HDMI considered harmful
Thursday, Jan 22, 2026 · 1724 words · approx 6 mins to readOne of my lifelong loves is great film and television, and one of my favourite hobbies in the last few years has been putting together the best environment I can for enjoying them at home at the highest quality. I have a setup that I love that includes a very big MLA-toting OLED that can do 4K144 and supports all major HDR standards, along with a Panasonic UB820 4K Blu-Ray player for getting the highest quality moving pictures to the amazing TV.
When it comes to the audio side of things I make use of the eARC feature of modern HDMI, which routes audio from any device connected to the TV to a high-end soundbar that gives me 9.1.5 Dolby Atmos. I’m an avid console gamer and I’ve found myself with a PlayStation 5 Pro and Switch 2 this generation, plus I love watching live sports which means yet another box to get that at the best possible quality. Like everyone else I also stream Netflix and a couple of other services, using a modern Apple TV 4K 3rd gen for that. And thus, especially if you’ve been keeping count of the number of different devices in play, you’ll maybe have a feel for where all of this is going:
Two games consoles, one streaming box, one live TV satellite tuner box, one Blu-Ray player, plus a soundbar so I can hear it all, comes to six devices to connect to a TV with just four HDMI ports. Here begins the nightmare.
Assuming every HDMI device you have is a well-implemented and well-behaved citizen when it comes to implementing support for HDMI CEC, the mandatory (at least the wiring is) part of the HDMI standard which allows devices on either end of the HDMI connection to talk to and control each other, you can maybe have a good time with HDMI if the number of devices is less than or equal to the number of ports you have on your TV.
In reality it’s almost impossible to get a confluence of devices where that CEC support is robust and respectful to the point whereyou can take advantage of the promises in full-system usability that the standard likes to make. One remote to control all of your devices and automatic port switching based on activity are sadly a dream almost nobody gets to realise. That’s especially true if you also don’t have enough ports on your display to give everything you have an individual connection.
My 6-into-4 problem used to be “solved” with a combination of the lone HDMI input on my sound bar plus a simple UGREEN 2-port HDMI 2.1 switch which didn’t come with a remote. I had the Blu-Ray player and Switch 2 share that switch and the Sky Q satellite tuner fed into the extra HDMI port on the soundbar, with the PlayStation, Apple TV and soundbar getting their own front-line HDMI ports on the TV. There’s no way to reliably control all of that from a single interface, be that a universal remote, voice control or similar, due to the number of different devices involved and because systems like that can’t really query device power states reliably.
It’s that latter aspect that causes all of the problems in my experience, with HDMI CEC making it much worse. If you could get your entertainment gear into a starting state where everything was off, then something like a universal remote could keep track of that initial state and know with higher confidence that the commands it has sent to a device under its control are doing the right thing to the device. That’s particularly important when moving between devices, where one needs to turn off and the other has to come on.
HDMI CEC ruins that because it allows the display and connected devices to turn each other on and off. I can turn on my PlayStation, say, which then turns on the TV, but then the Apple TV will see the TV is on and wake up before asking the TV to switch to its input. If I’m truly lucky the devices will then fight over which one should be displayed, the TV flicking back and forth in an endless war.
Sorry, I just need a second to take a deep breath before I continue.
There’s nothing about the above that got better when I added a Philips Hue latest generation “8K” sync box to things. It’s designed to sit between up to 4 modern HDMI devices and your TV, analysing the frames being sent by those devices to your TV in order to synchronise nearby lights to what’s being shown on the screen. The first generation didn’t, but the latest one supports the latest HDMI 2.1 features like auto low-latency mode, high refresh rates, and Dolby Vision, on all 4 of its inputs. It has one HDMI port on the output side.
Oh, and no remote.
I invite you to guess how it instead decides which of the four inputs to select to sync lights with and pass through to your TV. While you’re congratulating yourself for guessing HDMI CEC, I’ll just go for a little lie down and a cry.
Operationally it was an unmitigated disaster. Even with HDMI CEC enabled on every device fed into its inputs, it would either pick the wrong input to switch to or not automatically switch to a newly activated one at all. Resolving that, because there’s no physical remote, meant a trip into the Hue app every time to select the input. Oh, and any devices connected to the UGREEN switch didn’t work through it at all.
My options at that point were to either send it back, swap HDMI cables when needed and use the Hue app to get the right input working, or front the Hue box with a HDMI switch of some kind so it only has to process a single input. Scarred for life by cheap and cheerful HDMI switches that don’t work as advertised, I did what any self-respecting technologist would do and threw even more money at the problem, dipping my first toe into the world of really high-class HDMI switches in a trench coat: AV receivers.
The AV receiver (AVR) formula is simple: have many HDMI switchable and analogue audio inputs feed a high-performance processor, taking the decoded audio into a multi-channel amplifier while spitting out the HDMI video signal to a TV. They’re primarily designed to take the multi-channel audio signals from all of those digital and analogue devices and get it out through a high-end surround speaker system. Most have at least 6 HDMI inputs and 7 powered output channels.
That high-end feature set of the best AVRs means that the signal processing part of them is usually very well tested, incredibly reliable, and compatible with anything you might want to feed into it. The trick with some modern ones is that you can also completely bypass the active amplifier and audio decoding and processing parts and just pass through the full digital input to the output. Do that with HDMI devices and an AVR with that feature effectively becomes a really good HDMI switch.
I chose a Denon AVR-X2800H because it can pull that party trick: it has a pass-through mode that works while it’s in stand-by, and its HDMI input switcher still works while the rest of it is powered off. That input switcher connects to 6 modern HDMI inputs (HDCP 2.3, 4K120, all major HDR formats including Dolby Vision), so I get to connect everything at once (with a port spare!). It also means that when budget allows I can have a look at a setup to replace the soundbar and sub, and make use of the built in 7.2-channel amplifier so that it becomes more than just the very well-made switch that I use it for at the moment.
If only the rest of the HDMI-toting hardware I had before getting it could live up to the standard that the X2800H currently sets. Especially those that want to use HDMI CEC.
The topology of things that need to draw pictures on the TV is now much simpler than it was before: each device only connects to the AVR-X2800H, which then feeds a single switched input to the Hue Sync 8K, which then passes just that input to the TV. The Hue Sync 8K controls the lights, the TV feeds all audio via eARC to the soundbar, and everything is much happier.
I have to manually select the input the AVR-X2800H will send to the TV via the Hue, but that’s fine by me since it avoids display input fighting caused by HDMI CEC, and lets me avoid the Hue Sync’s lack of physical remote. Plus, because all of the input switching happens in one place then maybe there’s a universal remote solution that could work for me now, and at least that input switching is reliable again with no cable swapping or switch button pressing involved.