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The HDMI Founders include leading
consumer electronics manufacturers Hitachi, Matsushita Electric
Industrial (Panasonic), Philips, Sony, Thomson (RCA), Toshiba,
and Silicon Image. Digital Content Protection, LLC (a subsidiary
of Intel) is providing High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection
(HDCP) for HDMI. In addition, HDMI has the support of major
motion picture producers Fox and Universal, and system operators
DirecTV, EchoStar (Dish Network) as well as CableLabs.
HDMI supports, on a single cable,
any TV or PC video format including standard, enhanced, and
high-definition video along with up to 8 channels of digital
audio. It is independent of the various digital television
standards such as ATSC and DVB as these are encapsulations of
compressed MPEG video streams (which can be decoded and output
as uncompressed video stream on HDMI).
HDMI devices are manufactured to
adhere to various versions of the specification, where each
version is given a number such as 1.0, 1.2, or 1.3a. Each
subsequent version of the specification uses the same kind of
cable but increases the bandwidth and/or capabilities of what
can be transmitted over the cable. For example the previous
maximum pixel clock rate of HDMI interface was 165 MHz which was
sufficient for supporting 1080p at 60 Hz and WUXGA (1920x1200)
at 60 Hz. HDMI 1.3 increased that to 340 MHz which allows for
higher resolution, such as WQXGA (2560x1600), across a single
digital link.
HDMI supports 8 channel uncompressed digital audio at 192 kHz
sample rate with 24 bits/sample as well as compressed audio
streams such as Dolby Digital and DTS. HDMI supports up to 8
channels of one-bit DSD audio, which is used on Super Audio CDs,
at rates up to 4x that of Super Audio CD. With version 1.3, HDMI
also supports lossless compressed audio streams such as Dolby
TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. |
