Here at Design Innovation we have been trying the HDMI over IP system from Just Add Power and whilst they’re good they do suffer from some image jitter problems. The recent announcement that the second generation models will be launched at the Home Technology show in June is really good news. Having a reliable and flexible HDMI distribution system will make all installers lives much easier and help us to finally deliver  a Hi Def video distribution system that customers have been expecting for so long.

We will see how these devices work in the real world in a couple of months but more information is coming out and it  looks good; loss less video compression being an important feature. The move to Gigabit Ethernet was inevitable and that will push up the price of the switch especially if the PoE receivers are used as a PoE switch will be required but bear in mind we can use a 48 port switch if necessary for very large installations and there is nothing else on the market that can offer that.

For those of you how don’t know what HDMI over IP is, let me explain – HDMI was designed to connect a single source to a single display, in the home automation world we want to do a great deal more connecting many sources into many displays. For this we use a matrix switcher which back in the days of analogue component video worked first time with no problems, HDMI has been a very different story. Matrix switchers do exist for HDMI but they each have their own set of problems, not least long switching times (10 to 15 seconds) and limited cable runs (about 30m) HDMI over IP resolves many problems by doing the switching in the IP domain using a managed Ethernet switch; each input is set up on it’s own virtual LAN and the outputs are switched between the VLANs using a control system such as Control 4, Crestron or AMX.   By ensuring a HDMI output from a source does not go into standby when not connected to an output (there is a trick for this) switching times are around a second or so!

As with other HDMI distribution systems you need to ensure all displays are the same resolution and ideally all from one or two different manufacturers.

Once we get our hands on the 2G HDMI over IP units I’ll post our thoughts on this exciting system.