Thread: Cat5 to replace HDMI?

Awesome idea is awesome

Originally Posted by CivilWars

What I don't understand is if HDMI is so great then why does the cable company run coax from their box to my house? If coax can carry the signal HD all the way to my house why can't it carry it from the box to my TV? I am an idiot when it comes to most of these things, so honestly asking. However the cat5 idea is flippin' awesome.

Actually, the coax to your house has a much, much higher bandwidth in order to get 500+ channels to your tuner. HDMI only has to get the video for one channel to your monitor/TV, the one you are watching at any given time.

I am all for it but I doubt I would use the same cat five cable for my home theater that I do for my computer. I am one of the suckers that will pay $100+ for an HDMI cable depending on what it is connected to. I find that I have less voice syncing issues, format issues and a lower failure rate with the higher end cables. My denon receivers will communicate with each other and any other denon device via cat 5 now but I have never used it.

Originally Posted by CivilWars

That doesn't answer my question. If coax can push even 20 channels HD from the box in the neighbor's yard to my house why can't it push 1 5 feet from the box to my TV?

Because when it's on the coax it's very highly encoded digital data, not a picture that your screen can display. When it heads into the box a decoder takes the digital datagrams and breaks it down into the separate RGB channels and audio, and then sends it to the individual channel circuits in the HDMI cable; at that point, it's a bitmap of color data and a highly precise timing signal that syncs the RGB channels into a unified image.

Coax, when it carries images, carries all three channels and the audio and a carrier timing signal on the same cable which leads to massive degradation of the picture and the precision necessary to carry high-resolution images.

Using coax to the TV means that the encoding/decoding standard has to be the same throughout the industry (it's proprietary to the carrier), and it means that any TV could watch any program on any channel whenever it wanted to with no control by the providers (ie, free cable for everyone). Instead, they control access to their networks with the use of separate decoder boxes, which are rented, ID'd and logged into a central database to track what channels you have access to.


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They're promising 100W of "charging power" in this standard, on 24AWG conductors. In their dreams, maybe. Even Cat6 is not certified to handle the kinds of bandwidth this standard proposes to send down the cable, and they have far too few conductors to carry all the necessary circuits, to say nothing of this 100W of power or the complete lack of any kind of shielding. A definite pipe dream.

Draco

Originally Posted by Veovis

Voice syncing issues?
Format issues?

No idea what you even mean by either of those. For the first one I can guess... but for the second one? You're saying a cheap HDMI cable won't transmit the same format?

"Failure rate?"

These aren't mechanical devices. You plug them in once and leave them. I had ONE cheap HDMI cable fall apart one (and when I say cheap I mean poorly made). But there are plenty of $3 cables which are rock solid and I've been using my Monoprice cheapies for 3 years in 3 different houses, disconnected and reconnected many times. No "failures"... and no "syncing" or "format" issues either.

Then keep buying cheap HDMI cables.