It was all a sham to get pennies on every device made. Millions if not billions was made of it. Sham I say. SHAM!

Fins, correct. It was not needed. And the sham of claiming it was to prevent pirating? HA! How did that work out? it didnt.

Isn't saying you know this guy akin to saying I knew David Koresh? Or someone like that. Distance. Thats what I would take from knowing this guy. It was done for money and money only. Good for his gain. But fugg him for how he got it.

I tend to agree!

The Kodi device that someone gave me as a gift that has the ability to watch movies for free that are still in theaters has an HDMI connection on it.

Just like. Or Hitler maybe.

Julie, you are taking some heat because somehow you think this guy is a hero and solved an industry problem, or maybe you just like knowing people with certain names or resumes.

If I didn't know that you wrote for an electronics publication, I would be inclined to think, how would she know about what a lousy system HDMI is, and how much time and money it has cost people who have been forced to implement it? But you are in the industry, and I hope to heavens you do know.

It has been a fail to keep from stealing content. It has been a fail as a trouble free way to pass high def video and audio around the house.

So being proud you know this guy just seems really off-the-wall to us.

To be fair, a lot of the grief we encounter is caused by the pasted on layer that attempts to stop pirates.

Oh please. A friend makes a perfectly nice connector 20+ years ago that Hollywood ends up adopting ... and staying with ... and crippling ... and failing to progress with ... the same Hollywood that tries to kill off a manufacturer of $20,000 media servers because it lets people make copies of their own DVDs, and to this day makes it illegal to back up one's own movies.

Yeah, I'm OK with a friend's accomplishment of making a successful cable and connector. Just like I'd be proud to know the chick who founded Vizio, even though it's clobbered our industry. Or the guy who invented styrofoam cups that will now clog our landfills til eternity. Or the bastard who thought it would be a great idea to take free water, put it in a plastic bottle, and sell it for $1.50. Or the dude who made greasy burgers and fries cheap and ubiquitous, contributing to our national obesity problem.

Fair use- look it up. Did you make cassette copies of your albums? Same thing. Did you pay for copies of other peoples' LPs? THAT's illegal.

Hollywood isn't as worried about A person making A copy of a DVD, they're concerned with all of the money they lose when someone makes a lot of copies and sells them. The stupid part is that when someone is making large quantities of forged discs, they aren't even using an AV cable, they save the video to a hard drive and use DVD or BD burners that are connected as/to a network.

Then, there's the Analog Sunset, which made higher def analog stop working as intended by the manufacturers at the time of the build and stuck users with crappy looking video from something they bought because it could do higher res output.

You write about this stuff, WE have to deal with its problems and the blow back from customers when it doesn't work. Don't assume you know what we deal with just because you talk to people in the industry.

As far as the connector being "perfectly nice", it's far from that. It's fragile, can work itself out of the port and it's a bad design, mechanically. You don't use a thin, wide and shallow plug if any amount of lateral/vertical force will be exerted on it in any direction where the dimension is small. That causes the end or the port to break and I have seen it many times.

HDMI sucks. I get that. I hate it. You hate it. The world hates it. That doesn't mean the guy who started the business 20+ years ago is evil. Just like the guy who invented styrofoam isn't evil. It all came back to bite us in the butt.

btw, according to DRM legal scholars (I checked in August), it is still NOT LEGAL to sell products that allow users to copy copyrighted DVDs. "Fair Use" is widely misunderstood. It is shameful.

Julie believes in the philosophy that if it makes someone money, then it's good. Damn the consequences.
Slight exaggeration, but not by much.

That's a good one considering I might be the most liberal person here.

Think back to 20+ years ago. You have this cable and connector that you think might make Hollywood and device manufacturers happy. Indeed, it does. It makes them happier than Firewire made them.

End of story. So now this entrepreneur -- who happens to be one of the kindest and most generous people I know -- is evil.

And I'm evil for respecting him.

Nice.

First, HDMI is not even a good connector. It’s bulky, heavy, fragile, and falls out of the jack.

Second, no one needed Hollywood to get on board for hardware. They got on board because of the supposed content protection. The true scam. For a connector, he only needed the hardware manufacturers to get on board. But Hollywood getting involved got him real royalties.

The whole thing reminds me of another story I heard. I don’t know if it’s true, but I was told once that Dow came up with the idea for fire caulk. They didn’t know for sure if they could make it. But there was no reason to try unless they could get a law passed requiring it. So they lobbied for building codes that require fire blocking in all holes. Then they figured out how to make a product.

Invent the problem them provide the solution

[Link: en.wikipedia.org]

There is one huge difference in all of those examples and HDMI. They all have alternatives. With HDMI, your conman friend got laws passed eliminating alternatives from the market.

It is NOT a good cable. So many conductors and not enough shielding causes RF interference which screws things up-design flaw.

The Connector is awful. with all those pins, even with miniaturization it is large, it doesn't lock nor does it do anything to ensure a snug fit. Like RCA, BNC, or DB9/25 etc.

Distance wasn't even considered in the original spec, but as we all soon learned distance would play a HUGE issue with HDMI

Everything about the standard seems to have been created by someone describing how to hook a cable box up to a TV who has never used either and is blind.

These are basic design flaws from the initial creation, a lot of our current problems are based on this flawed design so yeah good on you for knowing the guy who created HDMI. He is really bad at electrical engineering.