Pulse-Eight USB - CEC adapter review (1 Viewer)

Stéphane Lenclud

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  • April 29, 2013
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    Pulse-Eight USB - CEC adapter is a great little piece of hardware allowing you to take advantage of the whole HDMI CEC feature set depending on the TV you are using.
    Conveniently the driver called libcec is open source and published on GitHub.

    That adapter had been working great for me until I upgraded my GPU from an NVidia GTX 750ti (HDMI 1.4) to an NVidia GTX 1070 (HDMI 2.0b).
    Interestingly enough it was working fine on my older GPU even when it was set to UHD RGB at 60Hz in Windows. Though I now wonder if it was really outputting 60Hz.
    Over the HDMI 2.0 connection with the newer GPU I was getting some picture interference and distortions.
    First I thought it was an issue with Windows or drivers but I eventually tracked it down to that short HDMI cable provided by Pulse-Eight.
    The issue would fix itself when lowering the bandwidth by setting frequency to 30Hz or changing colour format to 4:2:0.
    Pulse-Eight support confirmed the short HDMI cable was rated for HDMI 1.4b.
    Hopefully newer kits are now coming with HDMI 2.x cables, I can't confirm that.

    Reliability greatly depends on the devices you have connected to your HDMI bus and notably the TV set. However that's most likely an issue inerrant to CEC in general and thanks to the open source library your can improve hardware support yourself.

    Pros:
    • Open source driver
    • Great hardware
    • Great support from Pulse-Eight
    Cons:
    • Short HDMI cable provided not HDMI 2.x compatible. Hopefully not an issue on newer kits.
    • Reliability depends of TV and other HDMI devices.

    Related threads:
    CEC Remote plugin.
     
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