Inside an HDMI Problem

What a terrible generic example. We have no idea how you ran any of your cable, no idea how good you were at terminating them or the quality of the components to make the correct terminations.

“Only a single Cat 5 was brought to the drop”.
Are you kidding me? wait ...Are you kidding me?  on large installations where our runs exceed 150 feet to a display we run 2XCat 5, 2XCat 6, 1x Coax, minimum. The words future and redundancy. 

A comment towards the short HDMI cables to complete the connection, as far as I know each balun over single cat requires a 3 foot cable max, could have saved yourself minutes.

ADT’s lol, a new acronym, HDMI, the STD of the CI world.

UTS—not all applications enjoy the luxury of having multiple wire runs. And some of the newer one-wire technologies (because they ARE so good) may tempt some integrators and consumers to run only one Cat 5, when multiple cables are always better.

I think it’s a pretty decent real-world scenario in a tiny editorial package.

@Julie
Why are you calling multiple wire runs a “luxury?”  Let’s call it what it is:  pulling a single CAT-5 cable to a display location is just bad practice.  It’s not a “luxury” - or lack of luxury - it’s just plain dumb.

In the scheme of things, almost NO homes have more than one cat 5 pulled to a single location. People didn’t do that back then…

In the scheme of things, almost NO homes have more than one cat 5 pulled to a single location. People didn’t do that back then…

Is this a website for the normal joe or for custom integrators. If a house that any one reading this website does not have more then one cat 5 pulled to EVERY location then they shouldn’t be reading this website.

Phil—Indeed, this site is for our many dealers who serve the 100 million+ households that don’t have more than one cat 5 to any location. Those are much more plentiful than the relatively small number of homes built in the last 10 years that MIGHT have multiple cable runs.

Consider also the secondary rooms of a home (bathrooms, guest rooms, etc.) that even today are wired with a single Cat 5 for Internet only.

As usual we get several defensive and accusatory posts from insecure integrators who wouldn’t recognize good business knowledge if it kicked them in the ass.  Of course integrators run more than one Cat 5e, so what?!

1. Even with the two cat 5e the HDMI cable still needed to be shortened, so the moral of the story is still relevant.

2. Would it occur to you geniuses that maybe the article helps to make clear that it IS a good practice to run more than one cat 5e, and therefore your points make no sense.

3. Since integrators run into houses every day of the week that are already wired and have only one cat 5e in place, that’s just one more reason that the info in this article is relevant, no?

@John
Actually, my problem is with Julie calling more than one cable a “luxury” as if best practices are treated like some unattainable things that only the 1% get.  You get my point exactly - it’s bad practice and that needs to be pointed out.

So when Julie made the innocuous and 100% factual statement that “not all applications enjoy the luxury of having multiple wire runs”, she was treating best practices as if they are unattainable?  Seriously???

@John
Yes, seriously.  Recognize best practices for what they are and stop referring to them as luxuries and maybe people start getting the picture.  Let’s define the word “luxury”:

1.
a material object, service, etc., conducive to sumptuous living, usually a delicacy, elegance, or refinement of living rather than a necessity.
2.
free or habitual indulgence in or enjoyment of comforts and pleasures in addition to those necessary for a reasonable standard of well-being.
3.
a means of ministering to such indulgence or enjoyment.
4.
a pleasure out of the ordinary allowed to oneself.
5.
a foolish or worthless form of self-indulgence.

Okay, so maybe unattainable was a step too far.  But the reality is that this industry needs to stop treating best practices as if they are luxuries and start treating them like every day occurrences.  If we can just get there then these silly issues become less and less frequent.  All too often integrators try and make something work that they just shouldn’t and in the end who gets hurt?  The integrator, the end user, the builder, the consultant, the manufacturer… the list goes on.

Details, I really have no idea where this is coming from. Purpose of story and my comments is that the best practice is multiple runs of cable. End of story.

But as there are millions of homes ALREADY in existence and home builders continue to build more homes with solo cable runs ... integrators will encounter countless situations where they don’t have the “luxury” of using multiple cables. They will have to make do with what they have. Jeff gives us a few good principles for such scenarios.

I believe we are all pretty much in agreement, but some folks are just getting a little touchy about semantics.

I don’t have the luxury of an electrical outlet by my desk, so I have to run an extension cord….

Details, I really have no idea where this is coming from. Purpose of story and my comments is that the best practice is multiple runs of cable. End of story.

But as there are millions of homes ALREADY in existence and home builders continue to build more homes with solo cable runs ... integrators will encounter countless situations where they don’t have the “luxury” of using multiple cables. They will have to make do with what they have. Jeff gives us a few good principles for such scenarios.

I believe we are all pretty much in agreement, but some folks are just getting a little touchy about semantics.

I don’t have the luxury of an electrical outlet by my desk, so I have to run an extension cord….

@Julie

This is where it’s coming from:  stop marginalizing and start holding ourselves and the rest of the industry (including the home builders) to a higher standard.  “Just make it work” really means “forget best practices and hope for the best.”

Do you think the IT industry would have found it acceptable to just go into a job where they were to deploy a gigabit network, find CAT3 cable, then proceed to use every hack work-around known to the modern world to make it work and then write an article about it - and then defend their stance that having CAT5e was a luxury not afforded this installation?  No.  They wouldn’t have even tried it.  They would have let the customer know and let the customer decide if they want to pull new wire or deploy a network that does not meet their original expectation and specification.

@details matter, your analogies are off.  Trying to distribute HDMI over Cat 5e is not like trying to deploy a gigabit network over Cat 3.  Rather it’s like using Cat 5e for gigabit.

The entire IT industry is based on finding ways to continue to use existing infrastructure to support new technologies, that’s the entire point of doing gigabit over Cat 5e, rather than requiring Cat 6 to do it. 

HDBaseT is a standard, which allows transmitting HDMI over a single cat 5e.  Therefore you should be very happy :p.