Over the last few days I have been on forums and chatting with friends about HDTV.
Anyone in the market should be aware that just getting HDMI is not enough. According to this article at cnet not all HDMI devices are compatible – nice. It was interesting to read Dvorak’s rant about HDCP in last month’s PC Magazine about what will happen when someone who bought a Sony TV two years ago, plugs in a new Sony blue-ray player only to find the player refuses to send HD content to the non-HDCP capable TV. Already I can picture non-technical yuppies flipping out at innocent Best Buy clerks – ‘listen sonny boy, I spent half your yearly salary on that [bleep]ing TV so you’d better make it work or..’.
Wikipedia details differences between versions of HDMI, which are principally higher bandwidth on video + new audio codec support (lossless TrueHD and DTS-HD). The question is would play a lossless codec straight to a TV’s built in speakers?
What is next? Probably a black market for boxes that accept any version of hdmi input, handshake with hdcp and output to DRM free DVI/ hdmi/ component video.