Post by KeithL on Oct 27, 2020 15:55:30 GMT -5
My whole point is that it IS all technically possible.
The only real reason that HDMI still exists is that everybody has been locked into the license requirement.
There is nothing being done over HDMI that couldn't be done more technically effectively, and more cost effectively, over Cat7 cable, or over fiber.
(And, yes, the signal coming into your FireTV seems to be secure enough to even satisfy the anti-piracy committee...)
And, I'm sorry, but the HDMI standard says that you are not legally allowed to extract full high quality digital audio from an HDMI signal and deliver it over S/PDIF...
(So either your HDMI audio extractor reduces the quality of the audio to the maximum quality allowed by the license restrictions... or it's illegal...)
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...