Need help with HDMI or DVI cable

[jerkane]

Hello all. I currently have a new home under construction and I am prewiring the living room for home theater. I will be hanging a plasma on one wall with my component rack on a side wall. I am running all the wiring in wall so I don't have cables running all over the place and I need to find an HDMI or DVI cable before the drywall goes up. Hope you guys can help. It needs to be 20-30 ft long in order to reach and I refuse to pay Monster prices. Are there any budget places for these cables out there? I found more sites offering longer lengths of DVI cables but not HDMI. I thought HDMI did better over longer runs? Any advantage to using either type cable? I would rather use HDMI as I believe that will be the future standard. But I could always use adapters too. Thanks for the help.

[BRANDONH]

Hello all. I currently have a new home under construction and I am prewiring the living room for home theater. I will be hanging a plasma on one wall with my component rack on a side wall. I am running all the wiring in wall so I don't have cables running all over the place and I need to find an HDMI or DVI cable before the drywall goes up. Hope you guys can help. It needs to be 20-30 ft long in order to reach and I refuse to pay Monster prices. Are there any budget places for these cables out there? I found more sites offering longer lengths of DVI cables but not HDMI. I thought HDMI did better over longer runs? Any advantage to using either type cable? I would rather use HDMI as I believe that will be the future standard. But I could always use adapters too. Thanks for the help.

I'm not going to push you one way or the other here is a link explaining HDMI technology.
It sounds like to me it would be best do go with HDMI but it is new technology.
http://www.pacificable.com/HDMI_Tutorial.htm
http://www.hdmi.com/

[woodman]

Hello all. I currently have a new home under construction and I am prewiring the living room for home theater. I will be hanging a plasma on one wall with my component rack on a side wall. I am running all the wiring in wall so I don't have cables running all over the place and I need to find an HDMI or DVI cable before the drywall goes up. Hope you guys can help. It needs to be 20-30 ft long in order to reach and I refuse to pay Monster prices. Are there any budget places for these cables out there? I found more sites offering longer lengths of DVI cables but not HDMI. I thought HDMI did better over longer runs? Any advantage to using either type cable? I would rather use HDMI as I believe that will be the future standard. But I could always use adapters too. Thanks for the help.

You have a basic misconception going here. HDMI and DVI are different from each other in the respect that HDMI can carry both video and audio signals, but DVI is for video only. So, unless you're planning on having your video display also put out sound, the DVI interconnect makes the most sense for you. That is, it makes the most sense if you're gonna spend the vast quanitity of cash needed to get a true HiDef plasma display. The cheaper (more affordable) plasma displays are not really true HiDef devices at all, since they're not capable (due to lower pixel density) of displaying either 1080i or 720p format images.

If the plasma you're getting is not capable of true HiDef images, then it would be a waste to use either HDMI or DVI ... "component video" or even S-video would suffice.

Hope this helps you

[jerkane]

Thanks for responding. I guess I thought of myself as fairly knowlegable when it comes to electronics but for some reason this whole HDTV thing has got me confused. I do understand the EDTV vs. HDTV thing. I was leaning towards an EDTV until I found DVD players such as the new Denon 2910 that will upconvert to 720p or 1080i through its DVI or HDMI output. Now am I leaning towards an HDTV. The plasma has both DVI and HDMI inputs but the cable box has only DVI. I will not be running audio out of the plasma but thought of using HDMI anyway. I was thinking of purchasing an HDMI to HDMI cable and an HDMI to DVI adapter. On the bettercables.com website there were reports of problems with both DVI to DVI and DVI to HDMI cables longer than 5M. Since I need roughly 20-30 feet, I will be over this lehgth. However, on the hdmi.com website they say HDMI cables can go up to 15M. If the two cable technologies are compatible, why would there be different length limitations? If I would get a longer HDMI to HDMI cable and add a DVI adapter will I still run into the same problem if I had purchased an HDMI to DVI cable? Maybe I will just go back to 2 channel... Thanks for everyone's help!

[Tony_Montana]

On the bettercables.com website there were reports of problems with both DVI to DVI and DVI to HDMI cables longer than 5M. Since I need roughly 20-30 feet, I will be over this lehgth. However, on the hdmi.com website they say HDMI cables can go up to 15M.

HDMI makes few demands as to cable length and bend radius. Runs to 50 feet or more are easily accommodated. But for DVI, length is of concern and only limited to 20 feet before signal degradation quickly becomes evident.