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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 didn't I think of that? First, kill off all TV signals and force people to use cable companies, then invent a system to ...
transmit TV signals!
Brilliant!
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
if you can broadcast a signal to every set in your house, or even your entire apartment floor, then there goes a bunch of lucrative descrambler box fees. then again, they can all only show one channel at a time. however, media companies seem to all be losing income nowadays, and have all taken a hostile attitude towards new technology. they seem to need very little reason, however slim and irrational, to pick a fight with new technology
of course, the future is all streaming media over the internet, mostly on demand and mostly free, so they're all fucked
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
bada-bing-TISH! Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I'll be here all week.
Seriously, though, did their advertising people not spot what a silly name Wi-Di is?
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.
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.
Shielded with tin foil?
Apple started the concept but ceded it to Intel to develop it.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/26/exclusive-apple-dictated-light-peak-creation-to-intel-could-be/
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Yeah, because we all know how completely difficult it is to connect a DVI to HDMI cable and an 1/8" cable from your computer to your TV.
Of course someone will say, "Most people don't keep their PCs near their TVs."
If people were willing to spend $600 on a PS3 that sits in their living room, I don't see why they can't spend a few hundred for a PC. Heck, if you subtract the $100 "special adapter" from the price of the PC, you can get one real cheap.
Of course someone else will say, "Who wants a noisy PC in their living room?" And to that I'll say, "Have you ever been in the same room with an Xbox 360?" Mine is much more noisy than my PC by a wide margin.
Compared to the 90s, I think retail desktop PCs are pretty quite nowadays. (Of course I built mine myself.)
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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.
Because people have bought expensive HD sets with VGA/S-Video/HDMI and they want to use them as big, honkin' monitors in their living room without running cable.
They should just broadcast it using ATSC. Then we don't need a receiver on the TV just the antenna.
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.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
... and none of the articles I've read about 'Wi-Di' seem to answer them.
How about sound? Transmitting video directly to my tv sounds nice, but how does this tech account for transmitting sound to a HT receiver? Potential for audio/video de-sync? How will this be handled?
Potential for latency issues? This could be a big one, especially for gaming.
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).
The only reason we have to rely on either third party clouds or port forwarding, VPNs, and all this other mess is because IPv4 wasn't adequate in size or security.
With IPv6, everyone will have globally routable IPs with IPSEC as a standard feature. We will see a wave of new devices and software to take advantage of this. Want to sync your phone with your laptop, and your laptop with your desktop? Easy. Even home users will be able to do it if the software exists, and it won't require a third party. You'd need to have your phone, desktop, and LAN in your local, "trusted" network at home, or manually copy enough info to set up the IPSEC, and then done. You take your laptop and phone on vacation, it gets its MIPv6 address, it then sets up a connection with your home IPv6 address. Your desktop doesn't need a VPN, it has strong certificates you transferred at home to do IPSEC. Your desktop doesn't need port forwarding, you set up your stateful firewall to allow IPSEC and existing connections in, but block all unsolicited, insecure connections. Your desktop doesn't even need DynDNS because the address space is large enough that you will almost certainly get a large, very large range of static IPs, and MIPv6 will even let your phone and laptop carry their IPs with them on supporting carriers. If that fails, you can set up DynDNS or something like that on your desktop, and never have to worry about it again.
The reason we need globally unique IP addresses is because:
1. NAT isn't security.
2. NAT is just as much propping up the network security industry as Congress is propping up .
Proper IPv6 will eliminate most of the need for VPNs, result in increased network resiliency and create new business opportunities. It's like going up a step on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Yeah, we had fun scrounging around on the first couple layers, but making globally routable IPs standard gets you one step closer to self-actualization ;)
And you're right, there is no reason a wireless screen has to talk to the outside world. That's why no one is recommending you remove stateful firewalls, no one is recommending you set your devices to promiscuously accept connections. Existing firewall technology, plus globally routable IPs, plus IPSEC equals win.
Speaking purely about networked appliances (NOT notebooks or phones), why on earth would you ever need unique IP addresses (in the global sense?).
Well, I can give you one fairly good example. I'm typing this on a laptop, a Macbook Pro. It came with a web server, which I enabled, and I routinely use it to test assorted web stuff locally. However, I can't use it as a "real" web server, because I can't get a fixed IP address for it.
I use it for its major function, a portable computer. Under the current IP regime, this means that when I carry it around, its IP address either doesn't exist, or is constantly changing. This means that even when it's exposed on the Net, not behind a firewall, it still can't be found, because the DNS system has no way of tracking a host with a rapidly changing IP address. Imagine that you had a cell phone whose phone number changed as you drove around, always having a number that belonged to the "local" exchange that you were driving through. Do you think that anyone could call you on such a phone? The same problem exists with portable computers of any sort. They can call you, but you can't call them. Two phones of this nature couldn't call each other at all. Similarly, two moving laptops with browsers can't find each others' web servers with the current IP setup.
Actually, I have a G1 "google" phone, and it has the same problem. Since it's running a linux OS, it could easily support a web server, and could "serve" things like pictures that I've just taken. Software on my home machine could automatically download files from the phone as they're created, using "HTTP GET" or scp or rsync or whatever. But this can't be made to work, because the phone's IP address changes rapidly. I've verified that, even sitting here at home, a web server's log shows successive HTTP requests from the phone as coming from different IP addresses. So, even if I did run a server on it, my home machine (or your smart phone) couldn't get to it, because there's no way you could ask the DNS system for its instantaneous IP address. Even if you could, by the time you did a connect(), it's address could have changed. The same sort of thing happens with my wife's iPhone.
If you don't see how this kills a lot of very useful network apps, you don't have much imagination. Maybe it would help to consider: You and a friend both have laptops. Fire up web servers on both of them. Then try to get a browser on each to connect to the web server on the other. Try this while carrying them around. Do you know a way to make this work? Do you understand why it would be useful?
Until we can give every net-enabled gadget its own IP address, there are a lot of things that simply can't be made to work right. IPv4 was designed with the idea that every "host" would have at least one fixed IP address. The NAT stuff is a huge kludge to get around the fact that this isn't possible (and even when it was possible, it wasn't allowed by the ISPs ;-). I've seen a number of claims that there are already many more than 2^32 IP-enabled gadgets in existence, most of them with no access to the public Internet. As long as this state remains, there are a lot of useful things that those gadgets can't do.
An interesting one that I worked on a few years ago is IP-enabled medical monitors and implants. A major problem that arose is that, in practice, putting even one of these on or in the body of all existing patients would require more IP addresses than were available then. We did talk about a design of a single wireless device per patient with NAT used to hide the other devices. We had no problems finding objections to this. One was that it would make it difficult for software back at the hospital to connect to a specific device on/in the patient; the device would have to connect to the hospital. This could be fixed by the usual "polling" technique, but the polling messages would quickly overload the low-bitrate channels available to wireless devices. Also, it
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.