There's no question, HDMI has been a great convenience
for the consumer. Aside from being a high bandwidth connection
that enables high resolution video and lossless audio,
it's a lot simpler to use than the old days where you needed three chords for an HD picture
and then up to six more for surround sound.
But that doesn't mean that it doesn't have its issues,
some of which are a result of its digital design.
Unlike old school analog AV connections, digital protocols like HDMI require a lot more processing,
introducing complexity and more potential points of failure.
One such issue that's been making headlines recently has to do with new HDMI 2.1 connections.
You can learn more about HDMI 2.1 up here, but in a nutshell, it's an incredibly fast revision
that allows 8K 60 or 4K 120 Hertz pictures,
dynamic HDR and even variable refresh rate support
for gamers to help cut down on ugly screen tearing. Sounds pretty good, right?
Well, it turns out that a widespread HDMI 2.1 chipset
is causing lots of headaches for early adopters.
You see, although tons of companies make HDMI components,
many of them source the actual chipsets that run them from the same places.
In this case, AV receivers from Denon,
Yamaha and Moranze have all been using a faulty HDMI 2.1 chip from Panasonic.
The problem is that when a device is set to 4K 120 Hertz mode
and connected to an HDMI 2.1 port on one of these receivers,
the video signal won't be passed through to your display
and no sound will come out of the speakers connected to the receiver.
So congratulations. Your festival of high resolution video and immersive sound
just amounted to a whole lot of nothing. This has been especially disappointing
for folks who bought an Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5
or NVIDIA RTX 3000 series graphics card
as all of these devices boasted 4K 120 Hertz support
as big selling points. The only workarounds right now then
are either to connect your gadget directly to your display
and use HDMI audio return channel to send the audio signal back to your receiver
or just settle for 4K 60 mode until a patch is issued.
That is, assuming that the problem can even be fixed
through software. Although the companies involved are working on a solution,
it appears that they don't even know exactly what the problem is as of the time we shot this video.
But hold on a second, HDMI is a standard, meaning all the manufacturers have to do
is build a product according to the spec, right? How is this broken?
Well, one potential trouble spot is the way that HDMI handles sending and receiving non-video information.
This includes identifiers that are exchanged between two connected devices
so that one device knows what's connected to it and what it can do.
It also includes plug and play features and HDCP,
which is HDMI's content protection system designed to counter copyright infringement.
All of these features are handled by part of the connection that is vulnerable to electrical interference
from other parts of the system, making it a common source of problems.
And of course, if you've ever seen a blank or snowy display over HDMI, there's a good chance
that's because of the HDCP handshaking procedure
that's used to ensure that connected devices are compliant with copy protection.
It ain't perfect and often necessitates a power cycle.
Additionally, packing so many features into one cable
not only means that it can be a little hard to switch between inputs,
which is part of what a receiver has to do, but it also means that it is basically impossible
to test every configuration of different HDMI compatible hardware that's out there.
It's similar to how sometimes PC components just don't play nicely with each other,
even though they're all supposed to be compliant with certain standards.
The nuances and idiosyncrasies of each individual component
can affect a standard protocol in unforeseen ways,
which is possibly part of what's going on with the current HDMI 2.1 fiasco.
Now, we're not saying that any specific issue we just discussed is the actual culprit.
We're gonna have to wait possibly into next year to find out.
In the meantime, hopefully we can all settle for 4K 60
or 1080p 120 or go outside and like play with a stick.
Basically, that's just as entertaining, right? Stick play, no?
Thanks for watching guys, check out our other videos, leave a comment if you have a video suggestion
and don't forget to subscribe and follow or it's possible that, oh man, I wanted to come up
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What were we talking about? I don't know. Yeah, me neither, I wasn't listening.
HDMI, that's right, or all your HDMI connectors will fall off, ha ha!