THE FRONT LINE: JANUARY 29, 2008
News From The “Other” Format War
While the blue laser DVD battles continue, the war over next-generation multimedia interfaces is all but over.
Today’s email brought a press release from research firm InStat (http://www.in-stat.com) that stated approximately 143 million HDMI-enabled consumer electronic devices (HDTVs, set-top boxes, DVD players, etc) will have been shipped in 2007.
Think about that number for a moment: 143 million! That’s about 150 times the total number of blue laser DVD players purchased last year. Of course, HDMI is just an interface, not a complete product. Even so, this story should dispel any doubt as to the success of HDMI – it has captured the CE market, and convincingly so.
The InStat report also mentions how HDMI’s ancestor (DVI) continues its slow march towards the endangered species list, declining from 112 million device shipments in 2007 to 3 million shipments in 2011. But HDMI (http://www.hdmi.org/) isn’t picking up all of that slack.
Apparently the nascent DisplayPort interface, developed by VESA, will be to blame for some of that decline. DisplayPort (http://www.displayport.org/), which officially launched at CES 2007, made its appearance on a few CE gadgets and computers at this year’s CES.
It’s expected that DisplayPort will make some inroads with desktop and laptop computer manufacturers, although the royalty payments that cover the 40+ patents associated with DisplayPort may dissuade some brands and steer them to HDMI instead.
HDMI, for those who don’t known, was developed by Silicon Image and is licensed through HDMI Licensing LLC, providing a one-stop shop for royalty payments. Prior to DisplayPort’s introduction, there was some minor squawking about the per-unit payments, and those were quickly adjusted after the 2007 DisplayPort launch.
Both interfaces offer similar bandwidth in the range of 10.2 to 10.7 Gb/s. Both can carry multiple channels of audio, copy protection, and control interfaces. DisplayPort’s one advantage was its ability to drive digital display directly from a PC, eliminating one interface in the monitor.
We’ve already seen some HDMI-equipped notebooks this past year from HP and Sony, but I have yet to see a production notebook with DisplayPort connections. Most notebooks still ship with 15-pin VGA analog output jacks! There are a few out there equipped with DVI connections, but DVI doesn’t support digital audio — only display signals.
While HDMI’s dominance is pretty much assured, there are a few oddball interfaces that provide alternatives to the 20-year-old VGA port. One that was shown at CES was DisplayLink (http://www.displaylink.com/home.html), which utilizes the USB 2.0 connector and can drive multiple displays in clone or extended desktop modes.
While not a substitute for HDMI — it’s a display interface only — the concept of using a USB port as a display interface shows there’s more than one way to get around analog video connections.
So while the battle rages on over which blue laser format will dominate (and it appears Blu-ray has the upper hand right now), you can relax in the knowledge that the digital video connectors used on these players — as well as set-top boxes, media servers, and even portable media players — will be the same, no matter what the outcome.
