Wednesday, 8 February 2012

Enjoying More With Your Entertainment Center With An HDMI Switcher

By Hayley Udaonsob


As we slowly build or entertainment center, the first appliances that make it home are a high definition television and a DVD player. When we add a third device such as a gaming PC, we get into a dilemma in how to connect all three together. Most flat screen TVs have only one HDMI port and if we were to resolve this dilemma manually the most obvious way would be to unplug the cable from one device and transfer it to the other. But with the introduction of the HDMI switcher that sits between your TV and the two other signal sources, we solve this dilemma in a better way. Device interconnection is resolved automatically.

There are gadgets that allow one resource to be shared. In the old days of the PC, such a gadget was the A-B box. If you had had two computers that shared a printer, the A-B box was the most popular device that allows one computer to get exclusive access to the printer. The switch box is operated by selecting the active connection with a rotary switch. This switch has to be manually operated though.

The HDMI switcher is the current version of the A-B box. A basic unit would have two input ports and one output connector. The two devices that need to connect to the flat screen is connected to the input ports while the TV is connected to the output port. The big improvement of the the switch over the A-B box is that the modern gadget does not need manual operation.

Auto-sensing is one of the most important features of the modern switch. It replaces manually selecting what port gets exclusive access to the HDTV. The gadget detects what device is sending signals to the switch and then it activates the port the gadget is connected. This contributes to a seamless entertainment experience.

Aside from auto-sensing, another important feature of the switch is being able choose what port has priority. What port priority does is it prevents contention when more than one device is sending data at the same time. The port that has priority gets full access to the output port when contention occurs. There is a manual override for this setting and it can be set using the remote control.

Most of the components that form part of a home entertainment center are already HDMI compliant. Because it is common to have more than two such appliances in our homes, there has to be a way of allowing these gadgets to work together smoothly. This is the important role played by the HDMI switcher. It would be such a big hassle if devices like these did not exist because it would surely make multiple devices working together very difficult.




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