HDMI Splitter

What is an HDMI Splitter
An HDMI splitter is a fairly simple piece of technology that allows you to transmit audio-visual data from one HDMI source – regardless of the size of cable like mini and micro (our tutorial on the differences) – to two HDMI receivers. This can be useful in situations where you have a television and a sound system you want to feed an external source to, but your devices don’t have HDMI ARC or eARC. It can also be useful if you want to display the content from one source on multiple TVs.
An HDMI splitter takes the HDMI signal from one source and splits it into two identical sources. HDMI splitters can either be passive, simply splitting the signal, or active, adding some additional power to the split signals to compensate for the loss of cutting a signal in half.
Passive HDMI splitters are usually sufficient for most applications. If, however, you have a setup involving long cable runs, then you should use an active HDMI splitter.
There can be some confusion around HDMI splitters. Sometimes, a similar technology, the HDMI switch, is confused for an HDMI splitter. An HDMI splitter splits a channel from a common source to multiple outputs.
On the other hand, an HDMI switch manages multiple source inputs to transmit to a single output (most receivers act like HDMI switches). Thus an HDMI splitter will transmit to all available channels while an HDMI switch will only transmit to one.
This means you will need additional cables for each device you intend to output the source to. Although passive and active HDMI splitters work slightly differently, this basic principle is the same.
An HDMI cable has 19 wire pairs that terminate in the same number of pins on the HDMI plug. Each of these wires transmits different information electronically via digital signals. This includes not only audio and visual data but also information about the specific devices and commands you might find on a remote control.
An HDMI splitter duplicates, or splits, each of these wire pairs. As a result, you end up with two or more sets of 19-wire-pairs that feed into as many HDMI jacks.
For passive HDMI splitters, that is the long and short of it. For active HDMI splitters, there is another step.
One of the drawbacks of splitting an HDMI signal (or any electrical signal for that matter) is that you technically cut the power of each output signal (more on this later). For this reason, you will almost never find a passive HDMI splitter with more than two outputs.
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