HT026 – HDMI Cables and HDMI Licensing Notes

Episode #026

Host:  Mike Deckys

Guest: Steve Venuti – President– www.hdmi.org

Topic:  What is HDMI Licensing?

Download Full Transcript here

Mike:  On this episode of the Smarter Home Theater Show we welcome back Steve Venuti.  Steve is the president of HDMI Licensing, LLC.  And we are going to continue our discussion about HDMIs.  So I would like to take this opportunity and thank you very much for coming back to the show, Steve.

Steve:  Thank you very much.  I am glad to be here again.

Mike:  Now I have also seen HDMI cables priced anywhere from about $10.00 up to $1000.00.  Is there really a difference between them?

Steve:  I think I get this question about 1000 times a day.

Mike:  Ok!

Steve:  It’s the most commonly asked question and it is a natural question.  There are many cables on the market.  And there are price differences between many cables.  Now I have, as my customers, many people who make cables and some people I’m sure, some of my customers who license the technology make cables that cost a lot less than others.  So I’m not going to necessarily say go buy the cheapest cable out there because there are going to be many differences that people build into it.  From the specification point of view, from the standards point of view, if one thing that we care about, the one thing that all consumers should care about and that is that this cable has been tested to comply with the HDMI specifications.  What does that mean?  That means that the source, the manufacturer is an HDMI adopter and his cable has been created according to the specification and has been tested.  All products much be tested to comply with the specifications.   That is what I care about.  So that means that you have a cable that works.  It works to the level that is specified as is minimally competent, let’s put it that way, to transfer the signals.  The signals that get from one end to the other.   Now many manufacturers naturally will say, “Well, we want to do more than just that.  We want to build a cable, for example, that can last for 50 years.  Or you can have your kids yanking it and it is still going to work”.  So number one for consumers, from my point of view, is buy a cable that had the HDMI logo and it is from a source you trust.  Because there are people who pirate this stuff and they create very cheap stuff out there and they say it is HDMI so it may or may not work so it is very cheap.  So the most important thing if it hasn’t been tested to comply with the specifications you just don’t know.   Beyond that then it is really up to the manufacturer.  Some manufacturers are saying “We are building for long lengths to go around studs in your walls” and so forth.  You want to make sure that the material is the best.  But we don’t test for that.  So that may be a difference.  I’m sure it is a manufacturing difference that costs money and is of some value to some consumers.  So that is a decisions that I think consumers have to make based on their own needs.  Once again from our point of view just make sure it is a valid, legal HDMI cable.  Then  you know it has been tested to work.

Mike:  So if you want to go with gold plated connectors and the heavier gauge wire it is up to you.  But as long as it has an HDMI stamp of approval then it meets your specifications and your feature set beyond that is up to you and what you want to spend your money on.

Steve:  That is correct and I can tell you that, that there are companies out there that are building cables very inexpensively and they have not been tested and those are the ones that you don’t want to gamble on.   It is not to say that there are not some inexpensive valid HDMI cables out there and of course there are.  The market has all sorts of different price points.  But you just want s to make sure that you get one that has gone through the compliance testing.

Mike:  Right.  It seems kind of silly to spend all that money on a TV or projector or stereo system and then go cheap on a cable and not get the best experience your possibly can out of it.

Steve:  That is right.  This is your home theater.  This is your big beautiful display that you are watching your sports or your movies on.  You want to make sure that everything is of equal quality so you get the best quality throughout the system.  And that includes cable.

Mike:  Right.  Is there a maximum length of an HDMI cable that will effectively work?

Steve:  Another question that comes up a lot.  And from a standards point of view, from the specification point of view there is no minimum or maximum length.  We don’t say you can only make it this long or you can make it up to this length.  We just don’t say that.  What we do say is to comply with the specification, and as I said before, all cables, all products are tested.  If you want to pass the test you need to: We are going to start out with a cable of this length and you need to at the end of this cable ( I don’t care if it is a mile long or it is a foot long) you are going to pass the test if your signal by the end of that cable is of x minus whatever the difference is.   Some sort of signal strength.  So then it is up to the manufacturer.  If I am a lousy manufacturer and I can’t get this signal to travel a foot then you don’t pass.  If you get it to go 100 feet you pass.  So that is the rules governing cable length.   Now what about in the real practical world?  In the real practical world we are talking about band width that is just incredible. 1080p requires such fast band width that copper, which is what cables are made of, is just not going to be able to take this much data, the signal strength, forever.  It is just not going to happen. So the signal degrades over length and what we have seen is that for a 1080i signal we have seen cables going up to, let’s say, 75 feet.  And maybe 1080p maybe 40 or 50 feet.  Where pure copper you can pass the compliance test.  If you want to go any farther than that then you need to look at things that repeat or boost the signal or different products that convert to Category 5, kind of ten based t, Ethernet cables or optical, or some other form of transporting the signal.  But I would say you are guaranteed you can find a cable 40 to 50 feet that can work at the highest band width currently without boosting the signal.

Mike:  Ok, now do, you mentioned repeaters or signal boosters, do they work?  Or in the sense are they subject to the compliance standards like HDMI cables are?

Steve:  They are.  There are 4 categories of products that are tested.  One is your source devise of DVDs, game consoles, set top boxes.  One is your display devise, obviously a TV or projector.  One is the cable, that is self explanatory.  And the other really is a repeater device that is anything in between.  Anything that takes an import and then sends it back on.  It could be an AV receiver where that is sitting in between your TV and DVD player or top box for example.  Or it could be just a little box that its sole purpose is to be a repeater.  To repeat the signal.  What happens is the HDMI signal comes in and let’s say that it s just at that signal strength where it is going to fail – it can’t get to the TV really soon – let’s say you have got another 30 feet  before you get to the TV.   You put a booster or a repeater and it does exactly what that says.  It takes that signal, rebuilds it to its original form and sends it on its way.  So that is how you can create long cable length with an HDMI signal, even though it will degrade over length,  you can just rebuild it and boost it and send it on it’s way.  They are tested in the same way that all the other products are tested.

Mike:  Ok, it there a resource online to help us decipher all this out?  It there a cheat sheet if you will?

Steve:  I think the best thing is to go to HDMI.org, wwwhdmi.org and that has information for some people who do this for a living.  For installers who are building home theaters or for the general consumers who want to find out some basic stuff about this technology.

Mike:  What does the next release, or what does the future of HDMI hold for us in the home theater realm?

Steve:   Well the future is about a week old now.  I say that facetiously.  We just launched a new version 1.4.  And let me just give you a brief overview of what is in 1.4.  1.4 has Ethernet built into it.  So just that the same way that HDMI is a single cable that meets all the sorts of needs (audio and video, so all those things that cable mess that you had before with all your audio and video cable) HDMI solved that with a single cable.   Well now more and more devices, game consoles, Blur Ray players, are becoming internet enabled, some devices like Roku devices and other streaming devises off the internet require the internet to function.  So the internet is going to become more and more important to home theater systems.  So what HDMI has done is said ‘alright we are building Ethernet into this cable.  Just as we consolidated audio and video we are going to add Ethernet’.  Now through the single cable HDMI 1.4 you are going to have a network connection between devices that have this capability.  Another thing we added was support for 3D.  So more and more digital theaters are showing content in 3D.  There are many a sets out there, TV sets that have 3D capability.  This is something we are going to see more and more of.   So HDMI now supports 3D.  We are going to see 3D content, 3D discs in the home very soon.  And we will see, finally, 3D come to the home.  We are supporting something called 4K2K.  Which really is 4 times the resolution of 1080p! Think of it that way.  So we all thought 1080p was the most beautiful, gorgeous picture available.  Well, not so fast.  There is always bigger and always better.

Mike:  Wow.

Steve:  I know.  And this is not something you are going to see right away.  But one of the things about HDMI is we are always looking to the future because we have to make sure that if you can’t get it from one place to the other no one is going to build the functionality.  So we are one of the first ones to develop this.  4K2K is essentially 4000 by 2000.  What that means is essentially the resolution of these state of the art digital theaters and it is 4 times 1080p and it is going to be- you will see it coming out in the next couple years for home theaters.

Mike:  Wow that is exciting stuff.

Steve:  I know.  It never stops.

Mike:  Much to my wife’s chagrin it never stops.

Steve:  Well, everyone’s chagrin.  Everybody is kind of happy and sad about it right?

Mike:  Right.  Oh no, I just bought that new TV but oh my God look at that thing. That looks wonderful.

Steve:  Right.  We have got something called audio return channel.  Which means a very specific niche application but many TVs, not so much in the US, but in many other parts in the world have a cable card built in. So that means both audio and video are coming in to the TV.  It sounds wonderful.  Well, what happens if you want that audio to be played in your surround sound system and not out of you TV?  Then you have to pump that audio back to your AV receiver for example to be processed.  That requires an extra cable currently.  Now that will be included in HDMI, so again single cable for everything.  We have got support for digital still camera color spaces.  This sounds very technical and it is but in essence there are many ways to capture and display color.  They all kind of use this orange TV, red, green, blue triangle, but the triangles can vary.   When they do vary then if you plug one device into another they have got to guess about the areas that are not shared.  So digital still cameras have a very different RGB they use that TVs now have HDMI supporting that manufacturers can build that color space in there and what that means is you can plug your digital still camera in and it looks exactly as it did when you captured in it on your screen.   And two other things real quickly, two new connectors which really means different ways to connect HDMI.  A very small connector called a micro.  Kind of the size of a micro usb.   What that means is you are going to see HDMI in smaller devices.  You are going to see it on point and click digital cameras.  You are going to see it possibly on mobile phones.  So these devices now that can start to be source devices for HD content now will be built to plug into TV.  And another amazing one I think is we have a whole way of connecting in an automobile.  So the automobile manufacturers came to us and said “You know, we are going to start building not only entertainment systems but also just displays that are sending HD signals back and forth.  We want HDMI to be the connection.  So we have a whole set of connection specification written for the automobile industry.  Not something consumers need to know about but it is just interesting that the automobile will now be wired with HDMI so that they can take advantage of transporting HD throughout an automobile.

Mike:  Wow that is something.  Now you work for HDMI Licensing.  What exactly does HDMI Licensing do?

Steve:  HDMI is a standard.  What that means is it is a way that all these devices communicate to each other.  Which means anybody who is building a TV or a DVD or a cable in the home theater world needs to build in HDMI.  What they do is then say HDMI – we need to know what are HDMI products?  We go to HDMI Licensing which owns the specifications.  Which is the way that anybody can build HDMI into their products and they license from us. It is the blue print.  So they need to get the blue print and build according to the blue print so that everybody is building according to the same blue print so that they all work together naturally.  So that is what HDMI Licensing does.   We are the owners of the blue print.  We make sure people are building according to the blue print and as you mentioned if a product isn’t tested or doesn’t comply with the specification it is our job to go out there and say, alright you didn’t build according to the blue print.  Which means if you go over here and plug it into this device it may not work.  So we have to take care of that. We just make sure everybody is playing fair. And as well we are involved in obviously the marketing and evangelism (which is what I am doing here) and we work with the founder of HDMI the large ? Companies that came up with this to continually evolve this and make sure we are meeting the market needs.

Mike:  Ok so we are the stewards of this standard.  It is good that there are stewards because having everything plug and play together is such a nice feature.  It is worth its weight in gold.

Steve:  It is something that we are all striving towards.  And you know it is an interesting issue because it is something that I think as we get more and more technology built in these devices and as they become one more feature rich we’ve got to make sure that it is still as easy to use because the TV is above all an entertainment system.  And when you want entertainment you don’t want to have to think about it.   You want to turn that thing on, lean back on your coach and you do not want to have to think about is this working with this or why isn’t this working perfectly.

Mike:  That is for sure.  We just all want it to work together.  Ok Steve thank you very much.  HDMI just kind of infuses and makes people nervous and you really just laid it out in simple terms.  I think that everybody can understand.  I’d like to thank you for your time and I appreciate you coming on this show.  And I would like to remind our listeners to please support the Smarter Home Theater Show by supporting our sponsor.  Your support of them helps to support us.  Simply go to www.smarterhometheater.com and click on ‘Support the Show’ to learn more.  And don’t forget to subscribe to our email newsletter for insider tips, cools contests and more.  Again go to www.smaterhometheater.com to learn more.

Just as a refresher people can go to www.hdmi.org to get more information and thank you again Steve for coming back and giving us some more great information about HDMI and what it is all about.

Steve:  You are welcome.

Mike:  Thanks again. Have a great day Steve.