ETSI investigates Powerline HDMI for very high bit rate HD and UHD video

Sophia Antipolis, 11 December 2015

ETSI’s Powerline Telecommunications Technical Committee (TC PLT) has published a Technical Report assessing the benefits of the powerline HDMI technology (PHDMI) for HD/UHD video transmission.

The adoption of HD video content has led to standards such as HDMI^® and DisplayPort, to interconnect multimedia equipment, capable of multi-gigabit per second throughput. Indeed uncompressed HD video transmission requires very high bit rates, up to 2 to 4 Gbit/s for Full HD video. However consumers value the flexibility provided by wireless connections to set up and reconfigure multimedia systems, and to eliminate wired connections required by HD multimedia systems, such as home theatres.

To rise to this challenge, ETSI’s Powerline Telecommunications Technical Committee published a technical report ETSI TR 103 343 to investigate the transportation over powerline technology of uncompressed video from HDMI short range links. Both single input single output powerline and multiple input multiple output powerline capabilities were investigated along with specific compression schemes including wavelet based compression/decompression algorithms and joint-source channel coding schemes.

ETSI TR 103 343 provides recommendations to offer the best user experience with PHDMI in different realistic scenarios. Targeted applications include multimedia wired high speed links in home video networks or video surveillance operating from multiple HD or UHD video cameras in future Smart Cities schemes.

Roger Samy, the Chairman of ETSI TC PLT, stated that “ Using HDMI links over powerline following the recommendations in this report, ETSI PLT demonstrates a solution for a real Plug and Play technology and not Plug, Plug...and Play ”.