By Megan Hayes

No, it’s not because people in the CE industry are too busy to find romance any other way. In this case it’s the products doing the speed dating. The common attraction for these products is that they connect using HDMI. HDMI makes use of the CEA-861 standard and High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) from DCP LLC. The product speed dating happens twice a year when CEA and DCP co-host each PlugFest event. The 10^th PlugFest event was held last week in Milpitas, CA.

More than 200 HDMI products converged on a hotel, escorted by their design teams with dating schedule in hand. Starting at 8 a.m. on Monday each video source moved to a room where an HDMI-equipped display waited to pair up. The teams connected their products and ran through basic interoperability tests. On the hour, hotel doors swung open, and the video sources moved on to the next display on their date list. PlugFest events span the entire week in an effort to pair up as many products as possible and stamp out potential design problems.

PlugFests are one tactic of many being used by the industry to address HDMI’s start up problems associated with the lighting-fast adoption of the interface. Training and compliance testing are also part of the arsenal aimed at making HDMI as reliable as component video. HDMI holds the promise of bringing out the best in an AV system with just a single cable. Many in the industry believe we have turned the corner and are starting to see that dream unfold for consumers.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Connectivity, DTV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.