HDMI ports are everywhere these days, and while they all look the same, many of them do totally different things. For the most part, the ports that are on your TV are just meant to display video and give you audio, but even those have differences. The big one to be aware of there is the eARC port that is meant to handle your audio equipment. This port gives you the best bandwidth that you can have, and it’s essential you plug your sound system into it.
Moving away from TVs, you might be surprised to know that your 4K Blu-ray player may have not one, but two HDMI ports. In many cases, that second port will go totally unused as it’s only for audio. The other HDMI port handles both audio and video, so you might be wondering why you would ever use that second port. Well, it comes down to your audio equipment, and it also comes back to that eARC port that I mentioned earlier.
Why that other HDMI port is important on your Blu-ray player
Only in certain scenarios
As it turns out, that second HDMI port is important if you have a receiver without 4K passthrough. This is common on older receivers, and it’s actually one that affects my older Yamaha that I picked up from a thrift store. With newer 4K receivers, you’re perfectly fine using the single audio/video HDMI port because it can handle that, but if you do that with an older receiver, you run the risk of being stuck with a less-optimal format.
If your receiver has HDMI but can’t pass through a 4K signal, which is something you’ll often find on older receivers, you route the audio and video to the TV, and then the audio only port goes to your receiver. What this does is ensure your player is still sending the 4K image to your TV while also sending the audio to your receiver for it to handle. It does mean that you need a second HDMI cable, but it’s an easy workaround to the problem if you have it.
Again, this really only applies to older receivers, and there’s a good chance that you don’t have to worry about it if you have something modern. If you have a receiver with 4K HDMI ports, it’s something you don’t have to really worry about. Newer receivers don’t need to split anything up like this, since they can just pass the image along or handle the image with no problems. It’s only when you introduce modern things such as HDR and Dolby Vision that it becomes an issue.
Keep in mind that this is typically something you only see on a 4K Blu-ray player. Regular Blu-ray players typically have just the single HDMI port, but you might have coaxial ports to route audio to a non-HDMI receiver. It’s the same idea as the 4K player, where you plug the HDMI port into your TV but the other cables in your receiver.
Make sure you have modern cables
Stay up to date
To make sure you’re really getting the most out of your 4K Blu-ray player, you need to make sure you have upgraded your cables. Fortunately, there’s a great chance that you’ve already done this if you’re using something from the past decade or so. If that’s the case, you probably have at least an HDMI 2.0 cable, which is exactly what you need for your 4K Blu-ray player. This gives you enough bandwidth to display a 4K 60 FPS image while also getting good audio quality. Of course, 4K Blu-ray doesn’t need that high of a framerate, but having more bandwidth for audio and picture quality is key.
The nice thing about the HDMI format is the fact that it’s fully backwards compatible. This means that if you upgrade all of your cables to HDMI 2.1, you can use them all across each of your devices. I wouldn’t recommend running out to the store and replacing each of your cables, but if I were in the market for a new HDMI cable, I would only consider buying a 2.1 one. They aren’t that far apart in price, and I know that I’m fully future-proofed — at least until HDMI 2.2 cables really hit the mainstream. We’re still in the early days of that, and I think it’ll be a while until it fully catches on. It still feels like we haven’t hit the limits of what HDMI 2.1 can do, so I can’t imagine HDMI 2.2 will be needed for anything for a long time. I do like to stay up to date on the latest tech, so I’ll probably pick up a few cables when it comes out and just tell myself I see a difference when I’m playing my Xbox.
