Wireless HDMI products have been around for almost a decade, but they haven’t gained a lot of popularity. But how does Wireless HDMI work, and should you buy Wireless HDMI products for your home?
Wireless HDMI is an Alternative to HDMI Cables
HDMI cables have been the standard medium for transferring high definition video for more than a decade. But HDMI cables have some obvious drawbacks. A couple of unruly HDMI cables can turn your entertainment center into a rat’s nest, and they can restrict your cable box or game consoles to a single room.
You’ve probably guessed this by now, but Wireless HDMI is a wireless high definition video solution that can solve some of the problems associated with HDMI cables. You can clean up your entertainment center, broadcast a single video source to TV’s all over your house, or mirror the display from your phone or computer to your TV.
There are a lot of Wireless HDMI products on the market, and they’re all pretty easy to set up. You plug a transmitter into the HDMI port of a video source and a receiver into the HDMI port of a TV, and that’s all there is to it.
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It’s Like Bluetooth, but for Video
Unlike screen mirroring applications like Apple AirPlay, Wireless HDMI doesn’t require a Wi-Fi connection. The transmitter that you plug into your video source sends out a microwave frequency, and the receiver that’s plugged into your display decodes that frequency into high definition video. Think of it like Bluetooth, but for video.
Some (but not all) Wireless HDMI products have built-in IR transmitters. These transmitters allow you to use TV remotes to control devices from far away. These IR transmitters are necessary for a lot of Wireless HDMI setups. After all, running from one room to another to change TV channels would be a pain in the butt.
Like any form of wireless transmission, Wireless HDMI is prone to obstruction. Most Wireless HDMI products work around the 5 GHz microwave frequency, which can get congested by Wi-Fi and cellphone signals. Thankfully, most new Wireless HDMI products use dynamic frequency selection to adjust to the least congested frequency in your home automatically.
But when it comes to Wireless HDMI, latency is an unavoidable form of obstruction. A video signal has to be encoded, transmitted, received, and decoded before it’s displayed. As a result, most Wireless HDMI products have a bit of lag.
