HDMI 2.0 Officially Announced 293
jones_supa writes with news that HDMI 2.0 is out. From Engadget "The folks at HDMI Licensing are announcing HDMI 2.0 officially. Arriving just in time for the wide rollout of a new generation of Ultra HDTVs, it adds a few key capabilities to the standard. With a bandwidth capacity of up to 18Gbps, HDMI 2.0 has the ability to carry 3,840 x 2,160 resolution video at 60fps. It also has support for up to 32 audio channels, 'dynamic auto lipsync' and additional CEC extensions. The physical cables and connectors remain unchanged."
Just like HDMI 1.4, the specification is only available to HDMI Forum members.
Re:THROW AWAY YOUR OLD AND BUY THE NEW !! (Score:2, Interesting)
HTPC + VGA/DVI compatible TV* + BD-ROM drive + AnyDVD driver
*Because HDMI sucks at displaying text. Unless they finlly fixed that in HDMI2 (which I doubt)
DOES IT HAVE MEANINGFUL ERROR-CHECKING? (Score:4, Interesting)
HDMI is a pure digital signal, with error checking. But since there's no means of retransmitting a broken packet (and thus no valid reason for buffering) in actual practice it's less capable of error checking and bit regeneration [wikipedia.org] than methods used by scribes in the ninth century [wikipedia.org]. You can know you lost more bits than you can regenerate, but you can't do anything about it.
I think this is because HDMI is not really a method for clean digital signal transmission, but rather a way to stealthily carry HDCP into the consumer mainstream. The feature set is primarily aimed at preventing users from doing things (like making backups) rather than providing the maximum benefit to end users.
Re:No Mention (Score:4, Interesting)
Color my cynical but I see all this hype with 3D TV and movies and cable companies looking at these silly things as a way to extort money from $50 a month to $199 for HD. WIth 4K HD here comes $499 a month, now add conference rooms and TV makers, ... oh I guess greenRay DVDs are needed so now Sony can make even MORE $$$ for these etc. Sadly idiots wil pay for these too and then wonder how they are just barely making it with their middle class salaries and how they could have bought a brand new car for the monthly bills they keep paying for such garbage with minor improvements of what they had.
Just because they make it, doesn't mean wel'll buy it.
3DTV is probably here to stay, but not a lot of people are upgrading TVs just to get 3D. And 3D media is fairly scarce and largely irrelevant. Even the TV salesmen will admit that 3D is a flop. Nobody with a 60" edge lit LCD from 3 years ago is even slightly interested in upgrading to 3D. The only people buying them are people upgrading from CRT, upgrading from a smaller TV, or who have a older LCDs/Plasmas/DLPs that are dying. And they are buying them because it doesn't cost any more than a TV without 3D.
4K HD... I'm looking forward to that one with respect to computer displays etc, but I doubt a lot of people care for TV. I doubt it'll gain traction as a must have upgrade, and will instead become like 3DTV... where everyone buying a new TV will end up with it once its no more expensive than buying a TV without it. And half or more of them will never be used with any 4K content anyway for years to come.
oh I guess greenRay DVDs are needed
Blu ray launched just in time for the disc market to collapse as people switched to streaming. I doubt a greenRay tech will ever see the light of day as consumer disc media for movies. Most people are satisfied with streaming stuff at lower quality than DVD, nevermind bluray... the content market for 4HD just doesn't exist no matter how badly the gear industry wants one. Meanwhile the broadcasters don't have the bandwidth for it. The movie rental places have nearly disappeared. The movie stores are struggling and diversifying away from movies.
We'll get 4HD gear sooner than later, and 4HD content eventually, I'm sure, but its going to take some amazing marketing to convince us we need it enough to upgrade.