Welcome back to HowToAV.tv! We're on the HDBaseT stand at ISE 2023
and I'm joined by Daniel Schwartzberg the last time we spoke was 7 years ago?
I think so Chris, it was a long time ago.
Well I believe that there's been some updates to HDBaseT since then
the last time we talked we were talking about HDBaseT 2.0 now it's time for all of the latest on 3.0 version.
Daniel before we go into what's changed let's have a quick brief about what HDBaseT is
and what it does for the AV industry. Absolutely so let's that's a great starting point let's
start with that so HDBaseT finally brought to the industry quite a few years ago a solution
for elegant Long Reach extension of all of the different data types that are needed in
installations so if we think about before HDBaseT You add a cable for HDMI and you had a cable
for ethernet and you had a cable for this and a cable for that. They were limited in size,
in length most of them couldn't be field terminated either so an installer had a heck of a job
trying to get the equipment placed where he wanted it within the limitations that the cabling had an
HDBaseT came along and said okay we can do this much better what we can do is take all
of those different protocols and we're going to converge them into a new protocol called HDBaseT
it's going to run over a very long reach single cable so it's one category cable that can run up
to 100 meters long it can be terminated in the field and on that cable we're going to do five
things we call it five play we're going to do the AV the audio video, and as we'll find out in
a moment when we talk about Spec 3 right now we're doing uncompressed 4K 60 444 so we've got the AV
on that cable we've got ethernet and it depends upon which version of the spec but it's either
100MB or 1GB of ethernet being tunnelled on the same cable we can now do also USB 2.0 we
can do all of the controls that are needed in the system whether it's RS232 UART, whether it's
I²C whether it's the thing that the HDMI interface needs like CC like the EDID and the HDCP
we can also do as the element power as well up to 100W of DC power all on the same cable so
suddenly the installer goes away from struggling with multiple short length cables to having one
cable five play elements on it and it's able to do everything they need and it really has since
it's came out has really revolutionized the AV industry and the way work is done.
And I cannot stress enough for those who are new to HDBaseT that this is over a single cable all of those signals and
it's using standard ethernet Category 6 cable.
It's you know in fact to begin with in fact the minimum
requirement of HDBaseT was just a simple CAT5E which was even unshielded and then as the spec versions
have increased so you want to put slightly better cabling in to get more margins but as you say it's
a single cable it can run up to 100 meters long off the shelf category cable cut it to exactly the
distance you need terminated in the field crimp on the connectors no wastage of cables makes them
very very neat easy to perform installation. And you talk about long route and I know we'll talk about
distances in a while but it's really important again if you think that the key benefit is that
you're using existing network cable infrastructure then if you start talking about the distances it's
a whole of the story again so if we compare distance maybe of HDMI to what you can do
with HDBaseT how will those two compare? Excellent question, so an HDMI cable, you're normally
going to get up to around about 10 maybe 12 meters and when you get to those sort of lengths you're
going to pay top dollar for it right these are not cheap cables. As I've said we can take that and we
can drive that up to 100 meters in some cases actually we go to 150 meters if you're willing
to compromise a little bit on the bandwidth so you've got a ton more cable reach available to you
but don't forget it's not just the distance it's the fact that on that one cable we have everything
else the audio, the video, the USB, the ethernet, the controls, and the power. And if you think about USB
USB 2.0 is actually limited by spec to a 5 meter cable so even if I can put an HDMI cable
in that does 10 meters I'm limited now by the USB okay with HDBaseT those limitations simply
Fade Away 100 meters no matter what the protocol is that's running on the cable.
So we last spoke about it 7 years ago I was sold back then it's an incredible technology really has revolutionized
the way that AV systems are installed now we're 7 years on we're now out with version 3.0 what
is the difference what are we now getting that we can add into a system? Well it's all about bandwidth and
just to remind everybody what spec 2 was capable of doing in the downlink it was an 8GB/s
link and in the Uplink it was 300MB/s. What that meant was that I
could run in for the video uncompressed 4K 30 444 or 4K 60420 in the Uplink, we call that our return
channel, that's where we carry all the non-video data so that would allow us
to do 100MG of ethernet plus USB 2.0 but with some limitations on the bandwidth that's available.
Fast forward those 7 years to where we are today - spec 3.0. We've doubled the downlink so
we've got 16GB/s in the downlink and I'm not going to do the maths in my head but I
think it's almost 7x more Uplink so from a 300MG backlink we've now got 2GB Uplink
so Spec 3: 16GB in the downlink, 2GB in the Uplink. What does that mean practically speaking?
That means that I can now run uncompressed 4K 60 444. We Are The Only Solution on the market
that runs completely uncompressed HDMI 2.0 formats okay? That's revolutionary. But because now I have
more bandwidth in my Uplink as well now I can increase the bandwidth for other interfaces so
my ethernet now jumps from 100MG to 1GB so I'm now tunnelling gigabit Ethernet at the same
time as I'm going to uncompressed HDMI 2.0. I have more bandwidth also from my USB 2.0 interface so
it's all about getting more data through the link and HDBaseT 3 has the ability to do that.
And we have some neat also our on-board chip to chip interfaces that allow us to do things like
daisy chaining allows to create more advanced apologies. HDBaseT has always been a networking
topology, and when I mean networking I've mean going Beyond just simple point-to-point links
so we're going away from the idea of having the transmitter here, a receiver there and
that's all we've got. No, now we can create very neat topologies like two by two switches without
the need for HDMI crossbars without the need for really anything else on the board. There's a lot of
new use cases and it's use cases that are not necessarily traditional HDBaseT markets.
I mean here we are at ISE, we walk around the show floor. We see switch matrices, we see extenders and
we see projectors and displays and they all have HDBaseT in them. But what we're seeing
now are brand new segments emerging, new markets. Things like industrial, things like Medical
transportation, and these are markets that maybe people don't traditionally think as being rife
for HDBaseT, but on the contrary it's one technology that serves an entire range of
use cases that quite literally are limited by the imagination so a lot of bandwidth,
a lot new of new applications are available. And you say we can't name names of course there are many
many manufacturers who use HDBaseT technology. If we talk about all of those certainly within
ISE right now we're seeing all of the lead players within AV is there compatibility between brand to brand of devices?
Absolutely so first of all, yeah HDBaseT is a technology that's backed by an alliance
of some 200 members as I said earlier. What that Alliance allows us to do is to implement what we
call our compliance testing specifications so in other words, what we do as an alliance we
will test customer products to ensure they meet the demands of the spec okay? And what that
guarantees is interoperability okay? So in other words I can now go and buy a switch Matrix from
company A and a projector from company Y and I will know that they will interoperate at the
best level that both support so if I'm mixing between vendors I have interoperability we also
have backward compatibility and interoperability between different versions of the spec so if I
have a Spec 3 product connected to a Spec 2 product, it will work. Of course it will work
at the level that spec 2 enables. So in other words, don't expect to have a 16GB link when I have a spec
2 product on it but you won't get a blank screen, you won't have to call the installer back to say
my system's not working. It's fully interoperable and that's the beauty of having such a large
Alliance it is the largest AV industry Alliance around and it continues to grow and as you say
on the screen we see some of them at the show. I have a card I didn't count them all but
I think there's more than 100 member companies here on the show displaying HDBaseT products
HDBaseT Spec3 is enjoying an enormous adoption rate. We have our HDBaseT power
wall here, we have around about 40 products from 25 customers just here in the booth but in fact there
are more 100 HDBaseT Spec 3 products that we know of currently in the marketplace and we hear our
customers telling us that they are transitioning to more and more HDBaseT Spec 3 product so we see
interoperability, you see a growing ecosystem of companies, we say growing ecosystem of
products, and everything fully compatible fully interoperable it's really a winning proposition.
Technology continues to move forward from HDBaseT making systems easier to install, faster to install
cheaper to install now of course as well. And the technology will not slow down we've seen adoption
of 3.0 throughout the industry we're going to see more and more products. Do not forget if
you're using 2.0 products at the moment you still have that interoperability. They do not
worry about new 3.0 and 2.0 working together. You are going to get that. Daniel, thank you so much
for joining us once again. We're not going to wait 7 years until we catch up! We'll see you again
next year if I don't see you before. Absolutely Chris!
So all join us again soon at HowToAv.tv