First maglock HDMI cable certified

THE HDMI LICENSING body just certified a rather nifty HDMI cable by the unfortunately named Torrent, Inc. It has a built in diagnostic light and locking connectors.

Magnets and blinky lights

The first interesting bit with these HDMI cables is the built in diagnostic light. If you plug in one end, the cable end blinks if the connection is OK. Plug in the other end, it blinks if that local connection is OK, then goes solid if it can talk to the other end. Normally bright lights on a TV are the epitome of subtle evil, but Torrent thought it through and turns it off a minute after power up. Good move.

The other interesting thing they do is to have a magnetic locking mechanism. In a flash of brilliance, HDMI didn't put a locking mechanism into their standards, so each manufacturer is on their own, and that never means compatibility.

Torrent came out with a pretty smart way to do things, magnetically. The end of the cable has a little sleeve magnet around it with sticky tape on the end. Peel off the protective tape, plug the cable in, and voila, the magnet is glued to your TV. Pull the cable off, and the magnet stays glued on to lock the cable on next time. Once again, good move.

Toss in 'green' materials, IE no halogens, phthalates or PVC, and you have a neato cable that won't up the chances of your next child having a few limbs too many. The flip side of nifty non-tetratogenic things with blinky lights and magnets is that they tend to be expensive.

Normally we would post a price, but if you search for anything with 'torrent' in it, you tend to get bittorrent sites and generic HDMI ads. Luckily, their site has all the info you need short of where to buy them. The only thing left for Torrent to do is to figure out a way to end the last reason HDMI causes black screens, mandatory DRM infections. Then the cables would be perfect. µ