HDMI cable maximum length

When setting up a courtroom for an electronic presentation, you might think that having a very long HDMI cable would work to your advantage. It could give you more flexibility about where you position your tech table from the inputs for the audio-visual system. There are certainly a lot of very long HDMI cables available of 50 feet,

100 feet . . .

. . . and longer

But with HDMI cables, longer is not necessarily better. HDMI cables may be active or passive. A passive HDMI cable will allow signals to be sent in both directions. An active HDMI cable only allows data to go in one direction, and will include a processor. An active HDMI cable will get power from the device it is connected to. At a length of more than 25 or 50 feet a passive HDMI cable will no longer transmit video and document images with maximum speed and clarity.

More sophisticated audio-visual systems may route an HDMI signal from a computer with Cat 5 or Cat 6 network cables and then pass through to an HDMI cable for a display in order to prevent significant lag over long distances.

Adding Digital Exhibit Stickers to Trial Exhibit PDFs

A developer called 'Done by 5' has a utility called Final Exhibits that will add digital exhibit stickers to multiple PDFs automatically. I downloaded and tested the trial version tonight. A key advantage of this software is that it will use the file name of the PDF as the basis for the exhibit number that is added to the sticker. So in this example, the first file in my set is named 'DX 1000.pdf'

Final Exhibits can also number exhibits sequentially. It allows you to resize only the first page of the PDF to place the sticker at the bottom in order to avoid covering text that appears on the first page.

Drag and drop the template of the sticker onto the pages to apply the stickers to all loaded PDFs. The Edit menu includes an option to delete all stickers if you have made a mistake.

After you have added the sticker, Final Exhibits gives you the option to reposition the stickers automatically if you want to expand the edges of the page to fit in the sticker. It's also possible to manually relocate the stickers on specific pages.

There's an option for page-level exhibit numbering. It also works by having the user drag and drop the preview of the number from the left pane onto one page of one exhibit.

Different colors (including an option for transparent) and shapes are available.

Thanks to Diarmuid Truax for this post which raves about Final Exhibits.

Sadly, the trial version leaves a banner across the sticker indicating that it's a trial version.

K-Lite Codec Pack

As previously discussed in the Tip of the Night for December 7, 2019, a video may not play in an application or on an operating system, unless the necessary codecs are installed. A codec will uncompress a video file, so it can be played. Typically video files are compressed to save storage space at the loss of some of the original resolution. These are lossy video files.

The K-Lite codec pack, available here, https://codecguide.com/, will allow Windows to play a wide range of video and audio formats. It should allow Windows Media Player to recognize most video and audio files. The Ogg video format (with an .ogg, .ogm or .ogv extension) is actually a container file which must be uncompressed before it can be played. It is not supported by Windows Media Player. See the list of supported files posted here. If you attempt to play such a file in Windows Media Player, you'll get an error like this:

If you prompt the Windows Media Player to try it, you'll get this result:

After the K-Lite Codec Pack is installed, an OGG file should play in Windows Media Player. I tested this on my PC tonight and confirmed that installing the pack made the difference.

Another common format video format which doesn't work with Windows Media Player is are Adobe Flash videos with the .flv extension.

However, if you are presenting videos with IPRO's courtroom presentation software Trial Director ,be aware that the K-Lite codec pack can cause problems. Tech support for IPRO warned me last month that the K-Lite codec pack has been known to interfere with the performance of Trial Director. It's usually recomnended that Windows Media Player be set as the default application for video and audio files when using Trial Director.