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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."
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.
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?
you have to be kidding me..
Why spend $4K on a tv/projector and then $1K on the latest 1080p players to have it transmit wirelessly with a LOSSY codec!
bit for bit sharpness.. that's what it's about..
i'll keep my damn wires thanks!
See! Sony's once again ahead of the curve, not shipping the PS3 with an HDMI cable.
HDMI, in its present incantation, is just glorified DVI with DRM. But, anyways, a wireless version of a video connection which is lossy is not the same as the video connection it purports to replicate. I would propose they call it HDMI Minus (or something like that) but HDMI is already a minus.
If lossy is allowed, my regular CRT TV from 1998 could be called HDTV. It's just lossy, right?
JPEG2000 has both lossless and lossy modes.
Did I miss something in the article indicating which they were using?
"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!"
http://twitter.com/onion2k
JPEG 2000 is a relatively new image compression standard that was approved by the JPEG committee. It can operate at higher compression ratios without the characteristic blocky and blurry effects of the original JPEG standard.
I'm sure the millions of pr0n userz will be happy.
Dead horse, I know.
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]
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.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
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.
IANAE (I am not an engineer)
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 much $$ can't you just higher a contracter to run the cables for you?
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
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 frequencies are historically hot beds of interference. Does this 1 packet error in 100,000,000 include the use of a 5.8GHz cordless phone near by. Not to mention multiple UWB devices like wireless USB. I'd like to know how this technology was tested to understand how they calculated such a low error rate. Have we learned anything from the 2.4GHz spectrum?
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.
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.
They do discuss how JPEG2000 compresses "without the characteristic blocky and blurry effects of the original JPEG standard."
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..
HDMI is DVI with digital audio. High Defenition Content Protection (HDCP) is part of the DVI standard.
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.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
Only a complete retard would pay $100 for a cable meant to deliver a purely digital signal. Then again these are the same people Monster-brand products are amrketed to, so nothing surprises me.
So sayeth their presentation anyhow.
http://www.tzerotech.com/site/demo/
Wideband is great when you really need it, but there is only so much bandwidth available. Why do people insist on having a HDMI link to cover 10 feet, just because it is cool?
The government can't save you.
Future news: Sony announces that the new Wireless HDMI will not be shipped with the PS3.
No matter how hard the digital people work towards perfection, some creative engineer is determined to re-created the effect of crappy analog. Why use compression? Why not just keep cans of spraypaint next to your plasma screen and use them everytime something you care about is on?
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
WTF?
Hey, here is just a trick for you my friends...
Make you a friends who work at best buy or future shop...
They will get you a good HDMI cable for 5-7$!!! why spend 100$ on cable when you can have them for less then 10 buck....
Posting anom because I will get labeled a troll by someone who doens't understand this is a big issue in the audio/video community.
HDMI does NOT work correctly as it is. v1.1, v1.2, v1.3....it just does not work. I have too many devices (including a $2500 video scaler) that are not passing signals perfectly becaue the standards are just not "standard" enough between vendors. And they are proposing a "wireless" version? I am sure that will work just great. Let's throw the overhead of HDCP and any other DRM they want in and then authentication and everything else....yea, I have high hopes of that working. Wireless N doesn't even provide half the bandwidth it is supposed to get and they are going to send uncompressed HD throught the air? I won't hold my breath.
DRM? no thanks.
What's wrong with blue tooth, 802.11a-z?
How can someone assure they are getting the best possible picture if they can not spend $300 on a gold platted cable for it?
I'll bet someone will sell a signal conditioner for this. It will ensure the proper, efficient, and the most error free method of ensuring the wireless signal is transmitted between the devices. It will create an environment in the room that promises to maintain an optimum ionization level in the air and will remove any sound and visual impairing impurities that could deflect and disrupt the rf signal between the devices. Self proclaimed audiophiles will talk about how everything looks and sounds much warmer and rich. Others will take it a step further and replace the power cord of the device with one that costs more then the device itself and others will strategically place small sheets of aluminum around the device to remove any capacitive effect that the ionization machine might cause on the surrounding equipment.
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).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
With all of these wireless signals?
The encryption better be rock-solid or every horny 14 year old is gonna be tapping their lonely-old-man-neighbor's monitor for p0rn.
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. The wavelet compression also is smoother and less noticeably blocky than other methods. (I do wonder tho, what the compression scheme does to video streams that have already been decompressed from MPEG 2/4. Hopefully they have it tuned to not maim such streams too horribly.)
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 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.
While I understand their desire to have a wireless standard, Are we not forgetting there is a whole home standard being devised around broadband over power lines? Could they not instead use something that would travel the power line digitally and make the connection? Perhaps BPL is a dead horse but I had not heard that it was so. The home standard was to allow devices to travel the wire path to make all sorts of connections. This would be a much better design IMHO.
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
I don't think the model is to transmit video data to the monitor. I think the idea is to include the groovy computer that wirelessly downloads HD TV content onto a hard drive that's IN the monitor. The DVD drive, as long as the format survives, will also be included in the 'console' which we call the TV. No video needs to be transmitted. Am I missing something?
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 be wireless... Now, if someone said that they could transmit power wirelessly (so I wouldn't need batteries), then I'd be excited-- as long as it didn't bake my reproductive organs.
100baseT is a piracy enabling devices. Don't you realize that 99% of all music and video piracy occures over at least category 5 cables. And then you want to give them 100baseT 10 time more piracy than your standard 10baseT piracy!!!
Design, patent, and license free to hobbyists and "pro-freedom" commercial vendors a box that takes {your favorite signal} on one end and converts it to/from something that can ride on cat5 or better yet, ethernet or tcp/ip.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
My God. Are we sending video signals straight through thin air these days??? What exciting times we live in!
Any source of HD is compressed with some algorithm (even terrestial broadcast is MPEG2).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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 is an advanced set of tools for video compression. It is used at the highest levels of distribution, and has been proposed for consumer use as is the case here. For more on JPEG2000 a decent primer is here.
If you are watching content at home, it already has gone through a "lossy" compression scheme. Whether it is DTH satellite MPEG2 or MPEG4), cable (MPEG2/NTSC - yes NTSC is a lossy compression scheme), or terrestrial (MPEG2 ATSC or NTSC), DVD (MPEG2), or even LaserDisc (NTSC), your content has gone through a lossy scheme.
Remember, Google is your friend, and although not perfect, wikipedia can answer many questions. For more on video compression here is a nice little presentation.
The short story is everyone shouldn't get real upset about JPEG2000 and it being lossy. Cheers.
It does claim lossless JPEG2000. The slashdot post is incorrect.
-=Lothsahn=-
Most "audiophiles" that would fall for such snake oil and con-artistry (is that even a word?) have little to no interest in home theater. Most of those interested in home theater are looking for high picture quality and high impact sound. This technology just doesn't seem like it's going to measure up to the performance needed.
I could see something like these TCP/IP In-wall Speakers being able to use wireless beause there would eventually be enough bandwidth in wireless networks to handle a full frequency response range. Especially with the new technologies on the horizon. That's not snake oil though, that's honest technology. I could see someone trying to sell such a silly idea to an audiophile in that respect though.
That's not to say that someone won't try selling it. However, the fundamental definition of audiophile doesn't even mention home theater/multi-channel sound reproduction let alone video hardware.
From The American Heritage Dictionary:
audiophile (ôd--fl) n. -- A person having an ardent interest in stereo or high-fidelity sound reproduction.
Then again, that definition does not encompass the insanity that surrounds the most extreme of "audiophiles".
$100 for an HDMI cable? I know that HDTVs have yet to become common in living rooms, and even so not all of them have HDMI.. but really have you ever seen the cable? The connections remind me of SATA meets USB. They SLIDE into place, there aren't even thumbscrews to spin but they charge INSTALLATION for these things?
$10 HDMI cables
Once companies find out you dropped a pretty penny on an HDTV set they will be out to screw you any way possible.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Even for analog broadcasts, OTA has much better quality than cable if signal is strong enough to get a good reception.
Well, a poster up above stated that they are infact using lossless JPEG2000. I believe 720p on my digital cable box produces about 80 Mb/s of compressed data and a channel occupies about 6 MHz of bandwidth. The GP says that the UWB system will provide 250 MHz of bandwidth, which is much greater than the 6 MHz currently being utilized in compressed form. If a 6 MHz channel can carry 80 Mb/s, a 250 MHz channel could carry 3.333 Gb/s and an uncompressed 1080p program only contains 1920x1080 (Pixels/Frame) x 30 (Frame/Second) x 24 (Bits/Pixel) = 1.492 Gb/s. So it seems as though it would be possible to use lossless compression as an earlier poster stated.
I always banging my head against the wall whenever I see any "big room" A/V product that is wireless (I'm not talking ipods here). Don't these guys get it....?
You are still going to have the power Cord!
So one thick cable for power is almost always going to be visible. What is the problem with a thin one for HDMI ?
People don't see much problem with one lossy compression step. It becomes a problem when you stack lossy compression over lossy compression. That's why I don't use stuff like TiVo. You can rip DVB streams right to your PC. Unfortunately, most people don't know about that or don't understand what all that compression means.
This sentence makes me tense.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Hey guys don't you know that every "HD" signal you currently see is compressed? Infact it's even compressed with a lossy compression when its recorded to tape from the HD camera. Unless you're taking an SDI out cable directly into a Hard Disk Recording system and hardly anyone does that. Why is all HD compressed? 1 1080i uncompressed stream runs 165MB/sec ....do the math ;) and even though its compressed it looks pletty good. One of the widest formats used with cameras and editing/storing is the DVCPRO HD Codec, Panasonic who is the current leader in HD cameras uses it with their VariCam setups. Sony uses a mixture of formats which in my opinion has hurt their market share...what else is new.
At anyrate everything is captured edited and outputted using compressed HD. Then its recompressed to be broadcasted either using MPEG-2, MPEG-4 or .H264, most people suffer quality loss from dropped packets durring transmission rather than compression artifacts. JPEG2000 has a less noticable compression than the other formats it actually uses a higher data rate than the other formats (which is good) however I'm surprised they didn't go with a .H264 standard which may be better because you can get similar quality with a smaller data rate.
This may confirm apple rumors about a "wireless video Jobby" similar to what Aiport Express is for audio. Since they're already pushing tv shows and it's known they are wanting to start pushing movies. Granted 2 generations of compression/decompression isn't great but you're really not going to notice it especially at 1080i.
and remember HD-DVD and Blue-Ray are also using compressed HD video formats wether it be WindowsMedia, .H264 or MPEG2 so stop all your Compression whining very few people have seen pure uncompressed HD....well except maybe at the movie theater...but thats film and it looses a generation going to analog....you still have film grain, dust and scratches. :)
looking forward to what apple is going to do with it all.
Not from my Xbox 360.
Yes, HDMI is basically DVI-D. But it has many advantages, and few disadvantages.
- It also carries 8 channels of uncompressed digital audio.
- It has a smaller, more convenient physical connector.
- It is specced to drive longer cable distances.
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 things (hey, another bullet list!):
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I have a year-old wireless keyboard + optical mouse at home, and I don't use the mouse because it is frequently innaccurate and eats batteries. I've seen a couple of sets with a charger of some kind (battery (pack) charger in the reciever, or stand mouse in reciever to charge), and aparently these mice are more responsive because they don't use such aggressive power-saving schemes. "Why save power if it lasts 3 days and gets charged every night" I guess.
By reading the following you agree not to sell or use my idea without my consent, and you must impose a similar restriction on anyone you transmit it to. (Can't be too careful these days)
The thing is, why has no-one made a keyboard equivalent? I'd love to have a keyboard that I just clipped onto the reciever and it acted as a wired keyboard for super-responsive gaming, while at the same time it would charge the internal battery pack for when you un-clip the keyboard to use it wirelessly, lying on your bed or just leaning back in your chair or any other situation where a wireless keyboard is useful.
Anyone?