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HD Should Be Wired, For Now
AcidAUS writes "Current wireless networking standards aren't fit for streaming high-definition (HD) content between a media centre PC and multiple extender devices, according to Intel and Microsoft." From the article: "'You've also got to remember though that wired connectivity is a lot more efficient than when you start putting it [HD content] over wireless,' said O'Shea, adding that the real-world bandwidth of 802.11g would 'probably top out around 22Mbps'. Intel's Gurgen added that in addition to efficiency differences, one must also consider other network traffic when weighing up a move to wireless. 'Remember that at that one time when you're streaming content it's probably not the only thing that's happening. You could be sending e-mails, you could be downloading some sort of update,' said Gurgen. Both O'Shea and Gurgen declined to comment on whether or not the upcoming 802.11n Wi-Fi standard would make wireless streaming of HD content throughout the home viable."
Another benefit in going with wires, is that you could potentially power some devices with Power over Ethernet, right?
And there's less interference for everything else wireless we'll want to run. And less EM radiation in the neighbourhood could have health benefits we can't quantify yet.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I live in France, where I have Free as an ISP. The ADSL service is 24Mbps and comes with an ADSL Wifi-MIMO equipped modem (built-in 5 port switch as well), and a Wifi "Television box", that streams MP4-Encrypted HD content over the Wifi without problems. And the content is drop-dead beautiful. In addition, I can receive a second HD stream to my computer while one is playing on the TV, though my Athlon 64 3000+ sometimes struggles with the HD content...
(For those that want to be jealous, I pay 29.99 for this service, which includes a fixed IP, 100 Channels of mixed HDTV and standard digital TV, and unlimited calling to everywhere in 40 some countries, including the US.)
I still prefer having Cat-6 cables running all over the house :)
It would be nice to leech the HD from your . I think at that point, I'd only be paying for basic utilities.
There would have been no contradiction, since it's the *current* standards that they deem inadequate.
Could DRM have anything to do with this? Is wireless content harder for them to control?
PS: Sometimes I am lucky if I get 22 kBps on Wireless. I would love to get "only" 22 mBps...
... of your ISP expanding over to North America? -- especially in Saskatchewan, Canada. Our current offerings are very limited.
Pretty please?
I have enough trouble streaming DVD-resolution content across my 802.11g network.
Could be something to do with using SMB as the protocol to stream it across, though. When I test my bandwidth I get a good 15Mb/s, usually, with only 3ms ping times. Dunno why everything's so slow, but it is.
The really heartbreaking thing is that I live 5 km from the French border...
So near and yet so far.
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Because of overhead (read copy protection) you can't use wireless. If they had found a good copy protection or at least imagined the possibility someone will crack even this one then maybe they could make a good image for wireless.
It's definatly possible, you can get full HD Broadcasts over antenna, but because there's not Copy protection on that I guess it's ok. The fact is that it's not that HD or blue ray are going to be inferior technology, it's the fact both of them are going to be so overladen with copyprotection that neither will even gather acceptance. At least for a long while.
Well 802.11n promises a typical data rate of 200Mbit/s (max 500Mbit/s), but the actual standard is not expected to be approved until July 2007, so it will be at least another year before it is feasible to start integrating into mainstream technologies. 802.11g would probably be alright with heavily compressed HD content, but if you have more than 1 box trying to watch different content from the same source, then it will probably break down quite quickly.
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More like: Wireless HD content shall not impede the Microsoft Genuine Advantage Spy Network.
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I can stream full HD content wirelessly - if it's compressed.
According to TFA, they streamed five HD files to five different XBox 360 extenders, but the entire network load is only around 20-25 Mbps? Which means one of those HD streams is only around 4-5 Mbps? Seems a bit low for me....
Anyway, if one HD stream is around 20 Mbps (sounds more realistically), it would still be feasible to stream it wirelessly, although I would agree that depending on the quality of your wireless connection it could be a bit shaky, so that a wired connection is preferable.
But I think Intel and Microsoft saying "HD should be wired" has more to do with the mandatory HDCP copy protection if you use HDMI cables....
That's because wireless sucks. The latency is horrible, the frequent, short dropouts aren't really catered for by TCP/IP, the bandwidth, as others mentioned, isn't anywhere near what it's touted as, and the security, most of the time, is dire.
Considering M$'s other restrictions, what's buying a new modem.
I don't think M$ should be as worried about pleasing hollywood as they should be about pleasing their consumers.. because as it is now it's looking like m$ will be the worst platform for HD/HTPC for the forseeable future.
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Well, 100 baseT is inadequate for streaming good video.
Assume no compression (i.e. good video) 800x600 pixels, 32 bits/pxl, 30 fps
Moving that data alone requires 500 Mbps, not counting protocol overhead. Of course, with compression you can easily cut that down by a factor of 10, but that will be lossy.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
We have to decide whether to keep the cable spaghetti so we can watch movies with highly detailed film noise.
Or we can dump the cables and watch cleaner, cheaper transfer.
I'll take my time on this one.
Or elephants through keyholes. Even with tasty, high-efficiency/low-loss codecs, you cannot do 802.11g distribution of HD. Part of it has to do with QoS and the rest with the time domain of the duty cycle of the raster generation. In English: it's a shared space, like the 'collision detecting' part of Ethernet's CSMA/CD media access later. Only one device talks to the AP at a time successfully, unless you use two cards and two non-inteferring channels (which does happen if purposefully constructed in real life, but not from Best Buy or Fry's on a good day). Add into the mix, someone who's also sharing that AP (or random noise confusing the situation). Then the effective throughput goes down further. 802.11n uses two antennae for differential signal addition to improve speed. It's subject to the same problems, although it does potentially go faster-- except that it's not even a 1.0 standard until perhaps 2008-- despite all the equipment arriving into the big box stores that's non-standard and worse, having compatibility issues. Don't think that muni-WiFi, home WiFi, or any other WiFi or even whymax will work for you in HD distribution. Not yet, and not in this decade. Use fiber where you can; copper after that; the air after that for your MAC layer fun.
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Here are some real questions for/about the original poster.. essentially, boils down to "How much money does this guy make in comparison to someone in the USA?"
I am curious to know how exactly this great service measures up to something equivalent in the USA. If the price was in Euros, that comes to about 38 bucks. If not, sounds like a decent deal, IF it is comparable.
In Maryland, for approximately $70 I get HD digital cable, sticky ip (not fixed, though has not changed in six months), a free digital video recorder, HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, 40 various channels and a bunch of music channels I don't care much for.
Download speeds:
Upload speeds:
Download speeds obviously vary based on sources but the upstream seems fairly consistent when measured. Now, lets see how this compares to the French deal. If I make $50,000 / year as a crummy webmaster, and my cable/internet comes to about $840 / year, that means that I spend 1.68% of my income on the service. How would this French service scale to a typical French citizen/resident income?
Isn't HD content... broadcast... wirelessly... already?
(Just busted by elipsis quota for the year.)
55 MiB per second, 460.8 Mbps.
It makes more sense and is much cheaper to stream video (HD or otherwise) from the source (Set Top Box, HD or DVD player, etc.) to a PC, video phone, pocket computer, etc. I currently use a Slingbox (cost: ~ $199) to stream SD TV to all my PCs at home and I could stream content over the internet too. I think this "other way around" (Streaming device such as the cheapo Slingbox to PCs) is the common sense way to go but I suspect Hollywood, Cable and DSL ISPs, and the PC OS manufacturers would try and restrict this via DRM such as HDCP, etc.
Hollywood obviously would be concerned about consumers place shifting their content. Cable and DSL ISPs would prefer that consumers not stream content and that they buy/rent multiple Set Top Boxes instead. PC OS manufacturers would prefer consumers buy overpriced and overcomplicated hardware and use these as "media centers".
The consumers end up getting screwed yet again.
Yeah, but you have to live around French people. I don't think it's worth living over there and dating chicks with hairy armpits just to get good Internet access. I mean this with all due respect.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I prefer cat-5 wires running all over the house. How is THAT for old fashioned?
Some people encrypt by using rot-13 twice. I prefer the more secure method of using rot-1 a total of twenty six times.
ONe problem. Verizon has a setop box that fstreams to other tvs as part of there fios network. Cablevision also tried doing this with a network pvr but they immediately got sued by the tv and movie studios when the announced they were testing it. So its not the cable and dsl ips thast are stopping it. Its the tv and movie studios that are stopping it.
I've found a source that would allow wi-fi users to power all the appliances in their home. It is called the Broadcast Energy Transmitter. It takes energy and allows you to transmit it through the air without affecting anything in its path. Now if we can only take it from the Joes.
Can I bum a sig?
I get my HD content with rabbit ears.
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Video is due to it's very nature very redunant. The majority of the content which was in frame X is still there in frame X+1 and frame X+2, it may have just moved a little. Good compression (MPEG4 at a high data rate) simply takes advantage of this, and will not be noticable to the viewer while still reducing the data rate 3-5x.
Now as to your assumptions. First, why 32bpp? You don't broadcast an alpha channel. 24bpp is enough for RGB, and 16bpp is enough for YCbCr (using 422 sampling, which is fine for video but not so great for computer images).
Second, 800x600 isn't HD. The minimum resolution to be called HD is 720p, which is 1280x720 (roughly a 1 megapixel image). Some folks will try to pass 480p off as HD, but it's not, it's ED.
So taking a typical movie in HD, that's 1280 * 720 * 16 bpp * 30 fps * 1/4 (compression gains) = 110 Mbps. Still a little too much for fast ethernet, but GigE could support several such streams without a problem.
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Who in the hell is streaming uncompressed video around their house?
FC Closer
Lightning. I live next to a cell tower that "brings" lightning in and this last strike (250 ft away) induced enough voltage on my cat-5 cables (in wall) to blow up 4 ethernet ports (including a switch and an intel motherboard with onboard ethernet.)
All my wireless gear is OK
I know of no good quality video that does not use compression, for that reason. DVD uses lossy compression. Blu-Ray uses lossy compression. Certainly anything you download from the Internet uses lossy compression. The idea is that if most people won't notice the drop in quality, and it buys you a factor of 10 at least, it's a practical necessity.
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what codecs are being used to compress the stream.
Using MPEG-2 vs a higher compression codec like H.264 or WMV-HD will definitely have some impact on bandwidth requirements.
I've always wondered about this, and while it's a bit OT, I figured this is a good place to ask:
Does watching an "on-demand" program over digital cable take away from your available cable modem bandwidth? Considering it's all coming over the same pipe, and the shows you watch are technically "data", I would assume that to be the case, but I don't know for sure.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
You remind me of the people who download the "HD" torrents of the internet and think they're seeing the real thing.
Yeah, good compression can deliver a pretty good picture. It's a stretch to get a single real HD stream over wireless today, let alone two.
As to being jealous, I think I have 100 channels each of shopping networks, audio stations, pay per view and about 50 movie channels. I get 10 HD channels just with my antenna, and if I paid for the HD pack on DVT I'd get 10 more on satellite. I suppose I could get by with only 100 channels, if I got to pick exactly the ones I wanted.
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HD is usually at 60fps ... 720p60 or 1080i60 . The numbers I usually see for uncompressed bandwidth reqs are 1.5Gbps (3.0 Gbps for 1080p60, which is why there isn't much that supports that yet unfortunately)
Also don't forget audio, though usually I guess you only have a few tracks of AC3 audio that add another 512kbps max each.
Anyway, at work I use VideoLAN to compress a 1280x720p30 video feed to a 4Mbps stream using MPEG4 without too much quantization during high-motion sequences.
If you're talking HD movies, they're recorded at only 24 frames/sec. For broadcast in NTSC-standard interlaced video (and for its HD equivalent) at 60 fields/sec, every 5th field is duplicated. Thus, 1080i broadcast HD movies usually take more bandwidth than the original 1080p signal (which can be reconstructed with no loss in quality).
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