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Wireless HDMI Prototype Announced
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Sep 06, 2006 10:45 AM
from the thats-a-lotta-bits-in-the-air dept.
from the thats-a-lotta-bits-in-the-air dept.
legoburner writes "Tzero Technologies and Analog Devices announced that they have created a wireless HDMI interface for HDTVs, next-gen DVD players, and set-top boxes. The backbone for the technology is ultrawideband, also used as a future replacement for wired USB. The Analog Device compresses data with the [lossy] JPEG2000 video codec, which is then packetized and encrypted, and transmitted via the Tzero MAC and PHY chip."
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Women! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Women! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Women! (Score:4, Informative)
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It's true! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Another Sony Delay.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Another Sony Delay.. (Score:5, Funny)
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HD compression? (Score:4, Insightful)
On another note, what about the signal band already used by HD TV broadcasters, would a signal thats weak enough to stay inside your house be legal?
Most people's HD is compressed anyway (Score:5, Informative)
Then again, this thing is just adding in another compress/decompress cycle - not good IMO.
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Re:Most people's HD is compressed anyway (Score:4, Informative)
>Only 90%? Seems more likely to be 100%.
The other 10% is Over The Air (e.g. Antenna). If you're after the highest possible quality, this is what you want. OTA HD broadcasts are usually of higher quality than cable or dish. It sounds counterintuitive, but it's true -- The cable/sat company (re)compresses the signal, introducing visual artifacts. In effect, you're getting a second-generation copy.
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See! (Score:4, Funny)
Alternate joke (Score:5, Funny)
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JPEG2000 is not inherently Lossy (Score:5, Informative)
Did I miss something in the article indicating which they were using?
TZero is using lossless JPEG2000 (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.tzerotech.com/site/demo/ [tzerotech.com]
Installation? (Score:3, Interesting)
People pay for someone to come and install a cable?
"It's that whole 'plugging it in' thing! It's got me completely stumped!"
$100??? WTF??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Only a complete retard would pay $100 for a cable meant to deliver a purely digital signal. Then again these are the same people Monster-brand products are amrketed to, so nothing surprises me.
Let me get this straight... (Score:3, Interesting)
You rush out and spend god knows how much on the latest and greatest next gen DVD player, you throw away your perfectly good TV / projector / box that emits coloured light and buy a new one that supports HDMI (and HD). Finally, you then cough up more hard earned cash to buy a movie you probably already own on regular DVD for twice the price. You do all this in the hopes of getting a fantasic picture with amazing sound.
Why, oh why, would anyone with two brain cells to rub together then install a wireless connection that uses lossy compression?
Still, fair play for getting that many bits through the air. Personally, I won't be standing anywhere near the transmitter.
Ohhhh the audiophile victims.... (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe even a vacuum chamber so you don't degrade your digital transmission. It sure would suck to have your bits coming through the ether in low fidelity.
Of course we all know that movies looked better on vinyl anyway.
Re:Ohhhh the audiophile victims.... (Score:4, Funny)
Wrong frequency band, though,
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The One Use for Ultra-Wideband... (Score:4, Informative)
This is a first generation UWB wireless interconnect. When the concept of UWB mas marketed around a few years ago, the claim was that it would be a low power RF communication method.
Low power at the antenna, yes, at the power supply, no.
However, the power consumed for all the signal processing in the receiver & transmitter is pretty huge. The channel bandwidth is 250MHz and uses OFDM modulation. The implication is gobs of juice to run an ADC to deal with that high bandwidth, and "must have" DSP to do all the signal processing. (OFDM requires rather fancy signal processing, which can not be implemented using a lower power analog method.)
The net result - The "low power of UWB" may be true at the antenna, but the electronics require huge amount of juice to get the job done. Consequently battery powered applications are no-go. Now you got this fancy new wireless standard and a limited use for it, with all the applications needing to be plugged into the wall.
IMHO? Poke a hole in the drywall at the floor, run the cables up thru the wall and into the display. You have to do that for the power cord anyhow, so why not? It's not like you are going to be moving the silly thing much after you install it!
UWB won't see the widespread use of WiFi or Bluetooth.
I'll tell you what... (Score:5, Insightful)
C'mon folks, there's a hundred usable channels with 19.x Mb/s effective bandwidth so we could *in theory* just pipe that HD signal from a remote box to the tv with the existing wires, let the ATSC STB (or internal tuner) demodulate and decode the content and display it. Hell, we could all have everything-everywhere in our houses with all the ugly gear stashed in the basement with this standard. *Analog is not the enemy* OTA HD works damned fine. Why fuck it up with expensive, unnecessary cabling?
Disclaimer - yes I have an older home. I also have the DVD jukebox on channel 40, my Tivo on 45, my wife's tivo on 50, and a media server on 55. They get combined with the off air antenna and piped through an RG-59 coax to every TV in the house, with a Xantech IR sensor (DC coax return) at each TV. It works great, except that there's no HD. My parents just bought a new house, but can't put HD in the rooms because the builder ran (the standard) one coax to each TV location. Suprise...DTV requires 2 to get HD (I haven't verified this, mine are old TiVo units with two tuners, and need two cables).
It's not how often it fails, it's *when* (Score:3, Interesting)
If only they just used 100baseT. (Score:3, Informative)
If the consumer-electronics people weren't so hung up on proprietary interfaces, consumer electronics could just use 100baseT for everything. More bandwidth than some UWB thing, can be extended to cover just about any house, cables are cheap, and interference isn't a problem. You can get a whole 100baseT/TCP/IP node in the RJ45 connector now, so low data rate sources like audio devices could play cheaply. Power over Ethernet could power some of the lesser boxes, like cable modems.
That "30 meter UWB" link will turn out to be a huge pain. It probably won't work through walls especially ones with metal studs, so inter-room links in houses will fail. Even across a large classroom (an obvious application), there might be problems. The DRM probably won't allow multipoint distribution, so you can only have one monitor per Blu-Ray player, but that's another issue.
Re:Not really HDMI (Score:4, Insightful)
Wireless is a no-go, in any of its incarnations today, save the input devices which don't need high data rate: mice, keyboards, remotes. All the rest is just on an emergency basis.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
True, but only at the RF level. Since it's a digital signal (presumably with ECC, I haven't taken a look at the HDMI spec), you'll easily be able to either reconstruct the stream (using ECC) or ask that it be re-sent. And probably, if you're getting less than some threshold of signal strength, the devices probably won't sync up, so you'll look at the little blinking "SYNC" light and the manual will tell you to move the transmitter closer to the TV. Eit