HD and cabling

Posted by: Richwleeds on 30 April 2007

About 5 years ago I had a plasma screen (and surround speakers) plumbed into the house. All cables are routed from the Sky + box & DVD player & hidden in the wall / plastered in. They are long runs running up and over the legth of room.
I have a s-video cable for Sky and component video cable (with 3 colour coded connections) for the DVD available to link to the Plasma (currently a new Pioneer). I don't need sound to the plasma (have speaker cables from my Denon processor).
Based on this configuration is there any way of getting a HD signal (picture only) from a new SKY HD box (or HD/blu ray DVD player for that Matter) without ripping up my walls to install HDMI or whatever is needed
Hope this makes sense - and grateful for any help

Posted on: 30 April 2007 by neil w

yep, sky box has component and my tosh ax1 has component

neil

Posted on: 30 April 2007 by Mike1380

Sky HD does indeed have component.... but when you bung an HD plasma in you won't see HD via component due to Sky's policy re not sending HD over anything other than HDMI.

This is basically because HDMI has copy protection and component doesn't.

When the time comes and you have an HD screen then perhaps a wireless HDMi solution will suffice.

These are just beginning to emerge...

Gefen Wireless HDMI

Posted on: 30 April 2007 by nap-ster

I'm pretty sure that the first (current version made by Thomson) generation of SkyHD boxes will transmit HD over component. The next generation boxes (to be made by Amstrad) will be hdmi only, no component connections I believe.

Posted on: 01 May 2007 by neil w

my sky hd box ( thomson) transmits hd over component , as i once had the pioneer issue and could only use component , to be honest i couldn't really see any difference in quality
the sky hd via component was sent to a plasma and a pj both 1280 * 720 with no problems

neil

Posted on: 01 May 2007 by Richwleeds

Thank you all

Posted on: 11 May 2007 by David S Patterson

I also had the SkyHD / pioneer problem and had to "drop down" to component. The HD signal does indeed come through, and i actually thought it had some aditional naturalness compared to the HDMI and this was with cheapo cables.The HDMI wins on overall clarity though.

David