Wireless HDMI Prototype Announced 141
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! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Women! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Women! (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
"TZero, a startup in the Intel-led WiMedia camp, claims its components will be able to produce 100-Mbit* data rates across distances of between 10 and 30 meters,"
Their goal is to be able to handle 3 HD streams at once.
Do they even need to compress the streams to do that?
*supposedly >100 Mb/s at distancess 10 meters
Re: (Score:2)
Problem is, the video you're sending to your HDTV, from ANY SOURCE, is already DCT-encoded... MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264, etc. All of them use DCT. So, lossy wavelet recompression of the decompressed DCT signal is just introducing another set of artifacts on top. JPEG (at highest quality) would certainly be much closer, and introduce less quali
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
By the w
It's true! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Long ago a girlfriend asked if I couldn't tuck these speakers away into the corners to get them out of sight etc; I replied pretty brusquely I'd rather take them outside and burn them. She said "I'll
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure where your monthly HDMI 'fees' and thousands of dollars come from.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Which just goes to show how cool the 50's really were.
Seriously, after decades of political correctness, we see that some stereotypes aren't always that far off. These guys aren't guessing that women want this, it's part of the feedback/research. My own experience (my wife and her friends) supports this. I know, my own experience doesn't offer a sample size large enough to reject the null hypothesis but it makes it a little easier to believe when I hear
Re: (Score:2)
I remember sitting on my deck one night and overhearing this argument...
She (in an exasperated tone): "My life is HOLES in WALLS... "
He (in a matter-of-fact 'WTF' tone): "Well, how else are these speakers going to get installed?"
Which brings up a point: wireless speakers are a huge win, so it's good they're becoming common now.
In the same vein, an easy-to-use wireless product that solves the "last 10 feet" proble
Another Sony Delay.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Another Sony Delay.. (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Only 90%? Seems more likely to be 100%. About the only uncompressed source of HDMI material will be a PC digital output -- so your Vista Aero Glass experience will be marred by compression artifacts!
Exactly. This wouldn't be too terrible if it relayed a source compressed format (e.g. the original MPEG-4 stream straight from the cable provider), but
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.
Actually... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
See! (Score:4, Funny)
Alternate joke (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Not really HDMI (Score:2, Insightful)
If lossy is allowed, my regular CRT TV from 1998 could be called HDTV. It's just lossy, right?
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
All the Dell xx07WFP LCDs support HDCP over DVI, as do all HDCP-ready InFocus projectors. I'd imagine that every single display device which has both HDMI and DVI connections supports HDCP over DVI.
Superset of DVI (Score:2)
Yes, HDMI is basically DVI-D. But it has many advantages, and few disadvantages.
Also,
Basically, the only thing DVI can do that HDMI can't is carry an analog video signal. But if you really want that, VGA is a lot more widely used.
For a wireless version, I'd be concerned about a number of t
JPEG2000 is not inherently Lossy (Score:5, Informative)
Did I miss something in the article indicating which they were using?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Though, they could just be stupid and really mean 'encodes'. Maybe they mean lossless..? I'm sort of dumb and always just think of lossless compression as encoding.
Who knows.. I would guess they might have brought it up if the compression was lossy. Then again, I would guess they might assure readers that it was not lossy.. aahhh!! I don't know.
hmm.. maybe Lossy (Score:2)
Sooo.. I guess it must be lossy if they're discussing that. They're essentially saying that it doesn't look as bad as the previous lossy compression method..
Re: (Score:1)
Generally speaking, if you're that self-aware, you can't be that dumb. In this case though, there's no good reason to equate encoding to lossless compression. Encoding just means you scamble the signal. Lossless compression entails, well, "compression": The stream will contain more data than it currently occupies in the medium. There IS such a t
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Either way, this seems like the wrong way of doing it. Most content that actually needs compressing is already compressed; decompressing it, then recompressing it, transmitting it, and
TZero is using lossless JPEG2000 (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.tzerotech.com/site/demo/ [tzerotech.com]
MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Informative)
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!"
Re: (Score:2)
Now if you are a technical newbie, plopping down thousands of dollars at the
$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.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
1) need cable for whatever reason
2) where can i get one around here? best buy? circuit city? compusa?
3) drive to one of the above
4) "where are the cables?"
5) get pointed to a wall of Monster stuff
6) "do you carry any thing else?"
7) sigh
8) GOTO 3
9) hurt myself trying to open the packaging
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.myopenx.com/ [myopenx.com]
More HD Ripoff! (Score:1)
$10 HDMI cables [google.com]
Once companies find out you dropped a pretty penny on an HDTV set they will be out to screw you any way possible.
The Pulse (Score:1, Funny)
Now included free with every PS3! A wireless device you can't live with/out!
Sony's hotshit ultrawideband technology summons soul-sucking ghosts from another dimension to EAT YOUR SOUL!
[watch them spin it as a viral marketing scheme]
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Swi
What is the point? (Score:1)
Isn't the point of HDMI to have the highest qualety possible?
Send this over a wireless connection (even if you could do it with out compressing it), and you are more likely to start seeing a degraded signal. Now if you compress this (As you have to I assume), then you end up with with loss by default.
Now we have taken our thousand dollar TV, our thousand dollar DVD player, and stuck another expensive piece between em, that lowers the final picture.
If you are going to spend that
Re: (Score:1)
Do your wireless downloads to your laptop degrade because it is wireless?
No. It works or it doesn't. It is digital.
Re: (Score:1)
Again, I am not an engineer, and simply speaking from personal experiance. I have yet
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
I'm not saying it's a good idea. I'm just saying that the general population doesn't understand what a digital signal REALLY means.
If you go to Best Buy, they sell HDMI cables for $60, $100 or $150 for premium. It is DIGITAL. Getting gold plated connectors on your cable isn't going to make a bit of difference.
The same misconception was being applied to the wireless signal by the parent poster. Of course the data still needs to get there - and it needs to get there reliably.
Re: (Score:1)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Put annother way, you could hire a contractor to mount a tube monitor INTO your wall for less than the price of an LCD when they were new. But they sold because they "took up less space".
In this room, I have two computers. Mine still has a CRT, which is long overdue for replacement, and will probably be replaced by a LCD soon enough. My girlfriend's PC has
Re: (Score:2)
No, I believe the point of HDMI was to add content controls [wikipedia.org] to the digital signal in an attempt to make copying it more difficult.
No Lessons Learned from the 2.4GHz Spectrum (Score:1, Insightful)
From Intel's Website:
In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has mandated that UWB radio transmissions can legally operate in the range from 3.1 GHz up to 10.6 GHz, at a limited transmit power of -41dBm/MHz.
Unregulated frequencie
Re: (Score:2)
Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_wideband [wikipedia.org]
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,
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
"Esto es muy malo. No trabaja. Me engañan!" -Toraidio Smith, Tijuana
Re: (Score:1)
Naw, the people who buy $200 gold-plated, oxygen-free audio cables and $2500 DVD players already have plenty of empty space in their heads.
Re: (Score:2)
Quite right.
Why would audiophiles be concerned about TVs? (Score:1)
I could see something like these TCP/IP In-wall Speakers [slashdot.org] being able to use wireless beause there would eventually be enough bandwidth in wireless networks to handle a full frequency r
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
JPEG2000 (which TFA is talking about), on the other hand, defines both lossy and lossless standards.
Re: (Score:2)
Except that if they're using lossless compression, the bandwidth required would be more than just leaving it at MPEG-2/4. In other words, they're using lossy.
250 6, Channel = 3.3 Gb/s, Video = 1.492 Gb/s (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
True that JPEG only offered lossy compression.
JPEG2000 DOES have a lossless compression mode for images. Sweet!
I have used it to compress terrain data. It gave a nice 5:1 compression where our previous compresion was only getting 3.5:1. On the flip side, it uses a surprising amount of CPU.
I don't know if there is an option for lossless video, but it seems likely.
One step forwards, nine back (Score:1)
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).
Re: (Score:1)
Pipe the TS stream from an HD DVB FTA source through a linux box running streamdev-server.
From my tests, I could easily transmit a 1080i broadcast (raw ts stream) over ordinary 100mbit cat5.
So for wireless, a good 802.11g router and receiver could handle the bandwidth of one channel at least.
Also, the signal that comes off the LNB through the coax is that raw HD stream. So it's definately doable. Coax can handle
at least 50mb/s, likely at lot more.
HDMI is just about c
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's not what this is for (Score:2)
Of course audio/videophiles aren't going to want this, but I'm can think of a few applications this would be convenient enough to offset the (minor, hopefully) quality loss. i.e. equipment cabinet or rack outside of main living room area. Fussing with extra-long HDMI cables or having to add repeaters into the mix can be a hassle for some.
Also w/ JPEG 2000 the artifacts are going to be pretty minor. It's compressing each frame independantly so none of the weird MPEG-esque artifacts inbetween keyframes.
It's not how often it fails, it's *when* (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
Avoid running with your pants around your ankles and you won't have that problem.
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.
Patent a converter box (Score:1)
It's been done with KVM-over-cat5, various disk protocols over tcp/ip and I think ethernet, and others already.
Sounds like a great market opportunity.
Re: (Score:1)
can turn transport stream HD data into a component 1080i signal) using ethernet to read
NFS mounted data that was captured using an HD3000 HD ATSC tuner card. Standards, wonderful things.
Re: (Score:2)
But less than DVI or firewire...
PoE is a mess. It's cheaper to give out wall warts than to include the circuitry to allow a device to operate on a wide range of voltages (necesary because ethernet is high resistance, so voltage varies dramatically by distance).
Agreed, it's just some marketing BS.
Power Wires? (Score:2, Interesting)
who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
Think of it as a giant laptop on the wall (hopefully the non-TV components will be interchangeable). IO should be the only thing that needs to b
Wow! (Score:2)
"Lossy" - if you are watching at home, it is lossy (Score:2, Informative)
I would not consider myself an expert, but this is my field, so let me give everyone a REALLY quick lesson in 1) JPEG2000 and 2) "lossy" video compression.
JPEG2000 [jpeg.org] is an advanced set of tools for video compression [wikipedia.org]. It is used at the highest levels of distribution [dcimovies.com], and has been proposed for consumer use as is the case here. For more on JPEG2000 a decent primer is here [purdue.edu].
If you are watching content at home, it already has gone through a "lossy" compression scheme. Whether it is DTH satellite MPEG2 [wikipedia.org] or
Welcome to the world of tomorrow! (Score:2)
This sentence makes me tense.
Jpeg isn't bad (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
First of all, encryption does not equal Digital Rights Management. What it does mean is your neighbor can't put his TV on the shared wall between your apartments and watch whatever you are watching. Most wireless technologies employ encryption to secure data transmission, including 802.11.
Second, Bluetooth and 802.11 do not have the transmission rates required. According to what I've read, to transmit the signal from a full HDMI you would need abo