Yet another home theatre cable standard announced

The latest example of this comes in the form of a new cabling research called HDBaseT. This is being spearheaded by a group in the US called the HDBaseT Alliance, which has been founded by LG, Samsung, Sony Picutres and a chip company called Valens Semiconductor. What it aims to do is replace the myriad cabling that currently plagues home theatre setups with a single cable that does everything.

One cable for video, audio, networking and powerWhat is most intriguing is that this single cable is in fact the humble Cat5e/Cat6 ethernet cabling in other words so ubiquitous in the PC networking world. Or rather than just use the cable for data transfer, HDBaseT adopts what the alliance calls 5Play convergence. This refers to HDBaseT supporting digital video, audio, 100BaseT Ethernet, power and 'control signals'.

Ethernet cable seems pretty impressive

Cramming all this into an Ethernet cable seems pretty impressive, and is achieved by special transmitting and receiving chips designed by Valens Semiconductor. This is necessary because the innovation is asymmetric. During the Ethernet and control signal part of the innovation is omnidirectional, the video, audio and power signals take the form of one way traffic, sent from transmitting to receiving chips.

Getting beyond Ethernet's bandwidth limitationsThis allows HDbaseT to get around the inherent bandwidth limitations of Ethernet. To put it in perspective, current gigabit Ethernet innovation tops out at around 2Gbps when running on a PCI-Express enabled PC. Opposite an uncompressed HDMI 1.3 signal is capable of 10.2 Gbps in order to deliver images with technologies like Deep Colour enabled.

What about HDMI?

What about HDMI?HDBaseT does sound like a highly impressive research, and one that addresses some pretty important issues like cable clutter and limited lengths of HDMI cabling. Nevertheless we do wonder whether it is too late. HDMI has now firmly established itself as the dominant means of connecting HD video devices, during Intel's Wireless Display is as well now ready for primetime. Don't forget Displayport, which is as well gaining traction among PC manufacturers thanks to its royalty-free nature and increased flexibility over HDMI.