People like me trying to build whole house digital entertainment systems become very familiar with the dropouts that may occur when you have any HDMI connection other than the most basic (media player to TV with 6' cable). You'll begin to see problems when you have HDMI switches, HDMI active splitters (don't even bother with passive splitters), ethernet HDMI extenders, longer than 15 foot cables, and so on. I've seen hundreds of pages of complaints and occasional successful solutions at premier AV websites. These dropouts may occur constantly, or irregularly. For me, they've always been irregular, and recently have been 1 or so dropouts per hour, sometimes rising above 10 per hour. I think I now have the situation better under control (I now see about one or so dropouts in a whole day hours could go by without getting one, but then I could get several in one hour) and may get even better as I perfect my system further.
Here's a pretty good introduction to HDMI problems and the most basic ways of fixing them.
BTW, the whole reason for the complexity that makes HDMI dropout prone is copy prevention systems like HDCP and their endless need for timely handshaking to be absolutely positively sure nothing is being copied. That was the primary engineering requirement for HDMI. The second goal seems to have been the requirement that users must buy expensive computerized switching and distribution gadgets when analog video only required simple mechanical switches. Industry likes that for two reasons. It discourages people from doing exactly what I am doing, and instead have the satellite or cable company provide the multi-room capabilities for you (which limits your AV network to their sources, and forces you to pay them for your multi-room capability). Make users into sheeple, in other words. And the second is that for those users who refuse to be sheeple, make them pay through the nose to do the least little extra thing. I have spent several thousand dollars on HDMI switching and distributing equipment and cables over the last 8 years that I've been using HDMI. Much of that was problematic and had to be replaced with even more expensive stuff.
Update: My dropouts have almost entirely disappeared since I replaced a 25 foot tangle of Cat6 STP with a short 3 foot piece of my new standard, Cat6a STP (same as used in the attic). I did have to make the HDMI cable slightly longer, from 3 feet to 5 feet, so this required the purchase of two new cables (5 foot HDMI and 3 foot Cat6a STP) which I just received recently. I also ditched the audio inserter that inserts digital audio (from coax) into a DVI interface to produce an HDMI signal...that's a troublesome process (both digital streams must remain in sync) and the adapter itself is not professional grade and had frequent problems. The ultimate solution to analog-video-to-hdmi would be a brand new DVDO (to replace my 10 year old unit) but I haven't sprung for it yet. Unlike my older model, the new one takes care of the audio insertion internally and has a true HDMI output rather than DVI. The analog-to-HDMI lets me watch my harddrive recorder and SVHS machine on the whole house network, it's actually one of the things I use most.
Here's a pretty good introduction to HDMI problems and the most basic ways of fixing them.
BTW, the whole reason for the complexity that makes HDMI dropout prone is copy prevention systems like HDCP and their endless need for timely handshaking to be absolutely positively sure nothing is being copied. That was the primary engineering requirement for HDMI. The second goal seems to have been the requirement that users must buy expensive computerized switching and distribution gadgets when analog video only required simple mechanical switches. Industry likes that for two reasons. It discourages people from doing exactly what I am doing, and instead have the satellite or cable company provide the multi-room capabilities for you (which limits your AV network to their sources, and forces you to pay them for your multi-room capability). Make users into sheeple, in other words. And the second is that for those users who refuse to be sheeple, make them pay through the nose to do the least little extra thing. I have spent several thousand dollars on HDMI switching and distributing equipment and cables over the last 8 years that I've been using HDMI. Much of that was problematic and had to be replaced with even more expensive stuff.
I recently replaced my old 4 way active splitter (from 4 years ago, and it was getting flakey, with dropouts and noise persisting sometimes for a minute or more) and my Oppo HMDI switch (which seemed fine, but was less than easy to use) with a very nice professional grade 4x4 hdmi matrix switch. Matrix switching is and incredibly nice feature, I now would not want to live without it, and I love this switch (at least functionally). And I recently set up two new ethernet-based HDMI extenders in addition to the one I set up last year. Sadly my two OWlink HDMI extenders have died, they were the least dropout prone of any extenders I have used and they spoiled me.
Unfortunately this did not, at first, make the increasing dropouts situation go away at first. But I improved the situation greatly when I switched currently unused outputs (displays) to inactive inputs. Notably the situation improved when I did this for the living room, not currently being used. The living room is still running on old unshielded Cat6 while every other room that needs an extender is using my latest Cat6a Shielded connections (at least mostly). So having that connected to the same source as other rooms seems to lead to dropouts. I need to bring up that extension to my new standard, and make all cables as short as possible. I've recently ordered a whole bunch of new ethernet and HDMI cables for that purpose.
Update: My dropouts have almost entirely disappeared since I replaced a 25 foot tangle of Cat6 STP with a short 3 foot piece of my new standard, Cat6a STP (same as used in the attic). I did have to make the HDMI cable slightly longer, from 3 feet to 5 feet, so this required the purchase of two new cables (5 foot HDMI and 3 foot Cat6a STP) which I just received recently. I also ditched the audio inserter that inserts digital audio (from coax) into a DVI interface to produce an HDMI signal...that's a troublesome process (both digital streams must remain in sync) and the adapter itself is not professional grade and had frequent problems. The ultimate solution to analog-video-to-hdmi would be a brand new DVDO (to replace my 10 year old unit) but I haven't sprung for it yet. Unlike my older model, the new one takes care of the audio insertion internally and has a true HDMI output rather than DVI. The analog-to-HDMI lets me watch my harddrive recorder and SVHS machine on the whole house network, it's actually one of the things I use most.
