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HDMI and HDR10+ Keep Up With The Game The Latest Versions of HDMI and HDR10+ Include Features That Hard-Core Gamers Will Appreciate By Michael Heiss If you ever want to see a residential specialist shiver, just whisper “HDMI” in their ear. For a technology that has made almost everything we do in video and home theater connectivity happen — including 4K, HDR, High Frame Rates (HFR), Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) to help play game content with little or no jitter or stutter, ARC, and much more — HDMI often gets a bad rap. To reuse an old cliché, “HDMI: You can’t live with it, and you can’t live without it!” To the credit of the HDMI Forum and HDMI Licensing Administrator, the HDMI format itself is often not the cause of the abovementioned shivering. Sometimes it is the fault of HDCP authentication, not HDMI. Sometimes it is poor implementation of hardware or software in the connected devices, not the fault of HDMI, itself. Sometimes the root cause of professed HDMI woes are the connecting cables. No, it is NOT always their fault, HDMI is just too easy to pin the blame on, even when it isn’t deserved. One way that HDMI has been trying to keep things moving is through new versions of the format. Over the past 20 years we’ve gone from HDMI 1.0 to HDMI 1.3, HDMI 1.4 and 1.4a, and most recently to HDMI 2.0, which enabled all the features we demand for today’s home entertainment environment. Continuing to move forward, HDMI LA, the guardians of the format and its intellectual property, has just announced HDMI 2.1a. To be certain, this is not a major upgrade. However, particularly for gamers, it will be a useful one. Along with the usual collection of normal software improvements and bug fixes, as well as improved performance for features such
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Residential Tech Today | Vol. 4 / Issue 1
as QMS (Quick Media Switching), HDMI 2.1a brings yet another acronym to the technology lexicon: SBTM, which stands for Source-Based Tone Mapping. HDMI 2.1a Improvements for Gamers One industry that has benefited from many of us being cooped up inside for more than a year is the video game industry. Gaming has become a major way to pass the time and, as much as possible, interact with other people. With new consoles such as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, along with the latest sophisticated video cards for PC gaming and e-sports, the video displayed during a game has changed from the early days of Pong. Screens are no longer just the game content but, particularly for Twitchers, there is also a window with the gamer’s video image and a
chat window. This is all well and good, but what happens when the game is in HDR, the camera window is SDR, and the chatbox is, well, simple white on black text? Too many frame rates and too many color-capability formats. No matter how good the display is, it can only do so many things and the related computations at the same time. Solving that is where Sourced-Based Tone Mapping comes in. It allows the source device on one end, be it a game console, PC, streaming device, set-top box, or optical player, to talk with the sink device (the display) on the other hand, sharing the processing load of managing the disparate parts of a single video image. Tone Mapping today is where the display tries its best to deal with the incoming HDR or SDR video and “map” it to the TV’s brightness
