Speed cable that is in fact capable of 10.2 Gbps and if you can throw 25 db of EQ onto the signal at the display side you will be able to recover enough data to get a “true” UHD 4K picture.

There are of course some serious issues involved with this plan. A vast number of cables are not really 10.2 capable, even though they are rated high speed. That means a fail. The display side equalization, while over-all adaptive, does not appear to be frequency specific adaptive. This means that if your cable does not have a very linear signal loss between 10 Gbps and 18 Gbps (with a max loss of 25 db) you will have a statistically high opportunity of failure. This theory also does not work well with longer distances and extenders, of any sort.

Here (IMO) is how it is working:

How is it that there are systems with long cables and extenders working with UHD right now? Well, they really aren’t doing HDMI 2.0.

HDMI 2.0, more importantly UHD, only needs about 9 Gbps to carry all of the current formats. I call this HDMI 2.0 Lite.

Aren’t UHD and HDMI 2.0 the same thing? No, no they are not. Thinking of the HDMI 2.0 spec as the USA, for example, UHD is about the size of Rhode Island! So while all UHD formats fit into the HDMI 2.0 Spec, and as a general rule the HDMI 1.4 spec, there is no way that all of the HDMI 2.0 features fit inside the boundaries of UHD.

Here is how current UHD 4K/60 works inside of the HDMI 1.4 spec:

Current UHD started showing up in products such as the Sony 4K server in the summer of 2013. This version was only 4K/30 meaning the picture was refreshed 30 frames per second (FPS.) While this looked great on static or slow moving pans, when there was an action scene the video became very jittery. This did not go over well with the consumer. The push was on to get the video refresh rate up to 60 FPS. The only way to accomplish this with the cables and digital roadways that are available is to cut corners on the “chroma sub-sampling rate.” This Chroma sub-sampling rate is represented as three numbers, 4:4:4, 4:2:2 and 4:2:0. This is very important to both the overall quality of the picture and the bandwidth needed to carry the signal. 4:2:0, available in UHD, cuts down on the necessary bandwidth by doing a lot of data averaging. This is done so they can cram a lot of data, in theory, into a small pipe.  In 4:4:4 each and every pixel can display any color independent of any other pixel. In the 4:2:0 pixels are arranged in groups of 4 which all show the same color. This is how they cut down on bandwidth, instead of needing enough bandwidth to provide every pixel its own color information, they now only need enough to cover a quarter of that need.

Thank You to AVS Forum for this Graphic

That’s enough for this issue, don’t you agree? Stay tuned for Part 2: The Future of HDMI in our next issue.

Be sure to send me your questions and any feedback you may have. I’d love to hear from you!

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!!!

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!!!!!

FROM METRA HOME THEATER GROUP