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HDBaseT Supporters Hope To Kiss HDMI Goodbye
arcticstoat writes "HDMI's short-lived reign over the TV cable racks could soon be over, thanks to a new usurper that combines several connections into a standard Cat5e/6 network cable with an RJ-45 connector. Designed by a coalition of consumer electronics manufacturers called the HDBaseT Alliance, which includes Sony, Samsung, LG and Valens, HDBaseT promises to not only carry video and audio signals, but also provide a network connection, a USB signal and even electricity using a single cable. The Alliance predicts that we'll start seeing the first HDBaseT equipment creeping into the shops later this year, but says the bigger wave of adoption will occur later in 2011."
And subsequently route the signal via patch panels / wall plates to various locations around your basement/home/place of work?*
I'm rather divided on this particular bit of news.
I'm invested in the HDMI technology already and I don't really want to replace everything. With the HDMI 1.4 spec they will address most of the current issues with the technology and provide backward compatibility with the existing devices on the market. HDMI 1.3 kinda sucks if you have an AV receiver and 5.1 setup. (Long story short video processor creates delay and without an auto-sync setup there will be issues with video and audio). This is all made possible because of the requirement for a protected path and downgraded audio on analog ports!
In theory HDMI 1.4 provides a built in protected return audio path, networking, power and a kitchen sink. Regardless, it is rather unimportant to me at this juncture because I doubt I will be upgrading my television and receiver in the near future.
The entire HDBaseT looks like they did mostly the same offerings but in an entirely new cable
which has been around for ages. I get the feeling that actually plugging the cable into a switch won't do much good.
I'm going to assume that in the end they really just get around some royalties and introduce even further market fragmentation.
Good jorb!
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Am I doing something wrong, or does everyone else have similar experiences? If it's the latter, using it as the connector for this new thing sounds like a terrible idea.
Clever signature text goes here.
A Cat5/6 cable has multiple twisted pairs. To reduce inter-signal interference, the pairs are made with different twist rates per foot. This results in slight distance differences between pairs resulting in up to 50 foot length difference internally per 1000 feet. Now, since standard video such as VGA or component video is usually separated into RBG and (maybe) sync lines, the cable length differences result in delay of one or more of the analog video signals relative to each other and this shows up as actual and visible color fringing with a normal cable. (I've seen it.) The solution is that conventional video over Cat5/6 requires active electronics (some vendors use delay lines but those are hard to time-adjust and it locks you to a known cable vendor/mfg spec) to support clean video. This raises the cost. My basis for this is that I'm involved in video conferencing systems, some using long-run video cable in a building as well as packet-based video for external destinations. If HDBaseT involves manufacturers shifting to packet-based video, it's going to be a very interesting different world, because this will require devices on each end to use codecs and video to/from packets, raising costs for consumer electronics.
This is why I need mod points.
Years ago I worked on jukeboxes that had RJ45 based audio connections.... oh the network cards we blew out when those cables got crossed.. and we were actually TRYING not to mix them up.