by J.R. Powell

Created on: October 08, 2007

HDMI is the name of the connector on the back of the latest HDTVs, HD-DVD and Blu-ray players and other electronics equipment. It is also the name of the leads that you use to connect these together.

HDMI is used for transferring the video and audio from a HD-DVD/Blu-ray player etc. to a HDTV. As it is digital, it is the best quality connection to use and should, in theory provide no loss of information from the player to the TV (unless you used very long lead with a very poor quality cable - but generally most cables will be fine and stores selling really expensive HDMI cables are not worth the extra cost as a cheap cable will generally be just as good as it is a digital connection).

Not all electronics equipment have this socket, but if you are buying a new HDTV you should try to make sure that it has at least 2 HDMI sockets, so that you can have multiple devices connected simultaneously (eg. a HD-DVD player and a Blu-ray player or set top box etc.).

Also note that HDMI also allows for the studios to prevent copying. The next best quality connector, if connecting high definition players to a HDTV is the component connection, however, some studios may set a flag in their discs that means that discs played back over this connection will be of a greatly reduced resolution. Also, around 2010, electronics companies will start removing the analogue connectors (eg. component) so the only option will be to use copy-protected connectors such as HDMI.

HDMI 1.3

A new version of HDMI has appeared on some HDTVs, players etc. called HDMI version 1.3, and in theory, this should allow higher bitrate and more colours ("Deep Colour") to be sent from the players to the TV. However, all current high definition and standard definition discs and players only allow content to be stored using 8 bit colour (around 10.6 of a possible 16 million colours are used), so they do not take advantage of deep colour. It may currently be useful for games, etc. HDMI 1.3 also allows for auto audio/video synchronization, though I don't think it is currently used (or how much of an advantage it would be).

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