It's easy to find yourself with more sources for your TV than it has inputs. Most TVs just have three or four HDMI connections, so if you have a PlayStation, Xbox and cable/satellite box, what happens if you buy a new Switch or media streamer as a great holidays deal? Even the best TVs have a limited number of HDMI ports. It's a hassle having to swap HDMI cables every time you want to use an unconnected device. Worse, cable swapping can cause wear on the cables and, more importantly, on the device's HDMI ports as well. Once those wear out you're looking at a costly repair or an unusable product.
Fortunately, there are some easy workarounds available so you don't have to swap cables. Some of these are quite inexpensive and, in most cases, only require a small amount of rewiring.
Is it OK to swap HDMI cables?
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Obviously, the cheapest solution is to just swap HDMI cables between devices. Each time you do this, however, you put a little extra wear and tear on the device's HDMI port. Behind that metal connection are tiny wires and usually, cheap plastic supports. Over time, you may wear something loose, and the HDMI port may be toast. Depending on the product, that could mean the entire device is toast and needs repair.
If you're pulling and tugging on the cables themselves, those too can wear out prematurely. Inside all HDMI cables are extremely thin copper wires. HDMI cables are cheap, so if one wears out, it's not a huge deal, but if you're wearing out the cable, it's likely you're wearing out the connection in the devices at either end, too.
So technically speaking, you can just swap cables to alternate between sources, but you're better off going with one of the solutions below.
An HDMI switch
A switch takes multiple sources, in this case two game consoles and a laptop, and sends them to a display. Main image: Univivi, TV: LG, Screen image: Geoffrey Morrison/CNET
The next cheapest solution is an HDMI switch. These small devices have multiple HDMI inputs and a single HDMI output. They're often described by the numbers of each, so a "4x1" switcher has four inputs and one output. The cheapest HDMI switches have buttons to swap between devices. More expensive models have remote controls to do the same.
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