HDMI 1.3 Home Theater: What you need to know

Posted by Wayde || 02/25/2008 - 10:34 || 1 comments

If you're in the market for a home theater receiver you won't research long ‘til you hear praise for the HDMI specification 1.3. Some will claim HDMI 1.3 offers real future proof connectivity. Many will go so far as to advise you don't buy an HDTV, A/V receiver or video disc player unless it's armed with HDMI version 1.3.

The trouble is there is no such thing as future proof. But that doesn't mean HDMI 1.3 should be ignored.

The new specification offers a single link bandwidth of 340MHz (10.2Gbps). Increased bandwidth between components makes it compatible with new audio/video standards.

Audio over HDMI 1.3

Dolby Digital True HD, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS-HD and DTS-HD Master Audio are the new audio codecs that require HDMI 1.3.

The one and only reason to go for HDMI 1.3 at this time is to bitstream the new audio codecs.

That means the disc player has to read a disc with a TrueHD soundtrack, and stream it to your A/V receiver before decoding it. The A/V receiver will then decode the audio and play it back to through the speakers. But that's not the only way to enjoy the new codecs.

You don't need the HDMI 1.3 specification on your A/V receiver if it has analog inputs and your disc player is capable of decoding the high resolution audio codec and sending out via its analog connections.

Video over HDMI 1.3

There is no video justification for HDMI 1.3, at least not yet. The only advance in video that requires HDMI 1.3 is Deep Color or x.v.Color. All versions of HDMI are compatible with 1080P resolution so you don't need HDMI 1.3 just because you've got an HDTV capable of 1080P.

Deep Color is are color depths that go beyond the capability of human vision and are very demanding on bandwidth. A few displays today are compatible with deep color, but it'll be a long time before there will be any regular consumer sources for x.v.Color.

In other words no movie discs use it and no player will send x.v.Color to your HDTV and the cable/satellite providers aren't going to provide Deep Color for the foreseeable future.

For now, Deep Color isn't quite ready for the mainstream consumer market and there is no compelling evidence that it ever will be. It should not be the impetus for an upgrade to HDMI 1.3.

So, the only tangible advantage offered by HDMI 1.3 today is the new lossless, high resolution audio formats available on HD discs. If you can play them back through a good quality speaker system - there is nothing like experiencing a movie with a DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack.

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Comments

Otis writes:

It's even better then that! If your Blu-ray player has a True-HD decoder built in (most do) you can decode the audio (un-pack/un-lock/decode/whatever) and then send the UNCOMPRESSED 8 channel audio over HDMI to your receiver. Guess what, Dolby says that this is bit for bit identical to decoding in the receiver and they prefer doing it this way!!!! You don't need hdmi1.3 for the new formats, just hdmi 1.1 and a reciver with hdmi inputs and a player with the decoder built in. Why pay for it twice?

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