I have an HDMI cable pulled through conduit behind a masonry wall. Similar to another question on here, the conduit is pretty small (1"). The HDMI cable that was pulled is too short. I can hook it up to my wall mounted plasma, but it does not reach to my dvd player.

There are two potential fixes (as far as I know):
1) Use an audioquest HDMI coupler and add another short cable.
2) I have three unused cat5 connectors in the wall. I believe you can attach hdmi to these.

Obviously option 2 is more expensive (option 1 retails for $25). Thus, the folks who pulled the short wire are opting for option 1. My question is, am I going to lose signal quality and thus picture quality as a result of using the coupler? What is the difference between the coupler and the extender?

Thanks in advance for any input. Really enjoy reading these forums. I'll have to post pics later.

I would go with option 3, remove cable thats in there now and return it for a new longer cable.

adding a coupler could cause issues as now you have introduced 36 connections that if not a solid connection could cause issues with a sync or power and cause color problems or color shift issues

Just my thoughts as HDMI isnt that great yet and trying to bandaid it to get it working with a coupler and another cable seems like a bad idea

With all the problems that can be associated with poor HDMI connections I would have to agree with the above poster and go with 'unlisted' option 3. If you have paid an installer and they ran too short a cable, it should be up to them to run the proper length.

A coupler would join 2 HDMI cables: <cable>>coupler<<cable>

An extender would have 1 less connection: <cable>>cable> as there would be a female on one end and a male on the other end of the extender. Better idea than above.

I did a 50 ft HDMI run that turned out to be just long enough to connect to my HD-DVD player, provided I put in on one of the lower shelfs on my rack.

Though it worked fine, I wanted a bit of flexibility for where I could put the HD-DVD. So I connected the 50 ft cable to a 10 ft cable using an "HDMI repeater amplifier extender".

So far it works fine.

Also running just the 50 ft cable alone, I could use my HD-DVD player (toshiba HD-A1) with good results. But if I hooked up my my standard DVD player I noticed signal loss (sparklies) with the picture.

After connecting the two cables together, the standard DVD player worked fine.

That's what I experienced, of course YMMV.