March Tech Tip - Know Your Cable

Tech Tips are written directly by the Murideo's Tech Support Team. With years of experience seeing every HDMI signal available and working with hundreds of different products, the support team picks up helpful knowledge talking to Integrators, calibrators and electronics manufacturers around the world. This series is aimed to share that knowledge. Here is this month tech tip:

Uncompressed Video distribution can be hard; Passive Copper HDMI cables falter with distance and HDMI extension methods suffer from bandwidth limitations. The Answer? Active Optical Cables of course!

What are Active Optical Cables (AOC)?
AOC HDMI Cables are uncompressed HDMI Cables capable of running 100 Meters due to 4 Strands of Fiber over the TMDS Lanes which carry Audio and Video signals. BUT not all AOC cables are made the same, just like anything some manufactures will take short cuts in the engineering and development areas. Many AOC cables require external power or worse, use Plastic Optical Fiber used in TosLink cables, a known poor quality fiber type not ready for high bandwidth signaling. These lower quality products will take up space with extra power supplies and often are unable to reach 18Gbps bandwidths, which is need for HDR and high frame rate video. 

The Solution!
The Bullet Train 10K AOC HDMI Ultra High Speed Cable is capable of uncompressed 48Gbps signaling and requires no external power supply. Bullet Train 10K AOC cables use Cleerline SSF OM2 Glass Fiber, and high quality fiber that is safe to terminate in the field. This means if we ever move past HDMI as a delivery method you can always cut off the heads of the cable and easily terminate the 4 individual fiber runs located inside the cable shielding. Not only future proofing your runs but allowing them to serve multiple distribution purposes.

HDMI 2.1 Bandwidth Chart

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This Tech Tip was written by Sam Metivier. Sam is a strong presence in our lab, always hungry for the latest technologies. Sam helps Murideo push technology into the future with this hard work and dedication to audio video distribution. ​