Why is whole home HDMI so expensive?

Originally Posted by petern 

You answered your own question.

Ultimate = ludicrously expensive.

Originally Posted by jautor 

They haven't been cheap to build - the chips aren't cheap - because they're not a mass-market product with millions of units sold. HDBaseT should help here, more by its likelihood to expand the market for such devices because of the single-wire cat5e solution. But the market is still limited due to the wiring requirements generally. Add to that the whole-home-DVR solutions and streaming devices, and the future for HDMI-based distribution for the whole home is cloudy anyway.

If the Blu-ray Association was less hostile to the "media server" concepts (K-scape), we'd all be partying with 1Gb Ethernet-based solutions for all of this by now...


Jeff

Originally Posted by Neurorad 

HDMI was developed so people will buy Blu-ray discs. It was designed only for short runs for a reason.

Originally Posted by cntp 

Component wouldn't have been the standard - regular people love HDMI. They plug In one wire and it just does. The best quality audio and video. Easy, neat, etc. Plus it does uncompressed multichannel audio, which you can't do over SPDIF. And 4k.

I'm sure HDMI would exist without HDCP, and would still be a huge hit. The fact is it was in the right place in the right time, when LCDs became cheap and were widely purchased.

Originally Posted by Neurorad 

You're joking?

HDMI was developed for copy protection purposes. No other reason.

I'm not saying it's wrong, as people who create and distribute content have to eat, but yeah, Hollywood couldn't adapt fast, so they came out with this HDMI stopgap fiasco.

Originally Posted by ifor 

HDMI was a starting point to have less wires and more communication between components as well as keeping HDCP with in the chain.

The growth in technology within the last 5 years is astounding and the last distributed video system was using component cables. This wasn't cheap as well but the limits were 1080i and analog audio.

Can you design a system that does 1080p (or 4K now), full hi-res digital audio, network and ARC in one cable and connector, have at it.
It took a lot of money, time and co-operation between all the developers and manufacturers to get to where we are now. Remember it was also a way to be better than DVI connectors which was the standard in the computer arena but that only carries video signals, no audio.

Originally Posted by Joe Fernand 

‘The number one problem with whole-home HDMI is cost’ – that may be true at the start of the project but is often forgotten once you try and get things working the way you expect them too!

As jautor said in Post #3 the market for 16x16 Matrix is pretty specialist – no matter if you are talking YUV or HDMI and manufacturing and supporting an HDMI Matrix is far more complex than YUV and has a bunch of costly upfront licensing costs too just to make things that bit more expensive.

There is a pretty huge range of 8x8 HDMI Matrix on the market with plenty of units that are in 8x8 YUV territory – the problem with a lot of them being they come with little or no manufacturer or supplier support so you have to do your own tech support and may find there are no options in terms of firmware and EDID updates/custom programming.

Supporting larger HDMI Matrix is a world apart from supporting YUV Matrix where you may suffer the odd board failure or power supply failure whereas with HDMI you are constantly having to deal with handshake and interoperability issues and that time and effort has to be reflected in the cost of the product if you are going to support them properly.

Joe

Originally Posted by wkearney99 

Truth be told distributing HDMI is a clusterf--- of major proportion. Honestly, it's probably worth avoid, for now.

One big reason is how handshaking is determined. The source wants to know the audio format to send the target device. As in, can the output device handle just plain 2-channel stereo or higher-end formats? Well, when you've got multiple target devices a lot of switchers dumb the source down to the least-common denominator. Doesn't matter if you've got 3 devices that can handle 5.1 (or better) it's the low-end 2-channel TV hanging off one output that causes the source to be told to dumb down to just 2-channel audio. Making a switch that's capable of blocking this isn't easy. In theory it would be possible to have the switch detect whether the target device actually needs the signal, but not all TVs properly tell the source whether they're actually USING the HDMI input, most just signal that they're turned on. So the switch can't know whether or not the TV actually 'needs' the source or not, just that it's active. The solution, of course, is to have a receiver at each and every location, and all of them have to be capable of the highest audio quality you expect to need. So all of your TVs, everywhere, have to have the highest your theater room supports. Trouble is not all the rooms will even have room for a receiver!

I don't know for certain, but I believe HDMI only supports one audio bitstream on the wire at a given time. If it supported both 2-channel and 'something else' then things would be less of a mess. But then you'd be dependent on the sources being capable of providing both bitstreams. I could see where many wouldn't both with this. It'd be trivial for them to do so, but cost-cutting trips up a lot of simple things...

And this has nothing to do with the HDCP copy-protection, which is it's own additional clusterf----. There things just get even worse.

So for rooms that' don't "need" what HDMI might offer you'd probably be better served sending them a component signal instead. Then just reserve the HDMI output from your sources for the theater room(s). But here you run into trouble making sure to get source devices that can send both component AND HDMI. This is becoming rarer as source vendors are moving to HDMI-only outputs. Get your component output Blu-ray players NOW before they cease to exist.

My plan is to wire each TV location with everything. Two RG6 for cable (or whatever), then a 5-conductor mini-coax for component and then 3 CAT6 (one for ethernet, the other two for HDMI). This way I can feed the set with whatever is best suited for the device AND for the sources.