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HDTV Almanac - Banned at the Border
by Alfred Poor on February 17, 2011 Categories: Digital (DTV) Transition, Entertainment

HDMI Licensing is the organization charged with protecting the intellectual property pool for the High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) standard. This has become the first choice for digital high definition connections for home entertainment devices and accessories, and is supported by more than 1,000 companies who have licensed these patents.

Not all manufacturers have bothered to pay for the rights to make HDMI products, however, and according to a press release from HDMI Licensing, the agency has been stepping into them in a big way. In the past year, the group has helped the US. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seize 32 shipments of counterfeit HDMI products at ports from Alaska to Florida. The devices ranged from cables to DVD players.

These actions help by protecting the investment the other manufacturers made in licensing the required patents. The good news for consumers is that this still doesn’t appear to have impacted either the supply or prices of HDMI products. You can still find good quality HDMI cables for under $10. (There’s no need to spend more on a cable, at least initially. The connection is usually pass/fail, and if the cheap cable works, you should be fine. A cable costing 10 times as much made with unobtanium won’t deliver any better results.)

Posted by Alfred Poor, February 17, 2011 5:00 AM

Reader Commentary

Reply
GiovannaVisconti • Feb 17, 8:17am
"Unobtanium." I love it. Thanks, Alfred. Am I free to use this provided I give you credit?

Giovanna...
Reply
alfredpoor • Feb 17, 8:26am
Sadly, I can't take credit for "unobtanium", though it is one of my favorite terms. It was used in Avatar, but that was hardly the first time. I believe that on the TV show, Star Trek's Enterprise used warp drives constructed of unobtanium. As it turns out, however, real world engineers have been using the term at least since the 50s, when it was used as a place-holder either for a material that hadn't been worked out yet, or for replacement parts for obsolete equipment that needed to be repaired.

So feel free to use, but alas, give me no credit.

Alfred...
Reply
alice • Feb 17, 10:08am
While i very happy that the manufactuers investment are protected as hopefully it will lead to effective standards among them.

What i do not agee is " quality HDMI cables are available for under $10" There is value in a more expensive cables especially when you have moved beyond Joe Pack's idea of HT with 42 ' tely sitting at 14 ft liistening to a 500 HTB with no hd set top box. :shock:...
Reply
alfredpoor • Feb 17, 10:54am
Alice, I agree that lots of people are getting HDTV sets that are too small, sit too far from them, and run standard definition content through them. But I'm not sure about the rest of your comment. Are you saying that a $10 HDMI cable is going to compromise the image quality of an HDTV signal? Can you see the difference between a $10 cable and a$100 cable? Digital signals are not like analog. A component video signal can degrade (does degrade) with distance, and you lose information as the waveforms are attenuated. But with a digital signal, either it gets through or it doesn't. Do you believe that there's a performance advantage with an expensive cable? I'd like to understand the technical reasons for that advantage.

Alfred...
Reply
Roger Halstead • Feb 17, 11:21am
HDMI is the manufacturers choice, not the consumers. Remember the good ol' days when you could rent or purchase movies, no special cables, no special players and both the manufacturers, entertainment industry, and consumers got along fine. Of course when VHS, Beta max, and audio tape came along the entertainment industry screamed loudly they had spelled the end of the industry ...but it never happened. True, we now have better quality video and sound, but that's it. I can't say the quality of the movies or programs has improved all that much.

With digital the industry discovered they could take control of the users equipment. Does your TV pause when changing channels, or occasionally pause during a program? That's the system renegotiating the connection between your receiver and something some where along the line. Much of that is courtesy of HDMI. Physically the components add little to the cost of implementation, but the development of these protocols and hardware costs a s...
Reply
alfredpoor • Feb 17, 11:28am
Roger, without even getting into the question of image quality on a degraded VHS tape, does anyone remember how Macrovision (now Rovi) got started? Copy-protection on published VHS tapes.

Alfred...
Reply
Roger Halstead • Feb 17, 1:18pm
VHS wasn't all that great to begin with, but we thought it was back then<:-))...
Reply
alice • Feb 18, 10:48am
There is a lot of techinical data that supports the value of a quality cable. Of course one can get carried as some cables are just expensive to be expensive & do some whale catching.

Yes i can see the difference . Inexpensive cable is a price point product & as long as you willing to accept the liminations sacrified to achieve said price & not deluding yourself that there is not a difference between a cheap cable & a quality one,go forth.

A perfect example: A couple who are in their mid sixties bought a new Samsung 50" HD with settop box & Blu ray player . The salesman outfitted the system with entry level Monster cable. After a month of viewing , they felt somewas missing and called me to calibrate & see what was up.

After basic tuning & properly reconnecting their system which eliminated a lot of cable & problems, we sat down to view.

They are sports fans , so watched a hd hockey game. The first period was using the monster cable. ...
Reply
GiovannaVisconti • Feb 21, 9:48am
Ah, I see. It's rather like "framus," a term from the high-end audio world (years ago) that was generally used to identify some kind of connection, or piece of odd equipment as in "this framus goes here...".

Yes, I know there is an actual German guitar manufacturer called Framus, but I don't know which came first...them, or the high-end "term." Anyway, "unobtanium" goes well with "framus." <smile>...

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About Alfred Poor

Alfred Poor is a well-known display industry expert, who writes the daily HDTV Almanac. He wrote for PC Magazine for more than 20 years, and now is focusing on the home entertainment and home networking markets.

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