Hiding the cords for AV

[Mattatooi]

Lucid do you not ever run HD-SDI cables in houses rather than HDMI or is it not worth it? I guess HDCP would be an issue.

 

[Lucid]

Lucid do you not ever run HD-SDI cables in houses rather than HDMI or is it not worth it? I guess HDCP would be an issue.

You're right about the HDCP issue. If you and I were discussing broadcast and digital cinema camera technology then SDI in 4K/UHD would be our standard solution . HDMI would be very much secondary for lots of reasons. The domestic/consumer market is different though. Like it or loath it HDMI is the standard. HDMI = Hardly Developed, Mostly Intermittent... lol; a standard developed with the interests of the film and TV companies in protecting their copyright very much front and centre. So there just isn't the support within the consumer products market for SDI and that's a damned shame.

Having said that, SDI comes with its own set of issues due to the moving goal posts of the developing HDTV and now UHDTV standards. In theory we could be looking at home entertainment systems with a requirement to move up to 18Gbps. In short, an SDI install that would have been happy to transmit basic 1080p/60Hz would have needed upgrades to cable and TX/RX gear to handle UHD/4K both in terms of bandwidth and transmission distance.

SDI still remains the cleanest way to get a signal out of a player device. In my Hi-Fi rack I have an SDI modified DVD/CD/SACD player - a Denon 2900. When combined with one of the SDI equipped Lumagen scalers I haven't seen anything this side of a Teranex or S&W Interpolator Gold that can do DVD better. Of course that's all moot now as the source standards have moved on.

Manufacturers such as HDAnywhere are improving what can be done with HDMI distribution @ 4K/UHD resolutions to the point where distance is only really an issue for the very largest of houses. On top of that there are solutions using Cat Baluns that provide a useful distance increase and still support HDCP.

 

[Doggit]

Hi Lucid, can I say thanks for putting what I was trying to say a lot more sensibly than I was able to. I wasn't aware of the previous thread, but I could see that there was more to the situation than met the eye.

 

[wannocks]

Have you got the TV yet?
Samsung have some models with an external box that takes the connections that has a thin connector cable to the TV.
Think it's called One Connect.