SAN JOSE—The HDMI Forum has announced the availability of the Ultra High Speed HDMI cables, which enable the full 48Gb/s performance of HDMI 2.1.

“The HDMI Forum didn’t rest after releasing the 2.1 specification, and 2020 was one of its busiest years ever,” said David Glen of Advanced Micro Devices and president of the HDMI Forum.

“We launched the Ultra High Speed HDMI Cable Certification Program (UHS Program) and now these UHS Cables are available in the market…,” he said.

The UHS Program ensures Ultra High Speed HDMI cables reaching the market support 4K, 8K, HDR, VRR, eARC and all other HDMI 2.1 features. 

The HDMI Forum also released the Compliance Test Specification for Active Cables in 2020, he added. Shortly, consumers will be able to buy Active Optical Cables supporting installations requiring longer cable runs.

Shipments of Premium HDMI cables reflect growing demand for 4K content as both consumer and commercial sectors look to connect 4K cable, satellite and IPTV set-top boxes to their televisions.

Premium HDMI cables are specified globally for use by service providers for in-home installations, the forum said.

The forum also is promoting HDMI Cable Power, which enables active HDMI cables to be powered directly from the HDMI connector without attaching a separate power cable.

More information is available on the HDMI Forum website. 

NEW YORK—What is HDMI 2.1? The new standard for HDMI connectors was confirmed back in November 2017, but has yet to trickle down into mass-market television hardware. When it does though, it will mark a big step for both the AV industry and the home viewers wanting to get the most of their TV series, films, broadcasts, and gaming consoles.

When High Definition Multimedia Interface (or HDMI) first arrived on the scene, everyone rejoiced at no longer having to use bulky SCART connectors, or those confusing component video cables, ever again. Instead HDMI offered high definition video with a connector that was just a little bigger than a standard USB plug. Over the years the HDMI standard has seen continuous improvement, with extra features being added as the needs of televisions have changed.

HDMI 2.1 is the next step in that process.

The headline feature here is support for 8K content at 60fps, but there are also a number of minor features that add up to a much more capable standard such as support for Variable Refresh Rates, Dynamic HDR and Quick Media Switching, which should make it faster than ever to change between the devices attached to your television.

Here’s a rundown of everything that’s due to arrive with the new standard:

RESOLUTION AND REFRESH RATES

The new HDMI 2.1 cables will allow faster refresh rates, including 8K resolution video at 60 frames per second and 4K at 120 frames per second—and it’s that second feature that will be the real selling point for gamers and home cinema geeks, at least at first.

“We’ve increased resolutions and frame rates significantly,” Jeff Park, director of marketing at HDMI Licensing, told TechRadar at CES 2017, adding at the time that the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games were going to be a driver for 8K TV content.

“NHK [Japan’s national public broadcaster] is going to push 8K120 as an actual broadcast stream, and many consumer electronics manufacturers want to hit that target, so we’re laying the pipe to give the industry flexibility. It’s practical stuff.”

Although it’s about keeping HDMI at the bleeding edge, HDMI 2.1 can actually go ever further, supporting resolutions as high as 10K at 120Hz—though that kind of capability is a while away from being supported on commercial sets.

DO I REALLY NEED 8K ANYWAY?

You may be skeptical of whether you even need 8K-capable hardware and connectors. And maybe you don’t: most content you’ll be watching on your TV will be in SDR or HD, and the industry is still adjusting to the flurry of 4K capable sets released to market. Isn’t this all preemptive?

Even if 8K TV isn’t on your radar, though, HDMI is looking ahead to its uses in VR, says Park. 

“8K content will have to follow, but it’s not all about linear content these days—it’s about VR,” he told us. “VR is targeting very high resolution and very high frame rates, and one of the targets the industry is talking about for VR applications is 8K at 240 Hz.”

That’s actually not in the HDMI 2.1 spec, but it’s achievable in the next spec, said Park, who thinks it’s even possible that some broadcasters could even skip 4K transmissions entirely and gun straight for 8K. You have been warned.

GAME MODE VRR

HDMI 2.1’s Game Mode VRR feature is about anything involving real-time interaction. The VRR stands for Variable Refresh Rate, which means less image lag, stutter and frame tearing similar to the effect achieved by FreeSync and GSync on the PC platform.

This is great news for gamers, because HDMI 2.1 will enable a 3D graphics processor to render and display images in real time, which will result in more fluid gameplay and greater detail.

Once again, this will find its biggest use in the world of VR. “VRR means no lag and a more immersive experience that you need for gaming, whether it’s traditional gaming or a cinematic ‘on the rails’ VR experience,” says Park. “An increase in fi delity is needed to make VR truly immersive.”

While it’s no endgame, HDMI 2.1 will bring convincing VR experiences closer. “But it will have an immediate impact on all gaming applications,” adds Park. “Whether it’s 480p gaming or 8K, it doesn’t matter—you’ll get that immediate feedback and interaction with HDMI 2.1.”

Another feature that will bring big benefi ts for gamers is Quick Frame Transport (QFT), which promises to reduce latency—great news for fast-paced games or online multiplayer.

WHAT IS DYNAMIC HDR?

Given the growing popularity of HDR, HDMI 2.1 bringing Dynamic HDR is perhaps the biggest news for home cinema afi cionados. Essentially it means that the very fi nest values for depth, detail, brightness, contrast and wider color gamuts can be sent to your TV on a much more nuanced basis.

“Today, HDR is done by taking average values for HDR across an entire movie, so while you still get some benefit, it doesn’t apply to each scene perfectly,” says Park. “Dynamic HDR enables the HDR metadata to be applied as precisely as frame by frame, or more practically, scene by scene.”

Frame by frame HDR would be massively time-consuming to produce, but scene by scene is feasible. Either way, HDR is about to be given a whole lot more impact.

WHAT IS EARC?

It’s not all about TVs, either; soundbars, AV amplifiers and other audio equipment will also benefit from HDMI 2.1—though it will mean upgrading all of your equipment.

For the last few generations, HDMI cables have had an Audio Return Channel (ARC), which means audio can be sent both ways between a TV and audio gear. This essentially enables a display to send its own audio—perhaps from a built-in Netfl ix app—to a soundbar or surround sound system, bypassing its own speakers.

Enhanced Audio Return Channel (eARC) is nothing more than a simple update to keep pace with changes in audio codecs, specifically to include the new object-based audio codecs, Dolby Atmos and DTS:X.

“eARC ups the bandwidth significantly,” says Park. “Previously you were limited to two-channel PCM or legacy Dolby Digital or DTS audio, but with eARC that reverse channel can now support much higher bandwidth audio including Dolby True HD, DTS HD, Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and other object-based audio at much higher bandwidths.”

WHAT IS A 48G CABLE?

This is about defining a new specification of a HDMI cable’s speed, with so called 48G cables (for now just a working title) offering 48Gbps bandwidth for sending uncompressed 8K video, with HDR, over a HDMI 2.1 cable.

So why do we need a 48G-rated cable? “Because we’re carrying so much data now—we’ve gone from 18 Gbps in HDMI 2.0 to 48 Gbps in HDMI 2.1,” says Park. “Today we have ‘standard speed’ and ‘high speed’ HDMI cables, and 48G will be related to that.”

Ditto the compliance tests that each HDMI 2.1 cable will have to pass in order to be labelled as such. Backwards compatible with earlier versions of the HDMI specification, and able to be used with existing HDMI devices.

WHICH TVS COME WITH HDMI 2.1 ALREADY?

As of 2020, HDMI 2.1 is starting to creep into the high-end ranges of today’s major TV brands. Many of these sets only feature one HDMI 2.1 port (with two or three HDMI 2.0 inputs alongside), as with Samsung’s Q950TS 8K QLED, new for this year. All of Samsung’s 4K QLED sets this year will feature one HDMI 2.1 port, which means you’ll have some options.

Others are being more generous with their support, with the LG CX OLED featuring four HDMI 2.1 ports—though at 10-bit 4K/120 Hz passthrough rather than the full 12-bit. This shouldn’t really affect your picture onscreen, given that the CX only has a 10-bit panel anyway, though it’s worth noting that there are other LG TVs that support the full 12-bit HDMI, such as the ZX OLED.

Most 4K TVs in 2020 won’t feature HDMI 2.1, though, and it will likely take another couple of years before its usage is more standard. Sony’s brand-new A8H OLED, for one, has no HDMI 2.1 ports, despite Sony’s gaming arm launching the 4K/120HZ-capable PS5 console later this year.

This article originally appeared on TVT’s sister publication TechRadar.

LAS VEGAS—The HDMI LA (Licensing Administrator) hopes to publish the first HDMI 2.1 compliance test specifications in Q2 and roll out the rest in phases through Q3 and Q4, but certified products aren’t likely to be on the market this year, HDMI Forum executives said during CES 2018.

Nonetheless, some 2018 CE products could be available later this year with some 2.1 features enabled but without having undergone certification testing for those features, said Robert Blanchard, president of the HDMI Forum, which develops HDMI specs. A number of features will be ready for certification testing by year’s end, he added.

Some 2.1 features, such as eARC, could be added to some current products as firmware updates, he added, and in fact Marantz plans to add eARC firmware updates to some of its current AVRs at an unspecified date.

Forum executives would not speculate on when the first CE products with certified HDMI 2.1 ports would be available to consumers. Forum chairman Chris Pasqualino said the forum is trying to publish the first phase of compliance-test requirements in the second quarter and hopes the requirements for all testing will be ready in the third quarter, though the final requirements might also come in the fourth quarter. In terms of text, the size of the spec doubled over its predecessor, so “there is a lot to test,” he said

The forum is “highly focused on compliance testing,” Blanchard added.

Finalization of the 2.1 specification was originally promised for the second quarter of 2017 but slipped into the fourth quarter. The original due date was a best estimate that slipped because the forum received more comments in the comment period than expected.

In its CES booth, HDMI LA is hosting demos of three pre-production AVRs with eARC, ultra-high-speed bandwidth, ultra-high-speed cable dynamic HDR, and other 2.1 features.

The HDMI 2.1 spec, released by the HDMI Forum in late 2017 and licensed by the HDMI LA, boosts data throughput to 48Gbps from 18Gbps, supports 8K video for TVs, 5K and 10K video for ultra-wide-format commercial displays and ultra-wide consumer TVs, higher frame rates to 120 fps at resolutions from 4K to 10K, and features native support for potential future active-metadata HDR technologies. Ultra High Speed HDMI cables supporting HDMI 2.1 will be backward compatible with ports incorporating earlier versions of HDMI.

New Ultra High Speed HDMI cables with 48Gbps bandwidth, up from 18Gbps for Premium cables, will be needed to pass through 8K and 10K resolutions and 5K resolutions at 48 fps and up. Some 4K video will also need the extra bandwidth, such as 4K video at 48 fps with 12-bit color depth and 4:4:4 chroma.

The new cable creates extremely low EMI (electro-magnetic interference) to reduce interference with nearby wireless devices, the forum said. The cable is backward-compatible for use with the installed base of HDMI devices.

HDMI 2.1 also widens the bandwidth of the Audio Return Channel (ARC) to 38Mbps from 1Mbps, leaving ample room for bandwidth-intensive audio formats to pass from a TV to HDMI-equipped AV receivers and sound bars. The new ARC, dubbed eARC for enhanced ARC, adds support for such audio formats as Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio and up to eight channels of 192kHz/24-bit sound.

The new ARC also eliminates interoperability problems between brands by moving device discovery from HDMI CEC to a new eARC data channel.

Though HDMI 2.0 already supports at least two dynamic-metadata technologies -- Dolby Vision and HDR 10+, HDMI 2.1 added native support for potential future active-metadata HDR technologies, thanks to its extensibility, said HDMI Forum president Robert Blanchard.

Video streams requiring the new cable include 4K video with 10-bit color depth, 48-60 fps and 4:4:4 chroma; most variations of 5K video; and all variations of 8K and 10K video.

Many high-res video streams will pass uncompressed through new Ultra High Speed HDMI cables, but Display Stream Compression (DSC) will kick in to squeeze through some streams whose uncompressed signal exceeds 48Gbps. Examples include 5K with 10-bit color depth, 100-120 fps and 4:4:4 chroma; 8K with 10 bits, 48-60 fps, and 4:2:0 chroma; and 10K with 10 bits, 24-30 fps, and 4:4:4 chroma.

Other enhancements in HDMI 2.1 include:

•  A variable refresh rate (VRR) to reduce or eliminate lag, stutter and frame tearing to deliver more fluid and better detailed gameplay. 

• Quick media switching (QMS) for movies and video to eliminate blank screens before content is displayed. 

• Quick frame transport (QFT) reduces latency for smoother no-lag gaming and real-time interactive virtual reality. 

• And auto low latency mode (ALLM), which automatically sets the ideal latency for smooth, lag-free and uninterrupted viewing and interactivity. 

This story first appeared on TVT's sister publication TWICE.

LAS VEGAS—HDMI Forum announced the upcoming release of Version 2.1 of the HDMI specification. This latest HDMI specification is said to support 4K60 and 4K120, “dynamic HDR” and up to 48 Gbps with a 48G cable. Vers. 2.1 is backward compatible with earlier versions and was developed by the HDMI Forum’s Technical Working Group.

The audio return channel supports the most advanced audio formats such as object-based audio, and enables advanced audio signal control capabilities including device auto-detect.

Game Mode VRR (SeeEurogamer’s write-up for details on Game Mode VRR) features variable refresh rate, which enables a 3D graphics processor to display the image at the moment it is rendered for more fluid and better detailed gameplay, and for reducing or eliminating lag, stutter, and frame tearing.

The new specification will be available to all HDMI 2.0 adopters, who will be notified when it is released early in Q2 2017.