HDMI cables are great. Almost anyone with a personal computer will likely have hours and hours and hours of MP3 music in their Windows Media Player or iTunes library, and maybe a few (or a few dozen) movies we’ve downloaded from Netflix, as well as some home movies we’ve kept for posterity. The problem is that it’s not always enjoyable to listen to that music on low-end computer speakers or watch those movies on your monitor.

So the HDMI cable couldn’t have come along at a better time, allowing us to run media directly from the computer right into the TV, without having to bother burning a bunch of CDs or DVDs to enjoy our music and flicks on something better than our laptop display.

Of course, as with any device first making its way into the homes of consumers, there’s always a learning curve. There are people who bought a VCR back in the 1980’s and who are only now figuring out how to program them. Likewise, a lot of people come home with an HDMI cable and have a tricky time figuring out how to get it to work.

When people break out their first HDMI cable, there can be some difficulties getting it to display correctly. You might get a flickering, scrolling picture, or improper aspect ratio, or any number of other problems. You can plug a coaxial cable into the back of any TV and have it perform just as it would with the next, but television sets these days are built in a variety of types, as are the sources from which you’ll be sending the information. As such, it’s actually not a "one size fits all" undertaking.

It helps if you know your TV’s maximum settings, but if you don’t, here’s what you need to do when your HDMI cable isn’t doing what you bought it to do…

1- Access the menu on your TV, box, or DVD player, and look for the HDMI settings.

2- Honestly, the rest should be self explanatory. Set video out to HDMI, set HDMI audio out to on, etcetera.

3- Set the maximum HDMI resolution that your TV will allow. You’ll know when you pass the maximum resolution because the picture will likely be scrambled or cut off. The settings should be listed something like 576, 720, 1080, etc. Most TV sets these days go up to 1080, but if you don’t know, then you won’t until you check.

And there you go, it’s as simple as that. Like most new entertainment gadgets, gear and gizmos, using an HDMI cable properly is actually quite a bit simpler than it seems to be at first, it’s just a matter of learning how it works.

Now, if you’re still having troubles after adjusting all the settings properly, then the trouble is most likely a defective product. Either your TV can’t accept HDMI for some reason, there’s an issue with your source’s HDMI port, or the cable itself is damaged. Try changing the cable out to see if that’s the problem, and then simply return the defective cable.