That's definitely a thing that happened, but it's minimising so much other important work that it's misrepresenting the whole thing.

Do you know how much bandwidth six channels of uncompressed audio needs? Home theaters would be a HUGE hassle without a single cable doing all that work for you.

ADAT Lightpipe supports up to 8 audio channels at 48 kHz and 24 bits - all using standard off-the-shelf Toslink cables and transceivers. MADI can do significantly more.

Let's not pretend surround sound is a nearly-impossible problem only HDMI could possibly solve.

I... think you might be proving my point for me? The ability to have a single cable that can do video AND a bunch of audio channels at once is amazing for the average joe.

Don't get me wrong, I use optical in my setup at home & I'd love to have more studio & scientific gear just for the hell of it, but I'm the minority.

I'm not trying to defend the HDMI forum or the greedy arsehole giants behind them. The DRM inbuilt to HDMI and the prohibitive licensing of the filters (like atmos) is a dick move and means everything is way more expensive than it needs to be. Was just pointing out that parent's comment was reductive.

> Do you know how much bandwidth six channels of uncompressed audio needs?

Yeah.

Half the bandwidth of USB 1.0.

Or, in terms of more A/V kinds of things, about two percent of original firewire.

Correct! Now put that USB cable _inside_ a DVI cable, magically solve all the buffering problems that plagued the industry for several decades, slap on some DRM over the top, and you'll have HDMI 1.0 :-D

You just replied to someone who explained it was about the DRM, with 'nuh-uh."

Pivot much?

The rest of the capabilities were all being done for over a decade before HDMI came out, and quite well by some companies.

Sure, firewire was typically used for video plus two channels of audio, but it's a single twisted pair, and HDMI uses 4 high-speed twisted pair to transmit clock and data, plus another few pins for out-of-band signalling information.

Technically, HDMI is actually a huge failure. It wasn't until 2.1 that they started supporting compressed video.

Take a system, figure out where it has the highest possible bandwidth need, and then insert the communication cable at that point. Yeah, that's the ticket!

Before HDMI, some equipment did AV sync really well, and even after HDMI came out, some TVs still didn't do the A/V sync very well. The correct buffering for that has nothing to do with the cable, although it might seem like it because when the audio comes out of the TV, the circuits in there sure ought to be able to do delay matching.

The adoption of HDMI was, in fact, completely driven by HDCP.

I replied to someone who claimed HDMI's only purpose was DRM, which is wrong.

I haven't pivoted since the start of the thread. There simply was not a digital solution that could negotiate then stream video and AND 2+ channels of audio, all in one cable, that was supported by more than a small fraction of consumer and industry devices at once. Firewire (which you seem fixated on), for all it's many technical superiorities, had almost zero market with Windows users, or consumers in general. Set-top boxes used it in the US, but was uncommon outside of the US. Camcorders used it, but in 2002 when HDMI came out most people were still using film camcorders IIRC; digital only really became commonplace well after HDMI gained footholds.

I'm not saying the cable itself controlled clocks and handshakes, I'm conflating terms over the last couple of comments. I'm referring to HDMI, the cable, the protocol, and the connectors. And yes - HDCP had a huge part in how HDMI was pushed, which is both bad (introducing proprietary bullshit's never great) and good (larger adoption of standards that work well in the field).

Was HDMI perfect? FAR from it. But all these "there was this tech that did THIS facet better" is missing the point that I've stated a few times. It was a good solution to a number of small problems.

I'll upvote you because you're mostly right.

But to be fair, there is a standard that could have been used for digital video, SDI/HD-SDI, but the transceivers were expensive and it doesn't support any form of bi-directional handshake. There was already prosumer kit, mostly in the US, which had SD-SDI connections as an alternative to component. It didn't get popular in Europe mostly because of SCART.

I was once talking with someone who was very much involved in the process of standardising TV connectivity, a senior engineer at Gennum, and he said it wouldn't have been practical and SDI couldn't have been competitive with HDMI.

Personally, I would have loved the idea of some kind of SDI with return path signalling, like a test probe connector: https://w140.com/tekwiki/images/thumb/8/86/Tek_Interface_Evo...