Intel Launches Wi-Di

Barence writes "Intel has launched a new display technology called Wi-Di at CES. Intel Wireless Display uses Wi-Fi to wirelessly transmit video from PCs running Intel's latest generation of Core processors to HD television sets. Televisions will require a special adapter made by companies such as Netgear — which will cost around $100 — to receive the wireless video signals. Intel also revealed its optical interconnect technology, Light Peak, will be in PCs 'in about a year.'"

Why wouldn't...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wouldn't it work with an older Core processor, or hell even an AMD processor?

Re:Wi-Di

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, that stopped the Wii...

Re:Wi-Di

[XavidX]

Well it worked didnt it. Your gonna remember it for awhile.

Re:Great!

[happy_place]

Even better, now that it's wireless and just like my wireless internet, I'll get free TV, maybe even get to watch what they watch from the neighbor's houses!

Re:Why wouldn't...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It was specifically mentioned that this "Wi-Di" link does not support HDCP(and thus won't count as a "protected link" for the purposes of playing back blu-ray disks, won't Joe consumer be confused and angered by that one?) so I suspect that that isn't the reason.

I'd chalk it up to a mixture of "don't want the hassle of having to test and tweak and validate on large numbers of old components not designed with it in mind" and the desire to drive the sale of more laptoops with new intel silicon in them.

Re:How much cat6 would $100.00 buy?

[justinlee37]

I agree that it doesn't make sense for a desktop PC. However you are neglecting to consider a laptop. It can be a pain to attach and detach a laptop to a television or digital projector using a VGA cable. Imagine being able to sit down in your living room with your laptop and, from the couch, use only the laptop controls to transmit your screen to your television or projector. Imagine if everyone in the house had such a laptop, and they could all take turns using the same television to display their movies, music, games, etc.

Imagine if you could be at a business conference with a large video projector and hundreds of businesspeople all with laptops that were capable of wirelessly connecting to the projector to display their slide presentations, graphs, or videos, and if anyone in the audience could do this without even leaving their seat.

In the old days of computer, we used to have dummy monitor terminals connected to mainframes. The cost of the computer was greater than the cost of the monitor so we set up one computer to work with many monitors at once. Today, the cost of computers is much less, and the paradigm shifted; a monitor is more expensive (or as expensive) as a computer. So we rig our computers to use multiple video monitors. We are truly entering a golden age where it is possible for everyone to have a small computer, like a PDA device, that they can use to plug into dummy monitor/keyboard terminals or projected video screens. Imagine if they could do all of this without cables.

I'll get off your lawn now.

Re:How much cat6 would $100.00 buy?

[drinkypoo]

You can get crazy long HDMI cables to transmit video and [digital] audio. I bought a 25 footer to go across a room, and that's not the top end, either. This is really useless for non-mobile devices.

Intel CPUs?

[VincenzoRomano]

PCs running Intel's latest generation of Core processors

I don't see the point here. How can I see from WiFi whether you use Intel, AMD, ARM or whatever else?
Sounds more like advertisement than technology!

Re:How much cat6 would $100.00 buy?

[slim]

Five meter VGA cable, and five meter headphone cable, running along the bottom of the wall, that works just fine. Certainly not worth spending $100 for.

You could equally argue that a long ethernet cable means WiFi is useless. Cables are a nuisance. Fewer cables is good.

Re:How much cat6 would $100.00 buy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody loves slow links with high latency, greater interference from ambient radio waves/microwaves, higher energy consumption, and a lower maximum distance.

Should use ATSC

[gr8_phk]

They should just broadcast it using ATSC. Then we don't need a receiver on the TV just the antenna.

Re:Why doesn't television use better compression?

[delt0r]

If you want really good quality (as i do) then you at the high bandwidth end of the spectrum and mpeg2 is no worse that H264 (and even the experts agree on this point). Basically you at the end where you are encoding quite a bit of noise (film grain etc). h264 shines at lower bitrates, but with massive increases in complexity and patents. Hell the spec reads like a bunch of engineers had a stack of patents that they wanted to include in the spec.

I know a lot of fan boys love h264 and believe that HD can fit in 1Gig for a 2 hour movie, but that only works if you are blind. Really the vast majority of content out there is so compressed that there no point in 1080p cus DVD looks better anyway. There is a reason Blue Ray can fit 25Gigs on it. Currently here in Vienna HDTV looks far worse than normal tv due to the horrible artifacts... that may be a combination of using mpeg2 at low bit rates, bad reception or using h264 at even lower bit rates. Either way whats the point of 1080i/p or even 720 when most pixels are mosquito and other types of decoding noise.

Why not just reduce bandwidth via a smaller image and rescale and be honest about what you are getting. HD does not fit in DVD bitrates. DVD does.

Oh and HDTV does include h264.

Bandwidth?

[JustNiz]

I can't imagine that wi-fi has enough bandwidth for full HD, at least without massive compression that would obviously downgrade picture quality.
Someone wake me up when this technology can transmit pixel-perfect full screen HD video, without the annoying dropouts existing wi-fi suffers from.

Re:Why wouldn't...

[thrawn_aj]

Speaking purely about networked appliances (NOT notebooks or phones), why on earth would you ever need unique IP addresses (in the global sense?). One unique IP address for a home (the one that comes with the connection you usually pay for is fine), a nice router, DHCP and all the port numbers you could wish for. I'm not an IT person but I could easily wire up my lab/office using cheap commercial components so that I can remotely control/view data acquisition boxes. This is no different in principle from home appliances. If this is what you were talking about (I don't get IT jargon any more than you'll get physics jargon), why is this a kludge? There's no good reason why a wireless screen has to talk to the outside world - raises more problems than it solves.

In fact, if all you need is your appliances to talk to each other and maybe your laptop but NOT the outside world, you don't even need a firewall for that internal network. Eliminating a firewall would remove most (if not all) the minor annoyances of setting this stuff up. Hell, even a caveman could do it (TM).