With the increasing popularity of 4K and even 8K displays, today at CES 2025 the HDMI Forum officially revealed version 2.2 of the HDMI spec.
While the shape of the connector and its general capabilities aren’t changing a ton, the big upgrade for HDMI 2.2 is that it can now support bandwidths of up to 96Gbps. This should make it significantly easier to send content with higher refresh rates and resolutions to compatible displays to help ensure your content looks as good as possible.
Notably, alongside the increased bandwidth, the HDMI Forum is also rolling out new Ultra96 HDMI branded cables that will be part of the organization's certification process to help customers better identify when they are buying a compatible HDMI cord. The forum says testing will be required for each model length and instructed to display an official Certification Label on the cable itself.
Other additions to the spec include next-gen Fixed Rate Link signaling technology which is designed to better support uncompressed content at 4K60 resolutions and above. Also, the inclusion of a new Latency Indication Protocol (LIP) should improve audio and data synchronization, particularly for multi-device setups like those with dedicated receivers or soundbars.
That said, while HDMI 2.2 looks like a very useful upgrade to support higher quality audio and video, don’t try to run out and upgrade all your gear right away. The HDMI Forums says the official spec will be released to all HDMI 2.x adopters in the first half 2025, so it will take some additional time after that for compatible devices to begin hitting the market.
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