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Interoperable Remote Controls
Lord Prox writes "From the HAVi website:
"Ever dreamed of how your ideal home could function in the new millennium? A TV with voice recognition capability? Or connected to a video telephone link so that the TV is muted and calls are answered automatically by a voice command? How about a video camera that automatically displays a picture on the TV screen when a visitor arrives; or starts a recording if the same thing happens unexpectedly during the night?"
Apparently 8 of the leading consumer electronics companies are trying to get rid of all those remotes and do some cooperation over IEEE 1394. Whitepapers and FAQ available."
Anyone notice that the companies participating in HAVi are all either European or Asian? If this standard survives, it'll probably take a while to get to the states ...
On a related note: philips already makes a programmable remote that you can program by pointing it at an other remote. You then press the button on the first remote and you can assign it to a button on the philips remote. Very handy.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Don't get me wrong, I think this would be cool, and I welcome the day when I can dispose of the 4 remotes I have (3 of which are Sony, and they still don't interoperate well). But in this day and age of DRM, I fear that the more we automate things, the easier it will be for those in power to legislate what we can and can't do with them.
Look at DVDs, for example. Sure, the picture quality and sound are miles ahead of VHS. But on VHS, I can fastforward through that FBI warning, and trailers. I can't do that with most DVDs. Nor can I skip chapters, or access the menu unless the disc decides I'm worthy. And I'm forced to watch the MGM splash screen, and some annoying intro that the DVD designers think looks cool. (Yes, yes, I know of the existence of mod chips and hacks for DVD players. That's not the point.) With DVD, the media (as in disc, not newspapers) controls the player, as opposed to the other way around with VHS.
The more we relinquish control over our equipment, in the name of automation and progress, the more we hand control over to another group. Is that the way it has to be? No. Is that the way it should be? No. But that's the way it is.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
This smells like the beginings of the semantic web approach to me..
:)
All devices should publish information about their capabilities using, for example, RDF.
When you answer the phone, anything that has exposed a "volume control" property could be muted until the call ends.. I hope they plan on using better security than WEP for the wireless links though..
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
I own a HAVi enabled TV (Mits WS-55511) and while its nice to know its there, there arent many other HAVi enabled devices. No HAVi DVD players, cable boxes, etc. Thats the current problem with HAVi.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
The technology is always changing now. We have no time to get used to the most recent tech before they start on creating something new and better.
Ok, this is slightly OT, but it is my current peevee against cell phone manufacturers - they are producing the car handsfree sets that can mute the radio, just as it is done with TV in article, but why not implement it also for standalone walkmans?
/.
I already have a handsfree headphones and mic. I want to listen to the music I have on my MD player. If I listen to the music, chances are that I will not hear the phone ringing, and when I hear it I have to fumble to change the headphones.
Why not put a simple 2.5mm jack on the phone, route the sound from the walkman through it and on to the handsfree headphones? Phone rings, music fades off, you get a beep-beep through the headphones, and you pick up. OK, the music is still running, and you would have to pause your walkman, but I think it is a minor issue. Furthermore walkmans can now be operated from the dongle on the headphones cord - I think that Sony could make their phones work with their walkmans...
My next idea is to have a soothing female voice tell me through the headphones which button should I press to retreive the call - somehow I tend to botch it.
And, yeah, if somebody tries to patent it - you saw it firs on
when the tv is actually voice activated, whats to stop things like:
(loudly spoken from the TV) TV Stop Recording, VCR Stop Recording, Stop Recording, DVD/VCR erase media.
wonder how much a station would have to get paid before it started running ads that had
"watch KPr0n, just by saying TV Switch to channel 69"
"I can tell you that that the HAVi standards are already written and available." Well, whoop te do.
I don't know what's going on. You can put any brand of gas in your car and it will go, you can put any brand of analog audio cassette in your cassette player and it will play, but when it comes to digital electronics, suddenly standards mean nothing.
You can't even buy plain old CD-R media and have more than about 80% confidence that you can burn it in drive A and then read it in CD player B. For DVD recordables, +, -, you name it, the degree of interoperability is far less. There have been "written and available" standards for years.
There are "written and available" standards for FireWire, but you'd better not buy a random camcorder and expect to plug it into your Mac and use iMovie without checking some reviews and discussion groups and KnowledgeBase articles first.
What do you want to bet: there will be no real validation method; the companies will rush stuff to market based on early versions of the HAVI standard; when it doesn't work, they'll fingerpoint at the other guy and claim noncompliance; if a consumer ever does figure out which device is noncompliant, that information will be of no value in getting the problem solved...
Look, nothing personal about HAVi, but I'm sick of this brave new world in which NOTHING WORKS and NOBODY CARES.
OK, I feel better now.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"Ever dreamed of how your ideal home could function in the new millennium? A TV with voice recognition capability? "
No. Talking to inanimate devices in my home is something I do not what to do, and while cute, gets REALLY OLD FAST.
Don't ever invest in anything that uses "voice recognition technology" as a selling point for a consumer product. It's all pointless and it sucks. Are you realistically going to sit there and listen to your SO talk to the TV?
The killer app for voice recognition technology is in automating call centers. The first person to develop transparent dialog with a computer will become a multi-billionaire as you've just found a way to eliminate tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs in front line technical support.
..don't panic
Surely I'm not the only person who thinks that current A/V setups have become close to unmanageable due to this mix of rca, xlr, coax and toslink audio, component, s-video and rca video.
I'd pay a whole hell of a lot of money for a proper fix to this mess, and surely I'm not the only one.
See these articles as an example.
And even with 5C content protection, the entertainment industry is STILL deathly afraid of the idea of delivering digital content to customers with full digital interconnectivity between their devices.
If not for them, we would have a single, clean FireWire cable, or no cable at all, connecting all of our devices, and enabling them to seamlessly communicate with and control one another. I would have thought we'd be there by now...
HAVi isn't really so much about the A/V connectors (as you point out, they're somewhat standardized already). It's about signalling. That is, communications between the devices about the data streams (the audio and video). Sure, they imagine that the data streams themselves will also be sent over the same wires, but as you point out, that isn't reall necessary.
To pick a somewhat dumb example (but playing off the one in the article post), it's about your HAVi telephone telling your HAVi audio receiver that a telephone call has arrived so please lower the currently playing sound by 50% and play the telephone ring code and the HAVi phone telling the HAVi TV to display caller ID information. And all this happening regardless of who the vendors of all that equipment is.
From an article at http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/cri/cri-
25. What is the license policy/fee for HAVi development?
Licensing for the HAVi specification is handled through Royal Philips Electronics on behalf of seven of the eight Promoter companies who co-created the HAVi Specification. (more information about THOMSON Multimedia's licensing policy)
* One-time license fee of US $5,000.
* US $0.10 per product.
Random is the New Order.
"1394 has more than enough capacity to simultaneously carry multiple digital audio and video streams around the house, and provides support for digital copy protection.
The RIAA/MPAA have not only convinced these manufacturers that P2P is evil, but now they want to control how we use media between rooms in our own homes. Maybe they will call it R2R(room to room) piracy.
The Fat Man Walks Alone
The thing I really hate about this HAVI stuff is that the CE companies are ignoring what the rest of the world knows about abstraction and layering network protocols.
You're missing the point to argue the merits of ethernet or 1394. The point is that this is a layer-4 protocol and should have nothing to do woth the physical or link layers. HAVI should be orthogonal to the physical layer.
Can you imagine the dark cave we would still be living in if TCP was somehow specifically bound to ethernet?
I think these HAVI guys are hung up on DRM, and feel that they might let the genie out of the bottle if they abstract the physical and link layers out of their protocols to run on any link layer.
As a result, this will wind up like previous CE standards effort and fail to provide a consistent interoperable system.
jeff