Weird HDMI Cable Types (You've Never Seen Before)

i'm sure all of you are familiar with hdmi the very common video connector and cable that looks like this but this is not the only type of hdmi cable for example have you ever seen this weird looking one probably not and there's actually five different types of hdmi connectors the first one that you're probably most common with is type a but there's also types a through e kind of like how usb has different types like usb type c the type only refers to what the connector looks like but the rest of the protocol and the digital amount of signal stuff is all independent of the connector type now i'm not going to talk about the different hdmi speed ratings today i'm just going to talk about the different connectors because it's kind of cool there's a couple weird ones that you've probably not seen before including that one i just showed you we're going to go over what all of these are so first of all here's a quick rundown of the different types of hdmi connectors so type a is the standard one this is the one you're definitely familiar with already type b is referred to as dual link and i'll definitely get to this one later it's one of the more interesting ones type c is the mini hdmi type d is the micro hdmi and type e is another interesting one and it's the automotive connection system very rare we'll go over that too first we'll just go through the three most common ones a c and d and then we'll get to the more rare ones so like i said type a is regular standard hdmi not much to say about this one it's 19 pins typically you see it on all kinds of devices tvs monitors and for the most part when someone says they need a hdmi cable this is the exact one they're talking about next type c is the mini hdmi connector this is pretty much the same idea as the standard one just a bit smaller and it's usually used on more portable devices for example cameras tablets that sort of thing and you can actually see this on my old canon 5d mark iii dslr there is an output with mini hdmi it has the same number of 19 pins just like the other ones except they are arranged differently instead of being on two sides of a thing it's just one all lined up together so yeah this one basically just looks like a smaller version of the standard hdmi and it was added actually in the hdmi 1.3 spec in 2006. the third common type of hdmi connector is type d aka the micro hdmi and this one is way smaller even than the mini hdmi and you can see it more resembles kind of like a usb mini or micro connector and this was also used on portable devices and you can actually see my canon r5 more recent camera has a micro hdmi output on the micro hdmi connector also has the same 19 pins although they are assigned differently even than both a and c so all of them kind of have different assignments for the pins but all the same number and this was added in the 1.4 spec in 2009. all right so now let's get to the two much more interesting connector types starting with type e which is known as the automotive connection system and i actually had a really hard time finding out any kind of information about this connector and while i did finally figure out what the deal is with it it does seem to be extremely rare it was added in the 1.4 spec of hdmi in 2009 same time as the micro and again it has the same kind of internal wiring and stuff it's just the physical structure connector is what's different and you can see it has a special locking mechanism design that goes into the port side and it's designed to really hold in there tight and we'll get to why that is later now when i was trying to figure out some info about this connector i kept reading on every website it pretty much said the same stuff like oh this was used in cars by audio manufacturers that sort of thing but i could not find a single car that was advertised as having this kind of hdmi connector i found a lot of cars that advertise as having hdmi in them but when i went to look at them for like the display or navigation console on the connector side for the consumer it was always just a standard hdmi port so i was trying to figure out is is this even used at all and it turns out it is but not exactly how it's expecting so what i did is i looked on amazon and there are cables like this for sale and not that many but there are a couple and one of them had several reviews so i was like all right let me look and see what people are actually using this cable for and i found that all of them were in japanese there weren't that many but they were all in japanese so i'm like alright maybe it's more used in japan and all of the reviews when translated mentioned different types of car navigation systems so i googled the names and that's when i figured out that okay it seems like these type e connectors are not used on the consumer side of the navigation systems but rather on the back that kind of connects to the internals of the car and you can actually see on these bunch of random pictures of navigation systems for sale i found on the back of them on the internal side they do have these hdmi type e connectors in them and i guess they go into the rest of the car to connect to the computer or whatever and also in some cases there will be kind of like an adapter where the type e connector connects into the back of the navigation system and then there's an adapter that goes into a standard hdmi port so even though it's used on the back end the consumer only has to use a standard connector so that kind of really explains why there's this locking mechanism and why it has to hold in so well is because it's on the internal side if it falls out and you're using a standard connector the person who owns the car would have no way to know that's what happened they would have to take out the whole dashboard and hook it back in it would be a mess so that's why it's important to have this locking mechanism and why it's kind of rare because it's only seen on the inside of the car that the consumer never sees now i did some more searching to try and figure out if there's really any other types of products that use this type e but really i was only able to find these examples on like the japanese version of amazon and again all of them were just talking about different navigational systems in their cars so it does very much seem like this type e connector is really only used maybe in the japanese market japanese made cars there were a couple of specific car brands i kept seeing coming up for example nissan mitsubishi subaru it seems like all of these manufacturers at least in the japanese market do use type e on the internals of the car and i was trying to figure out why this is only found in japan apparently because i was looking at even some us manufacturers for cars and navigational systems and even the ones that use hdmi for the internal cables it seems like they have a different system they use basically a standard hdmi cable but they all kind of have like a bracket that screws in and that's the way they use to hold the standard hdmi cable in instead of using this type e and i think the reason this isn't more common elsewhere is because the type e connector i believe only works with version 1.4 of hdmi that's when the spec came out which obviously is not exactly as fast as more modern versions of the hdmi spec so i think in a lot of cases manufacturers just decide if they're going to use an hdmi cable for an internal one they're just going to use a more modern one that can handle more speed and then just screw in a bracket instead of using this older one so yeah this type e1 is probably one you'll never come across and even if you did you would not recognize it as hdmi alright so now finally we can talk about hdmi type b connector called dual link and this is by far the rarest of them all i've also seen this type of connector refer to as extended pin hdmi and basically the difference between this one and the standard one is it's much longer and larger it has 29 pins instead of the standard 19. it's 21.2 millimeters wide whereas the standard is 19.3 millimeters wide and this connector is so rare that it was apparently never actually used in any actual product and it's not like this is a new one that just hasn't caught on yet no this connector is the only other one that came out at the same time as the type a connector in the original hdmi 1.0 spec i could literally only find a couple of pictures of this connector that seemed to be in existence and they do seem to be basically prototypes from cable manufacturers for example this one you can see them actually holding and i actually counted in there there are 29 pins so this is a type b connector but you can't buy it anywhere i don't think they really ever mass produced them because it wasn't used in anything another picture i found was literally of just the connector not even a cable and it seems to be from a chinese manufacturer but on the website that has this it says that that manufacturer has not logged in since 2012 so i doubt they even make this anymore if they did it all in the first place now you might be wondering wait a minute what was the purpose of this why was it even created and the reason for its creation is actually kind of interesting so if you didn't know hdmi is actually backwards compatible with the old dvi connection for monitors all you needed was a basic physical adapter that went from hdmi to the dvi interface and it didn't require any kind of signal conversion at all and apparently this compatibility between hdmi and dvi was very important to the creators of the hdmi spec which by the way was a bunch of companies you've probably heard of probably because at the time dvi was the more popular one so they figured to get hdmi off the ground it had to be compatible and you can actually see in this really old presentation of the hdmi 1.0 spec dvi is pretty much mentioned everywhere but my god though this powerpoint is hideous i mean it's got comic sans and timezy roman on the same slide it's an abomination but still shows the kind of history of it anyway here's where all this comes into play you see regular dvi which was single link supported a resolution of 1920 by 1080 at up to 60 hertz or it could be 2560 by 1600 at just 30 hertz but most monitors were 60 hertz so that was kind of like the de facto and that was no problem the standard hdmi 1.0 standard connector could handle that same amount of data so it worked perfectly however there was also dvi dual link which you might have heard of which supported much more data across it it supported a resolution of 2560 by 1600 at 60 hertz not just 30 and it also supported 3840 by 2400 at 30 hertz so at the time dvi dueling supported much more data and resolution than the standard hdmi connector so what they did instead to support the higher refresh rate and monitor resolutions if necessary was create a dual link version of the hdmi connector that would also support the same amount of data as dual link dvi and then this dual link hdmi would be the same way compatible with dual link dvi as the standard to the single link dvi so all right it actually seems like this might have been useful so why did it never take off well like i said the type b connector was actually created at the same time as the standard a connector just in the very original spec from the get-go this kind of was planned in but it was more of like a future proofing type connector not really any monitors at the time needed this kind of high resolution and if they did they'd probably just use dvi which was way more popular at the time that hdmi came out so basically no manufacturers were making monitors that needed this much data so they just never put this connector into anything but here's the important thing hdmi obviously was not the final version there was a couple more versions and by version 1.3 in 2006 just a couple years later the single link standard hdmi connector and cable was able to handle more data and bandwidth than even a dvi dual link was so at that point a standard hdmi cable was able to do the job that the original dual link hdmi cable was created for before it ever needed to even be used for example according to statcounter.com which keeps statistics of screen resolutions they go back as far as 2009 so not even as far back as when hdmi 1.3 came out but even in 2009 only one percent of people had full hd 1080p screens so you can imagine how few people if any would have had higher than full 1080p screens back in 2006 when 1.3 came out because remember even hdmi 1.0 could handle 1920x1080 at 60 hertz in fact one of the earliest full hd tvs i could find was the panasonic th65 px500 from 2005. so even this tv which did have standard hdmi only needed standard hdmi because even that one being 1080p top of the line didn't need any more than that and then when hdmi 1.3 came out just a year after that was released then it far exceeded any tvs even at the time so at this point it looks like we're probably never going to see a dual link version of the hdmi cable i mean i guess technically the specs still exist so if tvs came out in the future that really did exceed standard hdmi cables possibilities they might resurrect it and add it to tvs but that seems like it's probably not likely for a while so anyway now that you know all about these hdmi connectors you can be the life of the party the next one you go to by sharing all these fun facts and impressing everyone i'm sure they'll love it if you guys did enjoy this video be sure to like the video and subscribe i make a couple new videos a week so it should be worth it if you guys want to keep watching the next video i'd recommend is where i was talking about different types of qr codes or 2d barcodes that you may have seen before and wondered why some of them look different spoiler alert they're not all qr codes so i explained all about that in that video right there you can click on so thanks so much for watching guys i'll see you in the next video

Channel: ThioJoe

Views: 148,214

Keywords: technology, tech, hdmi, hdmi connectors, hdmi types, hdmi cable types, hdmi type a, hdmi type b, hdmi type c, hdmi type d, hdmi type e, computers, information technology

Id: 5xM_PW9YGq8

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021