CEDIA HDMI Troubleshooting White Paper Preview

CEDIA (the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association) released a new white paper this Summer titled simply "HDMI Troubleshooting". CEDIA has been targeting HDMI and all of the technical hurdles and issues it involves for its members by systematically dissecting and providing solutions for the technology from a number of fronts. HDMI Troubleshooting, for example, is the fifth white paper put out by the organization in a series designed to help custom installers and CEDIA members in general develop best practices and even correctly diagnose potential difficulties with the format. We downloaded and looked over the document and it address tricky HDMI troubleshooting on a number of fronts. In general, it's been difficult to work through HDMI problems simply because it all but reverses (and spaghetti's, in our opinion) the normal troubleshooting methodologies enjoyed by analogue signal propagation.

The HDMI Troubleshooting guide goes through a sensible sequence of troubleshooting, from defining the problem, to identifying causes and running through a sequence of diagnostics. To the benefit of anyone who has encountered problems with HDMI, they seem to address the four most common problems:

• Flashing Video - HDCP Error
  
• No Video - Hot Plug Error
• Incorrect Format - EDID Error
  
• “Sparkles” or “Snow” in the video feed - Physical Layer Problem (Bad Cable/Connector/ Board)
  

They even offer ways to eliminate particular portions of the signal chain so that you can more quickly isolate and fix the trouble's source. It addresses going after malfunctioning devices through the use of physical inspection as well as specialized test equipment (and not the ridiculously expensive kind that generates eye patterns).

We liked the education process that CEDIA builds into its white papers, teaching members the correct terminology, such as "sink" (the display device) and "EDID" (the data that carries the parameters of the display device's requirements and capabilities). You can download HDMI Troubleshooting from the CEDIA Marketplace at www.cedia.org/marketplace along with their other white papers.

From the document itself:

HDMI Troubleshooting is the fifth document in a series of HDMI whitepapers published by CEDIA. Previous documents include Introduction to HDMI, HDMI Initialization Sequence, Best Installation Practices and Understanding EDID. HDMI Troubleshooting introduces troubleshooting principles for HDMI systems, helping readers identify possible causes of malfunction and simple troubleshooting techniques by inspection or using test equipment.

This and select other documents (including all 5 in the HDMI series) are available free of charge for CEDIA members or can be purchased for just $9.99 by non-members. Shortly, CEDIA will be combining all 5 documents into one massive HDMI "handbook" that will be available on their website by Fall. If you happen to be attending CEDIA Expo 2011, they will have a limited number of hard copies available for purchase.