Gabi Shriki is from the HDBaseT Alliance. He introduced the organisation, which has 117 members and said that the technology is being used worldwide. It’s a standard, not a perfect one, but it is a standard. There are occasional interoperability issues, as there are will be with all interfaces, but it is getting better all the time.
There are A/V receivers and home projectors, cameras, switches and matrix switches as well as extenders using the standard. The technology from Valens received an Emmy award this year. Shriki highlighted that HDBaseT can send audio, video, networking, control, power and USB across a 100m distance using Cat 5 or Cat 6 cable. Although it is packet-based, it doesn’t have the overhead of traditional TCP/IP and is optimised for video and audio. The USB support to provide a return channel is really useful as touch becomes more common.
The current version can support 4K HDMI with 4:2:0 subsampling and the next version will support the full HDMI 2.0 specification for UltraHD. Bit rates for video go higher and higher. Wireless is useful, but as resolutions increase and bit depths get deeper, wireless stays under increasing pressure.
At AWE, a four pair very thin cable was shown that could support a head set to allow much longer cables for VR applications. That could be a real advantage, Shriki believes. The first network chip will come out next year to allow multipoint to multipoint addressing rather than the point to point of previous versions.
