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Comment by Strang | Hacker News Reader

HDMI is also very unreliable in my experience. The sound on my tv cuts out randomly whenever viewing an HDMI source. And my monitor occasionally blacks out for a few seconds. Sometimes it doesn't come back on, or only displays colored static.

I suspect this has something to do with HDCP DRM, but I'm not sure if that's the case.

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Get a better cable, or don't bend your current cable so much.

Of note though that this has not been a problem I've observed with non-HDMI solutions.

One problem is that category 1 HDMI cables are only specified to support 1080i signals. They aren't guaranteed to support 1080p60, and a number of cables (especially no-name chinese cables or longer runs) are only tested to this spec, as category 2 has a huge leap in required bandwidth (all of HDMI 2.0's new stuff works with category 2 cables.)

So attempting to send 1080p over a category 1 cable isn't uncommon, and it often "works" with occasional dropouts.

I've had this issue and fixed it with a shorter HDMI cable, that also happened to be higher quality than the OEM cable (I also tried a 16' Blue Jeans cable, didn't work). I'm running 4k@30Hz and while I get the occasional black-out on my monitor, it's now a weekly thing instead of hourly or worse.

The thing with Blue Jeans cable and most audiophile brands, is that they don't have engineers that understand the digital signals enough to add effective shield/choke to the cable. They mostly know how to produce good analog cables as that is what they build their business on.

Just adding a ferrite tube at the end of the cable is not effective choke. and a cable without choke, is a interference antenna.

While this may be true in general of "audiophile" cable brands, Blue Jeans is not the kind of company that puts out $500 oxygen-free RCA cables pre-digested by civets (or whatever). It's pretty clear from poking around their site that they do, in fact, understand HDMI pretty well. (The Civet Poop Cable Company is not likely to use language like "if the cheapest cable will do everything you ask of it, there's no picture improvement to be had in going to the best cable (this is, after all, a digital signal)" on their web site.)

I don't know which of their cables the previous poster had trouble with, but I'm pretty sure he could have returned it for a refund.

(Disclosure: I have no relationship with BJC other than being quite happy with the speaker cables I've bought from them. Which I'm sure the Monoprice fans would tell me I overpaid for anyway, but, well.)

We use the BJC 16 footers at work for 1080p monitors that are mounted in the ceiling and generally the player is in a closet far away. It was just a cable that was handy.

I read that people having an identical issue had better results with shorter cables. I don't know any of the details but the shorter cable had a huge effect.

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