HDMI Cables will Expand Bandwidth via the 4th High Speed Video Channel, Currently the Clock Channel

As HDMI version 2.1 continues its rollout, Metra Home Theater Group spoke with HDMI expert Jeff Boccaccio of DPL Labs to hear his take on the adoption of 8K content and how it will affect existing HDMI cables. Since version 2.1 is such a significant change regarding bandwidth, Boccaccio thinks that this change will be implemented incrementally, starting with 24Gbps.

Are you hearing that HDMI® cable manufacturers already have 8K HDMI 2.1 cables and wondering how this can be? HDMI has not officially released the Compliance Test Specification (CTS) for HDMI version 2.1 (as of the original publish date of this article). So how can there already be Ultra High Speed HDMI Cables on the market?

According to HDMI, Ultra High Speed HDMI Cables are the proposed “format for the next generation of HDMI (officially HDMI 2.1), this new format may support bandwidths upwards to 48 Gbps. Please note however that the Cable Performance Compliancy Standards have not been finalized and that the entire transmission format has changed, this means that there is no way to test for this new specification”.