There's No Such Thing as 'Wireless HDMI'

An anonymous reader writes "CE Pro magazine interviewed Steve Venuti and Les Chard of HDMI Licensing, LLC to get a preview of all things HDMI at CES. The duo addressed some of the more controversial issues surrounding HDMI, including 'Wireless HDMI' (There's no such thing); Consumer Electronics Control (There will be interoperability); competitor DisplayPort (No traction in CE); and the complications of HDMI ('It is not an HDMI problem. It's a digital issue.')"

Comments

what it is

[bcrowell]

Would it be too much trouble for the submitter to explain what the acronym HDMI stands for, or at least to link to the WP article? Even after reading the WP article, I don't really know much about it.

Since it's a device for imposing DRM, there's presumably some mechanism for forcing the user to buy and use it. What is the mechanism? What types of equipment require it? The closest the WP article comes to discussing it seems to be this: "Both introduced in 2006, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD offer new high-fidelity audio features that require HDMI for best results." Well, I'm still in the dark. What does "best results" mean? What are your results like if you don't use it?

Another thing I don't understand is how they think this kind of hardware-based DRM can work. All it takes is one hardware hacker to figure out how to tap in to some unencrypted signals, e.g., by connecting onto circuit boards. Once there's a single device that can be hacked by a publicly known procedure, every DRM'd movie out there can be transcoded into a non-DRM'd format.

One interesting sentence from the WP article: "PCs with hardware HDMI output may require software support from Operating Systems such as Windows Vista." So does this mean that you can't use the technology on a Mac, for example? I'm also curious whether any manufacturers are actually making mobos or video cards with hdmi connectors on them.

And how does this fit in with the apparently overwhelming recent trend away from DRM in music? Is it really believable that movies will go the other way?

Re:Bah humbug

[AJWM]

Nobody in their right mind buys cables at places like Best Buy unless they need the cable right now. Things like that are high markup items, where the stores more than make up for the couple of dollars they shave off the suggested retail of whatever electronics box is on sale this week.

One of my favorite places to order cables, Microbarn, sells 50 foot HDMI cables for $26.99, qty one. Cheaper if you're buying a bunch. The main cost in HDMI cables is the connectors, (a 6 foot HDMI cable at Microbarn is $6, or only $4 for nickel plated connectors), partly due to licensing costs, but wire is cheap.