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Just Add Power HDMI over IP - techncial discussion


Nded

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Nded, can you comment on audio formats? I saw a statement that says that you are missing something there.

The HDMI over IP solution supports 5.1 and PCM audio. At this time we are not trying to distribute the more complicated "lossless" audio from a Blu-Ray player. I has been our experience that most other CE HDMI output devices only support 5.1 and/or PCM anyways. For this reason, we reccomend you put your Blu-Ray player in the main HT room. That is typically the only place in the house that is wired for the full range audio, so you should directly connect the Blu-Ray player to the sound system and not use HDMI over IP solution for watching the Bly-Ray in that room (assuming you want to take advantage of the lossless audio features of the format). Most other rooms in the house are not typically wired for 7.1+ audio.

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Interesting yes. But having to play games with the switch config to get this to work leaves much to be desired seems like a hack to me......

Everything we are doing is what the Managed Switches are designed to do. No modifications or hacks to the factory settings are required. We are just using their standard features to achive a superior result.

Manipulating the switch config to achieve what you're trying to do in the way you;re trying to do it is a hack. Having duplicate IP's on a network to support this is a hack. The IGMP publish and subscribe model is not supposed to work in the way you've engineered your product.

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Manipulating the switch config to achieve what you're trying to do in the way you;re trying to do it is a hack. Having duplicate IP's on a network to support this is a hack.

I'm not sure there are duplicate IP addresses. Managed switches are designed to switch physical ports onto logical VLANs.

This seems to me to be a creative use of supported functionality integral to this class of higher level switches.

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Interesting yes. But having to play games with the switch config to get this to work leaves much to be desired seems like a hack to me......

Everything we are doing is what the Managed Switches are designed to do. No modifications or hacks to the factory settings are required. We are just using their standard features to achive a superior result.

Manipulating the switch config to achieve what you're trying to do in the way you;re trying to do it is a hack. Having duplicate IP's on a network to support this is a hack. The IGMP publish and subscribe model is not supposed to work in the way you've engineered your product.

Well, you can call it a "hack" if you must, but we are confident that what we are doing is totally acceptable and will work with practically any Managed Ethernet switch on the market. I will understand if you don't choose to use our HDMI over IP solution, as we don't expect everyone everywhere to take advantage of what HDMI over IP has to offer.

Can you point to any documentation from any Managed Switch manufacturer that says we are not supposed use their product this way?

Edited by Nded
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I don't think these devices break any IETF or IEEE standards. I think dynamically assigning ports to a VLAN is a creative use of existing technologies.

Ed: What can you say about the video and audio streams? What is the format and codec being used?

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I don't think these devices break any IETF or IEEE standards. I think dynamically assigning ports to a VLAN is a creative use of existing technologies.

Ed: What can you say about the video and audio streams? What is the format and codec being used?

We are supporting the full HDMI 1.3 Video Stream plus the 5.1 and PCM portion of the HDMI 1.3 Audio Stream. We are using a type of JPEG compression that is built into our ASIC. The TX and RX units are built around a RISC processor, and the latency is negligible.

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  • 1 month later...

Nded:

This is very promising technology for many uses, my application would be a distributed video system with all of my components located in a media closet on a rack.

If I could suggest an improvement, it would be to develop a rack mountable transmitter with multiple HDMI inputs and multiple cat5/6 outputs going to the Cysco swtich. For multi-source, multi-zone applications, I think you could produce this at a cost significantly less than forcing consumers to buy a separate transmitter for each source. This would make your product very competitive. An additional benefit would be that it would result in a much, much, cleaner install, currently you have to have a separate power source for each transmitter, and the transmitters don't cleanly fit in a rack, so a rack mountable transmitter with multiple inputs would clean things up significantly.

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  • 3 weeks later...

When you connect 2 or more switches together and span VLAN's across all the switches, it is called "trunking" ... not bridging. The standard trunking protocol across all network equipment manufacturers is 802.1q. Cisco had a proprietary trunking technology called ISL, but it is obsolete. Bridging is a totally different technology used to get network traffic from one network to another without the use of static routing or a dynamic routing protocol (RIP, OSPF, EIGRP ... etc.) and is not applicable here. Bridges are different from switches and routers, although they are Layer 2 devices. Think of your wireless access point is one type of bridge.

Just Add Power is not performing any magic or hacks in their video distribution system. It's all standard stuff ... mapping ports to VLANs and using IGMP as a transport for video streams. Before you start flaming me ... IGMP does not operate on the "transport layer" of the OSI model, it is part of the Multicast protocol.

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The driver for the Cisco 2960 switch is out

It would be great to get feedback from C4 dealers/users who have tried this in the field.

CytexOne and Kevin Luther have it. We're in the process of swapping out our Zektor for the JAP in one of our showhomes so we'll let everyone know what we think.

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Several models in the Cysco Catalyst 2960 series allow for some ports to support Power over Ethernet. If the "Just Add Power" HDMI over IP recievers were connected to these "powered" ports, would a separate power adapter for the reciever be necessary?

Also, will the recently created driver work on any of the Cysco 2960 series switches? (there are quite a few in this series).

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Several models in the Cysco Catalyst 2960 series allow for some ports to support Power over Ethernet. If the "Just Add Power" HDMI over IP recievers were connected to these "powered" ports, would a separate power adapter for the reciever be necessary?

Also, will the recently created driver work on any of the Cysco 2960 series switches? (there are quite a few in this series).

The JAP boxes do not support power over Ethernet in this version, you need a power brick for each box.

The driver should work for any 2960. The different model numbers differentiate the number of ports, gigabit uplink/failover ports, etc. but the commands are the same.

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Several models in the Cysco Catalyst 2960 series allow for some ports to support Power over Ethernet. If the "Just Add Power" HDMI over IP recievers were connected to these "powered" ports, would a separate power adapter for the reciever be necessary?

Any POE device has to be designed from the start to support POE. The JAP HDMI receivers and transmitters don't support POE. I also doubt that there would be enough wattage in the POE spec to run them.

Also, will the recently created driver work on any of the Cysco 2960 series switches? (there are quite a few in this series).

The driver would probably work for many different Cisco switches. Cisco has a fairly standard CLI across the product line. If it didn't work it would probably not be too hard to modify the driver to work with almost any switch that had a CLI to make configuration changes.

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Several models in the Cysco Catalyst 2960 series allow for some ports to support Power over Ethernet. If the "Just Add Power" HDMI over IP recievers were connected to these "powered" ports' date=' would a separate power adapter for the reciever be necessary?[/quote']

Any POE device has to be designed from the start to support POE. The JAP HDMI receivers and transmitters don't support POE. I also doubt that there would be enough wattage in the POE spec to run them.

The "A" series HDMI over IP devices use 5V, 1.2ma. We are investigating the possibility of producing a POE version of the "A" series that woud work with POE. No ETA is available at this time. There are already some third party POE extractors that would work with the current HDMI over IP product, but that still adds another brick to the stack behind the screen. We understand that this is a VERY DESIREABLE feature.

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I made a new video. The link 2 posts up isnt as good as this one

The video shows fast switching for two Direct TV sources with the same resolution. When the sources are one 720p and second 1080p, how fast is the Just Add Power Scaler? Is there a longer delay?

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