Here’s what you need to know to connect your laptop or PC to your TV using the high-speed HDMI or DisplayPort ports.
Your TV only has HDMI ports and never DisplayPort, but your laptop can have both HDMI and DisplayPort. Very often, the mini version can only be HDMI or DisplayPort. And if you look at advanced graphics cards, there are both types of ports.
Differences Between HDMI vs. DisplayPort
HDMI is used more widely, while DisplayPort is used chiefly only on expensive devices, which is why.
I will not talk about the technical aspects. In short, they are similar ports for streaming video, only encoded differently. HDMI and DisplayPort are not free; you have to pay royalties to the manufacturer of devices with HDMI and DisplayPort ports. But the main difference is the cost of making a DisplayPort. DisplayPort is more expensive to manufacture because it is compatible with HDMI; if you have a DisplayPort out, you can transfer video from it to HDMI. DisplayPort supports dual encoding; it needs two chips, so it is more expensive; also, the latest versions of DisplayPort support higher video transfer rates; it is ideal for 8K videos at 120 frames per second.
Royalties for using HDMI and DisplayPort
Manufacturers of devices with these ports need to pay royalties to the copyright holder for using the technology. The fee is not significant and ultimately falls on the end customer.
The royalty for using HDMI: Wikipedia says that the royalty for HDMI is 15 cents. But if you advertise for HDMI and label the ports in the advertisement mentioning that the device has HDMI ports, you can get a discount which can reduce the royalty to 4 cents per device. That’s the kind of unobtrusive advertising for HDMI. I tried to find out the royalty cost for an HDMI port, but that requires sending a request to hdmi.org, and that takes time, so I decided to limit myself to the information available on Wikipedia.
DisplayPort royalty: the payment per device with DisplayPort ports is 20 cents.
Connecting, HDMI laptop to HDMI TV
With this configuration, all you have to do is buy an HDMI to HDMI cable, and many cables are available at different prices. When buying, pay attention to the specifications of the cable. Modern HDMI cables are 2.1 standards, allowing you to transmit 8K video. If the cable only supports 4K or, for example, speeds up to 18 Gbps, it is most likely a lower standard cable. These are passive cables, and depending on the quality and length, an HDMI cable can range from $2 to $40.
Connecting to a TV, DisplayPort laptop to HDMI TV
There’s no problem with that, either. DisplayPort lost the battle for the consumer segment and switched to more professional use. Accordingly, since 2015, almost all devices with DisplayPort ports have been equipped with DisplayPort ++. The two pluses in DisplayPort mean that the port also supports the HDMI standard and automatically switches the transmitted protocol depending on the port on the TV, in our case. It doesn’t hurt to have a DisplayPort-HDMI cable to connect your laptop to your TV; they’re also passive and have a small price tag. Since the DisplayPort is large, the manufacturer can install a mini display port on the laptop. For example, Dell Latitude series laptops are equipped with mini DisplayPortI ports.
The edges of the image on the laptop’s TV are cropped.
This is a normal situation. Usually, the picture on your TV is set to watch videos from TV channels or streaming services, and the picture should take up the whole screen, so the default image size is set to wide; you need to go into the TV image settings and select the size 16×9 or by screen size, depending on the TV model. There are about five settings; you can quickly try all of them to get a picture without cropping the edges.
No sound to the TV from the laptop
I have encountered this problem several times; I connect my laptop to my LG TV, and the image appears on the TV. But the sound disappears on the laptop but does not appear on the TV. I found a simple solution – disconnect and reconnect the cable; I can’t say why it happens. Some televisions do not recognize the audio stream correctly, leading to audio blocking.
