Switch it up to connect
If you’re constantly rewiring your lounge room and fighting with a jungle of cables, then an HDMI switch might help bring order to the chaos. Smart TVs have reduced our reliance on set-top boxes, but it still doesn’t take long to run out of precious HDMI video inputs on your television. It’s not fun to spend your evenings squeezing behind the television to shuffle cables while your loved ones wait patiently.
If this sounds like your castle then an HDMI switch can save the day, turning one HDMI input into many.
Simply connect the switch to one of the HDMI inputs on your television, then plug a handful of devices into the switch, such as a Foxtel box, Apple TV and games console. You can choose between them with the press of a button, and some switches come with a remote control so you don’t even need to get off the couch.
That all sounds simple enough, but choosing a switch is not that straightforward. For starters, you need to be sure it handles HDCP encryption and the audio/ video quality coming from your devices, particularly if they offer 4K resolution, highdynamic range and Dolby Atmos sound.
To make life more complicated you’ll find HDMI switches and HDMI splitters; they might look the same, but they do very different jobs.
Basically a switch connects multiple devices to one screen – which is what most people need – whereas a splitter connects one device to multiple screens.
Chances are you don’t have multiple screens in your lounge room, but there are times when this comes in handy. A few years ago I converted my coffee table into an arcade machine; cutting a hole into the top, dropping in a monitor under glass and connecting a Raspberry Pi mini-computer with arcade-style controllers.
I mostly play it like a sit-down cocktailstyle arcade cabinet, like what you’d find in fish ’n’ chip shops back in the 1980s running classics like Pac-Man and Galaga. But sometimes I want to plug the coffee table into my television to play Street Fighter and car racing games on the big screen.
Pulling apart the coffee table to get to the Raspberry Pi so I can unplug the monitor and plug in the television is a real hassle, so I decided to install a tiny HDMI splitter inside the coffee table. Finding the right switch for the job was harder than I expected.
I didn’t want to see the picture on the monitor and television at the same time, so instead of a splitter I needed a 2 x 1 ‘‘bidirectional’’ switch; giving me the choice of connecting two devices to one screen and choosing between devices or, like I needed, connecting one device to two screens and choosing between screens.
The next complication was that I wanted a powered switch that also plugs into a wall socket, rather than a passive switch which draws power directly from your devices – in my case the Raspberry Pi – via HDMI. Cheap passive switches can be flaky if your device doesn’t supply enough juice.
In the end, the powered switch I bought works fine only drawing power directly from the Raspberry Pi, but I didn’t want to risk it. Now I can kick back on the couch, flick a switch and spend my evening batting baddies rather than battling cables.
– Sydney Morning Herald