Ya, I guess I underestimated the bit rate which explains why they couldn't use ethernet and also why the HDMI distances are so short. It also explains why HDMI extenders are so unreliable.
John
On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 12:35 PM, Gilles Detillieux < grdetil@scrc.umanitoba.ca> wrote:
I share your frustration, but in this case even gigabit Ethernet doesn't have the bit rate to support HD resolutions. HDMI 1.0 is almost 5 Gb/s, 1.3 is about 10 Gb/s, and 2.0 is about 18. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI) I suppose they could initially have gone with 10 Gb/s Ethernet, but that would have limited future growth. Not to mention that there'd be tons of support issues with people trying to use cables not rated for anything over 1 Gb/s or even 100 Mb/s. ;-)
More frustrating is the patent encumbrances and associated license fees, and inevitable competing standards to try to avoid these. Or am I mistaken that this was one of the motivations behind DisplayPort?
The price gouging on cables in the early days of the standard, before there was much competition, was another big frustration, but fortunately reasonably short lived.
On 09/09/2015 08:07 AM, John Lange wrote:
It really makes you wonder why manufacturers always seem to want to reinvent the wheel. Why wouldn't they just use 1G Ethernet? It's an established solid technology with readily available connectors and cables. Easy to work with, good over significant distances... You could even plug it into a switch if you need to go further and you could probably leverage Ethernet multi-cast to feed multiple displays over large distances such as in sports bar.
John
-- Gilles R. Detillieux E-mail: grdetil@scrc.umanitoba.ca Spinal Cord Research Centre WWW: http://www.scrc.umanitoba.ca/ Dept. of Physiology and Pathophysiology, Faculty of Health Sciences, Univ. of Manitoba Winnipeg, MB R3E 0J9 (Canada)
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