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Post by mgbpuff on Oct 26, 2020 10:08:51 GMT -5
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Post by audiogeek on Oct 26, 2020 11:05:13 GMT -5
HDMI is the single worst audio/video invention of our lifetimes...
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Post by Jean Genie on Oct 26, 2020 14:02:08 GMT -5
HDMI is the single worst audio/video invention of our lifetimes... It sure ain't no Betamax!🎃 |
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Post by SteveH on Oct 26, 2020 17:09:26 GMT -5
HDMI is the single worst audio/video invention of our lifetimes... Hahaha, I have to disagree! In 2018, I finally upgraded my 1992 A/V system from S-video/Component video to HDMI. I have a lot less cables and crap without all of those converters, extractors, switches and splitters 👍 |
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Post by mgbpuff on Oct 26, 2020 17:25:13 GMT -5
HDMI is the single worst audio/video invention of our lifetimes... Hahaha, I have to disagree! In 2018, I finally upgraded my 1992 A/V system from S-video/Component video to HDMI. I have a lot less cables and crap without all of those converters, extractors, switches and splitters 👍 In 2002, I thought the standard was going to be FireWire, a single thin cable that could daisy chain between devices with no encryption. I had Mitsubishi HDTV, Mitsubishi HDVCR, and a FireWire equipped cable box. I was hoping for more devices to be in Firewire, when the bigMedia companies invested and came out with the HDMI protected system. |
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Post by garbulky on Oct 26, 2020 17:32:43 GMT -5
HDMI is an amazing cable capable of pushing 8k resolution and audio in a single cable. The problem though isn't the cable but the software protocols behind it which appear to not be robust. Well that and sometimes the cables themselves are not up to spec. It's sad that HDMI has been around for a very long time and it still hasn't been made itself be rock solid.
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Post by audiogeek on Oct 26, 2020 21:05:08 GMT -5
Ok, how about this... The HDMI handshake is the worst audio/video issue of our lifetimes. To have been around this long and still having issues with component compatibility is ridiculous. It’s had it’s chance, time for a new method...
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Post by Jean Genie on Oct 26, 2020 21:10:26 GMT -5
Hahaha, I have to disagree! In 2018, I finally upgraded my 1992 A/V system from S-video/Component video to HDMI. I have a lot less cables and crap without all of those converters, extractors, switches and splitters 👍 In 2002, I thought the standard was going to be FireWire, a single thin cable that could daisy chain between devices with no encryption. I had Mitsubishi HDTV, Mitsubishi HDVCR, and a FireWire equipped cable box. I was hoping for more devices to be in Firewire, when the bigMedia companies invested and came out with the HDMI protected system. Ahh, FireWire. Now that WAS Betamax!   |
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Post by audiogeek on Oct 26, 2020 21:13:54 GMT -5
I still have my Sony SL2700 in its original box
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Post by bonscott on Oct 26, 2020 21:37:50 GMT -5
Ok, how about this... The HDMI handshake is the worst audio/video issue of our lifetimes. To have been around this long and still having issues with component compatibility is ridiculous. It’s had it’s chance, time for a new method... New method coming out soon. Should be bulletproof in about 10 years |
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bootman
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Post by bootman on Oct 27, 2020 7:33:34 GMT -5
This happens EVERY single time a new HDMI standards comes out.
OEMs use FOMO to drive the lemmings to buy the latest shiny object and use them as beta testers.
Same old advice applies, use the display as the HDMI switch and ARC as your audio feed.
Since eARC is lossless (and that hopefully works) you lose no sound quality.
BTW how many games even have lossless audio nowadays?
If little or none, optical out is the stable way to go.
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cawgijoe
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Post by cawgijoe on Oct 27, 2020 10:02:37 GMT -5
Copy protection has been the bane of our existence.
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Post by Jean Genie on Oct 27, 2020 10:16:44 GMT -5
Copy protection has been the bane of our existence. You might want to "slash- piracy" to this statement, IMO.😎 |
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stiehl11
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Post by stiehl11 on Oct 27, 2020 12:01:39 GMT -5
Copy protection has been the bane of our existence. And yet it's super easy to rip/copy our content. |
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KeithL
Administrator 
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Post by KeithL on Oct 27, 2020 12:52:30 GMT -5
Exactly...
We may all agree that software and video piracy is at least in principle a bad thing... The problem is that HDMI doesn't actually prevent it in its most common forms...
You can remove the copy protection from any disc with a free software program... or download pretty much any show or movie from a free Torrent link.
(As long as you don't care that it's illegal to do so.)
While, at the same time, it adds a lot of complexity to HDMI, which is already pretty complex... So, in the end, it fails to achieve its purpose, while causing a lot of inconvenience for the end user, as well as for everyone working with it.
So, as of now, the proverbial "typical housewife" probably can't make a copy of a disc to give to a friend... But a typical computer literate 12 year old probably can... and probably also knows where to download a bootleg copy of the movie anyway... And, obviously, any "commercial" or "serious hobbyist" software or video pirate is not going to have any trouble doing so at all...
But the REST of us have to put up with the added cost of that extra complexity and the problems caused by it...
The really sad part is that, as a side effect of that complexity, if you want to play that disc that you actually bought, on the new computer and monitor you also own... You may STILL end up having to defeat the copy protection... just to get it to work... After a while it starts to feel like being stuck in a burning car with a seat belt that won't open...
(You can just imagine some out-of-work burglar alarm salesman convincing some studio exec that "this will really make his stuff safe"...)
I would also say, however, that, WHEN IT WORKS RIGHT, HDMI really is a lot better than what went before... No more noisy signals... no more fuzzy pictures... and a nice clean digital signal that either works or not... (Which would be incredibly nice if the "not" didn't happen quite so often.)
Copy protection has been the bane of our existence. And yet it's super easy to rip/copy our content. |
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Post by megash0n on Oct 27, 2020 13:05:58 GMT -5
Exactly...
We may all agree that software and video piracy is at least in principle a bad thing... The problem is that HDMI doesn't actually prevent it in its most common forms...
You can remove the copy protection from any disc with a free software program... or download pretty much any show or movie from a free Torrent link.
(As long as you don't care that it's illegal to do so.)
While, at the same time, it adds a lot of complexity to HDMI, which is already pretty complex... So, in the end, it fails to achieve its purpose, while causing a lot of inconvenience for the end user, as well as for everyone working with it.
So, as of now, the proverbial "typical housewife" probably can't make a copy of a disc to give to a friend... But a typical computer literate 12 year old probably can... and probably also knows where to download a bootleg copy of the movie anyway... And, obviously, any "commercial" or "serious hobbyist" software or video pirate is not going to have any trouble doing so at all...
But the REST of us have to put up with the added cost of that extra complexity and the problems caused by it...
The really sad part is that, as a side effect of that complexity, if you want to play that disc that you actually bought, on the new computer and monitor you also own... You may STILL end up having to defeat the copy protection... just to get it to work... After a while it starts to feel like being stuck in a burning car with a seat belt that won't open...
(You can just imagine some out-of-work burglar alarm salesman convincing some studio exec that "this will really make his stuff safe"...)
I would also say, however, that, WHEN IT WORKS RIGHT, HDMI really is a lot better than what went before... No more noisy signals... no more fuzzy pictures... and a nice clean digital signal that either works or not... (Which would be incredibly nice if the "not" didn't happen quite so often.)
And yet it's super easy to rip/copy our content. Agree completely. |
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KeithL
Administrator
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Post by KeithL on Oct 27, 2020 13:22:36 GMT -5
I agree... and that's one way of looking at it. The HDMI standard covers a lot of ground, offers a lot of options, and actually handles it all reasonably well. And, from an engineering point of view, most of it really is pretty elegant and well thought out. And, being a digital signal, it DOES pretty well ensure that, when it does work, you DO get a perfect picture. (To me this is a big plus because I hated the fuzzy pictures, and faded pictures, and noisy pictures you often got with old-style connections.)
Now, to be fair, even the copy protection is quite elegant... Somebody put a lot of thought into all the back-ing and forth-ing that goes into how it works...
Once you get past the part about adding something that's incredibly complicated, prone to problems, and probably unnecessary...
Of course there is another way of looking at it... If I'm watching a nice 4k (or 8k) show, being streamed to my favorite streaming device, then sent to my TV via HDMI... Then the actual signal is probably coming in via Ethernet (or maybe fiber)...
So we COULD have just plugged that Ethernet cable straight into the TV and skipped the whole HDMI part altogether...
Or, to look at it all a different way, if you've ever used one of those cute little HDBaseT extenders... We also COULD just use that all the way instead of HDMI... And you COULD just have a Cat7 Ethernet cable going from your cable box to your TV...
And another Ethernet cable from your streaming device... And so on...
HDMI is an amazing cable capable of pushing 8k resolution and audio in a single cable. The problem though isn't the cable but the software protocols behind it which appear to not be robust. Well that and sometimes the cables themselves are not up to spec. It's sad that HDMI has been around for a very long time and it still hasn't been made itself be rock solid. |
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DYohn
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Post by DYohn on Oct 27, 2020 13:56:07 GMT -5
A "bug in a chipset" does not make HDMI a "horror story."
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Post by Pioneer on Oct 27, 2020 14:12:27 GMT -5
In 2002, I thought the standard was going to be FireWire, a single thin cable that could daisy chain between devices with no encryption. I had Mitsubishi HDTV, Mitsubishi HDVCR, and a FireWire equipped cable box. I was hoping for more devices to be in Firewire, when the bigMedia companies invested and came out with the HDMI protected system. Ahh, FireWire. Now that WAS Betamax! I forgot about IEEE-1394 (firewire). Our cable company here in this part of Virginia is Cox Communications and sometime in the early to mid 2000's my cable box had a firewire output that I hooked up a state of the art (at that time) RCA Scenium DVR and couldn't get it to work. When I called technical support at Cox the tech was surprised that I even knew what the output was for, then he informed me that it wasn't operational on their tuner box. Ah the good old days. Anyway I like HDMI, and I agree with others that the problem doesn't belong to the cable itself but the copy protection software. |
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Post by garbulky on Oct 27, 2020 14:57:14 GMT -5
I agree... and that's one way of looking at it. The HDMI standard covers a lot of ground, offers a lot of options, and actually handles it all reasonably well. And, from an engineering point of view, most of it really is pretty elegant and well thought out. And, being a digital signal, it DOES pretty well ensure that, when it does work, you DO get a perfect picture. (To me this is a big plus because I hated the fuzzy pictures, and faded pictures, and noisy pictures you often got with old-style connections.) Now, to be fair, even the copy protection is quite elegant... Somebody put a lot of thought into all the back-ing and forth-ing that goes into how it works...
Once you get past the part about adding something that's incredibly complicated, prone to problems, and probably unnecessary...
Of course there is another way of looking at it... If I'm watching a nice 4k (or 8k) show, being streamed to my favorite streaming device, then sent to my TV via HDMI... Then the actual signal is probably coming in via Ethernet (or maybe fiber)...
So we COULD have just plugged that Ethernet cable straight into the TV and skipped the whole HDMI part altogether...
Or, to look at it all a different way, if you've ever used one of those cute little HDBaseT extenders... We also COULD just use that all the way instead of HDMI... And you COULD just have a Cat7 Ethernet cable going from your cable box to your TV...
And another Ethernet cable from your streaming device... And so on...
HDMI is an amazing cable capable of pushing 8k resolution and audio in a single cable. The problem though isn't the cable but the software protocols behind it which appear to not be robust. Well that and sometimes the cables themselves are not up to spec. It's sad that HDMI has been around for a very long time and it still hasn't been made itself be rock solid. Well I don't know if I would want to use an ethernet cable....I suppose it is technically possible, but it would require new devices that supported this output. I wouldn't want the ethernet to go directly in to the tv though. See I want a streamer like my FireTV with Alexa capability. But also I want to hook my firetv to my HDMI audio extractor to get the SPDIF output. |
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