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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."
Will Monster make a special gold-plated, oxygenated cable for it? Because the guy at Best Buy said that is only way to really hear the crispness of the digital audio.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Can we please kill HDCP? Please? There is no technical reason why my monitor should not be able to be connected to an HDMI-capable entertainment device by means of an HDMI-DVI adapter.
Palm trees and 8
Use them to tie stuff down in your truck.
FTFS:
thanks to a new usurper that combines several connections into a standard Cat5e/6 network cable with an RJ-45 connector
Does that mean I can use one of the dozens of ethernet cables currently languishing in my closets?
Living With a Nerd
I would tag this as a sudden break out of common sense, but I am not sure that it is. Yes, it's better in that I will be able to terminate my own video cables again, but how many cable standards do we need? I fully welcome our new Cat5e overlords but I just want the madness to stop.
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
What on earth makes you think they're going to give up on encryption just because they're going with a connector that encourages senior citizens to plug 100W output cable boxes into their cable modems' ethernet port?
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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.
And let the battle for a new standard begin.
I had thought Light Peak was the likely replacement technology.
10Gbps and backward compatible with USB.
"At 10Gb/s, you could transfer a full-length Blu-Ray movie in less than 30 seconds. Optical technology also allows for smaller connectors and longer, thinner, and more flexible cables than currently possible. Light Peak also has the ability to run multiple protocols simultaneously over a single cable, enabling the technology to connect devices such as peripherals, displays, disk drives, docking stations, and more."
http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/None/1813.htm
Yes, there is a technical reason your monitor can't be connected to your entertainment device... Your monitor doesn't support HDCP decoding.
Then what's the technical reason to require HDCP in the first place?
Haven't we learned anything from PS/2 connectors? Installing ports that are physically, but not electronically compatible on consumer devices is a stupid solution.
Given that a lot of receivers and devices currently have built in Ethernet ports for network connectivity, I can't see this as being a particularly good idea... It's not as if hard wired Ethernet ports are common in residential walls...
this madness will end with new standards, it wont. The connector standard has become as much a marketing phenomenon as it has a control of the customers choice of provider and repeat purchase options. Just take a look at cellphone power connectors as a prime example. or for us old farts, i can simply whisper betamax and we're all sent running for cover. The easiest thing to do in light of all these changes is wait a few years for the price to drop substantially, and upgrade components as needed. yeah, i still have VGA for my monitor, and composite or svid for my video. things that need to go a long distance get baluns or repeaters.
at the risk of getting the troll stamp, you could go so far as to say the entire HDMI standard and its accompanying 720p/i 1080p/i standards are complete poppycock. computer monitors have had resolution superior to these standards for years before their inception.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The proper solution was to go to fiber. They could do long runs
The major U.S. motion picture distributors don't want you to do long runs. You could be doing runs to a nonsubscriber's house or doing long runs through a building that is large enough for a commercial public performance. That's why HDCP requires proximity.
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.
The spec claims that this approach can pump 10.2Gb/s over unshielded twisted pair. So this is really 10Gb/s "Ethernet" technology.
But only in one direction. Like ADSL, it's high-bandwidth only from the "content source". Video travels only in one direction; the reverse direction is 100Mb/s Ethernet packets.
They don't propose to power displays via this cable. The idea is to power disk players, cable boxes and such from the big-screen display. Control them from there, too. "PC-based media servers are no longer required and CE devices are once again the emperors of the living room." If they can get the inter-device control issues figured out (something the consumer device people have a history of botching), that could accelerate acceptance.
Because, here's a shocker for many smug "I know everything," geek types: Cable quality DOES make a difference! When you start talking extremely high bandwidth signals, like you are talking with HDMI especially the "beyond HD" stuff you are talking some tight tolerances that are needed. This is even more true when using smaller cable for longer runs (you can solve a number of problems simply by throwing copper at it and using larger cables). So you may well find that a cable that worked just fine for an old 720p TV doesn't work at all, or has sparkles and dropouts when you hook it up to a 1080p 120Hz connection. Suddenly your bandwidth is beyond its capabilities.
So you can't just say "Ha! Cables don't matter! Anything works fine!" because that's false. As we do higher and higher bandwidth stuff, cable tolerances become more and more important. That's why you can have Cat-3/5/5e/6/6a cables all of which look fundamentally the same, yet have drastically different performance. They are all 4 pairs of unshielded twisted wire. However Cat-3 is good for maybe 16MHz whereas Cat-6a is good to 500MHz. Why? Much, MUCH tighter tolerances and specs.
So cable quality DOES matter as people can find out, but then there are assholes like Monster that rip people off with it.
Depending on what you are doing, it takes more bandwidth. 720p video at 60fps takes much less bandwidth than 1080p video at 120fps. So a cable that works for the lower signal may not work for the more intense one.
Now for short runs, this is generally not a problem. At 2 meters pretty much any cable will do the trick. However longer runs this becomes a real consideration. It becomes even more of a problem if you want a thin cable. The nice thin HDMI cables are 28 AWG wire. However getting a high bandwidth signal over that at a distance can be a problem and require a cable of superior construction. Belden makes such a cable (sold through Bluejeans) that will get you more bandwdith at longer range over a smaller wire gauge.
As an analogy you might be more familiar with, take GigE over Cat-5. It works just fine for many people. There are plenty of NICs and switches that say Cat-5 is fine. However, according to the spec, it isn't. You need Cat-5e. So what's up? Well, with a short run, it just isn't such a big deal. The lower tolerances of Cat-5 are fine. However if you try and do a 100m run, and try and do it near a bunch of other cables and so on you may find that it no longer works. You may even have a situation where you sync at a gig, but it doesn't give you good speed because there are bit errors.
There are in fact certifiers for this purpose from people like JDSU and Fluke. They check the analogue response of the cable and do a bit error test to see if it really is up to spec, or if there are problems. When you run your own cables at a good length, as we do at work, you want one of those.
Same shit with HDMI but even worse, as there aren't any length specs. You can make an HDMI cable as long as you like. Question is, will it work for the kind of video you want? Also will it work for the kind of video you'll want later?
Quality DOES matter in some situations. However quality means "Tight tolerances," not "Brand name and shiny connectors." So you get people like Monster ripping folks off. It is actually fairly technical to learn about all the details, and forget about testing your cables, HDMI testers are off the charts expensive.