Wow -

[heatvent]

OK, so here's the background. I have my HD media player behind the wall and connected to a 35ft run of HDMI cables to get to my TV. I have historically used the HD200 which was OK speed-wise going through menus, etc. I recently picked up a HD300 off ebay. I was dissappointed when I couldn't seem to get it to work. Turns out the HD300 has a weak HDMI signal and the 35ft run was too much for it. I am also not using the heaviest guage HDMI cable (about 10ft of the run goes through a 1" flexible conduit run through a brick fireplace so I need a thin and flexible HDMI cable for this part). So I went to monoprice.com and orderd a 24awg HDMI cable for 25ft of the run and one of these repeaters (http://www.monoprice.com/products/pr...seq=1&format=2)to improve the signal.

I plugged the repeater into my current run of HDMI cables (didn't feel like messing with replacing the 25ft cable yet). I immediately noticed that the menu speed was lightning fast compared to before and the media player was much more responsive. What I didn't notice at first was that I still had HD200 connected and not the HD300! Wow what a difference in responsiveness!

I connected the HD300 and noticed (1) it now worked and a strong signal was making over the 35ft run, and (2) there was only a modest improvement in responsiveness from the HD200.

I thought I would share this experience because based on this test, adding one of these HDMI repeaters dramatically improved the performance (I am not sure why although someone else might know some of the technical reasons). I think my next test will be to try the repeater on my other HD200 that is on a short cable run to see if it improves performance even on a short run for some reason?

[Tomahawk51]

Very interesting and useful. Please do try a much shorter run and report back.

[heatvent]

I will try tonight and let you know

[heatvent]

Not as noticable on the short HDMI run. There may have been a very slight improvement but hard to tell. Certainly not as noticable as on the 30+ ft HDMI cable.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by heatvent

I plugged the repeater into my current run of HDMI cables (didn't feel like messing with replacing the 25ft cable yet). I immediately noticed that the menu speed was lightning fast compared to before and the media player was much more responsive. What I didn't notice at first was that I still had HD200 connected and not the HD300! Wow what a difference in responsiveness!

Fascinating. I wonder if the marginal cable was causing some kind of flood of prints or other activity from the driver in charge of the HDMI port, and that was causing the sluggishness.

Another interesting experiment would be to go back to the "bad" setup without the repeater, and telnet into the hd200 and run top & see what is using CPU. Or see if there is a steady flood of messages about hdmi in /var/log/messages

Drew

[Tomahawk51]

Thanks for checking the short run. I'm actually glad you didn't see a difference there, as it would mean I'd (wierdly) need to consider going out and buying lots or repeaters for ~4' runs

Again, appreciate you sharing this.