Wireless HDMI Prototype Announced

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."

Women!

Tzero and Analog executives say that wireless HDMI will make for much more aesthetically pleasing HD systems, which, according to them, will make women happier in the selection of home theater systems.

"One of the things we are hearing more and more now is that the disinterested spouse is taking a more active role in selecting and hanging the television, typically that's the wife," Bucklen said. "That's all well and good until you start dragging cables into the solution. HDI cables are expensive and bulky and we think that a wireless approach can give consumers the flexibility to put televisions where they want them."

The 1950s called. They want their mentality back.

Re:

Just because it was true in the 1950's and kind of has a caveman feel to it, doesn't mean there isn't a ring of truth to it. If you go over to http://www.avsforum.com/ [avsforum.com] you'd be surprised as to the number of posts talking about passing the spouse test rega

Re:Women!

And with jpeg as the codec, they can keep their 1950s picture quality too!

Re:Women!

JPEG and JPEG2000 are very different lossy image compression algorithms. JPEG uses discrete cosine transforms, whereas JPEG2000 uses wavelet transforms, which are much better at representing non-periodic data, like you'd see in motion video.

It's true!

My wife's only complaint with my home theater set up was all the wires and how best to hide them. She was totally against me using surround sound because of the wires. Finally I ran the wires under the flooring (it's complicated) and then it was no problem. So in reality these guys have a good point.

Another Sony Delay..

In other news, in an attempt to make the PS3 future proof, Sony has once again delayed the PS3 till 2009 so that they may integrate wireless HDMI. Wireless HDMI will not come standard however, but be part of the 1500 dollar "ZOMG" SKU.

Re:Another Sony Delay..

At least that would explain why they aren't including an HDMI cable with the PS3...

HD compression?

Ok why would someone spend large amounts of money on an HD system only to have it compressed.

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

If you get your HD from digi cable or dish (which 90% of HDTV owners do), then the signal has already been compressed in MPEG2 or MPEG4 on it's way down the pipe.

Then again, this thing is just adding in another compress/decompress cycle - not good IMO.

Re:Most people's HD is compressed anyway

>>If you get your HD from digi cable or dish (which 90% of HDTV owners do)
>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.

See!

See! Sony's once again ahead of the curve, not shipping the PS3 with an HDMI cable.

Alternate joke

Future news: Sony announces that the new Wireless HDMI will not be shipped with the PS3.

JPEG2000 is not inherently Lossy

JPEG2000 has both lossless and lossy modes.

Did I miss something in the article indicating which they were using?

TZero is using lossless JPEG2000

So sayeth their presentation anyhow.

http://www.tzerotech.com/site/demo/ [tzerotech.com]

Installation?

"If we break this down, it's going to be less than an HDMI cable," Karr said. "Those are about $100 plus installation."

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???

You can get hihg quality HDMI cables from monoprice.com [monoprice.com] for $12 or less.

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 surp

Let me get this straight...

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....

I can already picture the audiophile products which will at no small cost somehow imbue the air in your living room with better wireless transmission characteristics...
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....

Maybe this would work: WiFi Speed Spray(TM) [j-walk.com]
Wrong frequency band, though, ....

The One Use for Ultra-Wideband...

Remember - JPEG is a compression standard. By definition it is a "lossy" comnpression. Picture quality loss remains TBD. Need to read the details.

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...

How about we concentrate on getting systems which will modulate the original, compressed HD over coax so that 99% of the population who owns a house that is already built around the old way of doing things can still watch TV without fishing cable around?

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*

FTA: "The standard calls for link reliability of at least 95 percent...." I think that's shooting kinda low, guys. My current setup has a link reliability of 99.99%. The only time it fails is when I go running across the room to eject the p0rn from the DVD player and trip over a cable. OTOH, if they can guarantee it will always fail during commercials, maybe they're on to something.

If only they just used 100baseT.

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

I have learned that the wireless equivalents are always well under the performances of the wired ones. And I'm tired to see my image freeze every time someone walks between the Wi-Fi access point and the HTPC.

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.

Re:

you are more likely to start seeing a degraded signal

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