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Live Intel WiDi Demonstration At CES 2010

Posted by timothy on from the look-ma-no-wires dept.

MojoKid writes "As we saw earlier this week, Intel's new WiDi (Wireless Display Interface) technology will start to be bundled with various Core i5 and Core i3 notebooks later this month, promising to address the Home Theater and Multimedia PC markets with a solution that enables wireless connectivity of your notebook over HDMI to an HDTV using standard 802.11n wireless technologies for transmission of the data. Intel was also demonstrating this technology live at CES 2010 and HotHardware captured video of the technology in action, with Intel Product Manager Joshua Newman. This new technology is obviously fairly mature at this point with retail products waiting in the wings, just a few weeks away."

12 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Not good enough by faragon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This solution is simple transcoding, using a lot of CPU. They are probably picking the framebuffer from the display driver, providing it to a userland application that does the encoding and sending.

    I expected a true lossless wifi link to the DVI/HDMI connector, this is a vendor-specific dirty hack.

    1. Re:Not good enough by nine-times · · Score: 3, Interesting

      802.11n doesn't have the bandwidth for lossless video of a decent resolution. Uncompressed 1080p is something like 3Gbps, right?

      Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have wireless connections pushing 3Gbps. We just aren't there yet. You can get decent video quality at 802.11n rates, though. More than anything, I'm just a little surprised by the idea that they're able to do real-time high quality transcoding.

    2. Re:Not good enough by realityimpaired · · Score: 2, Informative

      802.11n is more than enough bandwidth for 1080i, though. An uncompressed broadcast TV at 1080i is under 20 mbit. Outside of enthusiasts, most people really can't tell the difference between 1080p and 1080i.

    3. Re:Not good enough by dnwq · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Then it isn't meant for gamers, any more than wireless mice and keyboards are meant for gamers. For all that, wireless mice and keyboards still sell well to general consumers. Presumably Intel bets that the wireless monitor will, too.

      I'm not sure who moves their monitor often, though, and it'll still need AC power anyway...

    4. Re:Not good enough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      1080i is actually VBR MPEG-2 at somewhere between 5 and 40mbit/s depending on if you are OTA or using a cable/sattelite provider and how much they re-compress their streams.

      uncompressed video at the 1080i resolution is HUGE: 1920widthx1080heightx30fpsx24bpp = 1,492 mbit/s

    5. Re:Not good enough by nine-times · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That doesn't sound quite right to me. 1080i is the same resolution as 1080p but interlaced, which would lead me to guess that it would require half the bandwidth of 1080p.

      I mean, I think the 3Ghz number is for 1080p/60, completely uncompressed. So I figure 1080i/24 is about 600Mbps, and you may be able to run that through some kind of lossless compression and bring that down a bit. However, I suspect that your 20Mbps number is based on a lossy compression (high-quality though it may be).

  2. cool, but what about sound by dan_in_dublin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    it's cool that I no longer need to drag cables across a room just to use a projector, but it would be even nicer if i could play back any media on my pc and have the images and sound on my tv.. does anyone know if this includes the sound? i owuld expect not as I dont see how it could capture and correclty sync the sound without being part of media framework and that would necessitate a particular playback applicatio. it seems from the article this is application independent. shame as that youtube video and sound redirected from pc to tv would have been cool

    1. Re:cool, but what about sound by nine-times · · Score: 2, Informative

      Given that the intent here seems to be for media streaming, it would seem silly to not include sound. From what people are saying, it sounds like it's just doing something like this:

      Your wireless router has an HDMI port that you wire to your TV. Your computer then encodes its output in real-time to a streaming video format and sends that to your router. Your router has enough processing power to decode the stream, and pipes the output to your TV.

      If this description is accurate, then it's not really new amazing technology. Your router is already a computer, so it would just need enough processing power to decode video. It's not hard these days to put good H264 decoding into a small package; you'd just have to be willing to incur the expense of the chipset capable of doing it. Really, you're just talking about standard video streaming over an 802.11n network.

      I don't say that to bash the idea. If the setup is useful to people, then it seems like a good use of existing and well-tested technology. If you build wireless networking and video decoding into TVs directly, I could definitely see that having some fine uses, provided it's standardized and implemented well.

  3. Oh boy that was laggy! by dannycim · · Score: 4, Informative

    Watch the video demo. There's a good 200+ms delay from the laptop to the HDTV. Reminds me of [Remote Play] on PSP+PS3. It's nice to watch movies but unusable for anything interactive.

    You'll be cursing a lot if you ever try to use a mouse with this setup.

    Not good enough, sorry, try again.

    1. Re:Oh boy that was laggy! by j_166 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Or a 99 cent hdmi cable and a netbook.

  4. Video of it in Action by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So instead of getting a crisp clean video feed from my PC, I can make it look like a youtube video? How exciting!

  5. WirelessHD is already here by gbjbaanb · · Score: 5, Informative

    I know this is news because Intel has said its got a new product to launch for laptops, but full-definition HD is already being streamed wirelessly. Check out the top-end Panasonic Z1 plasma.

    See a review(pdf) of the TV, which does mention the wireless aspects:

    Streaming Full HD video and high-res audio is no mean feat. It takes considerable bandwidth to ensure a constant and clean feed of 1080p24 footage over 10 metres, yet the gizmos here perform that task admirably. Not once during testing was the signal interrupted or hampered by additional artefacts. Admittedly, I remained within the recommended catchment area, but it is highly unlikely that, with a set like this, you'll set the separate media box more than 32 feet away. And anywhere within that area offers as clean an image as a normal HDMI cable is capable. That's it.
    There's no more to it than that. To be honest, it's weird being so impressed by something actually doing what's it's meant to, but I am. And you will be too.

    It uses WirelessHD which is (I guess) designed for home theatre, but it should work with any HDMI port - so your laptop could send out wireless signals using this too, it doesn't need any fancy processing from the CPU or OS (as if my cheapass DVD player works with it, my $2000 laptop should be able to!)

    It doesn't have super range (32 feet), but it does 10Gbps by all accounts, and 4k support (that's 4x the resolution of 1080p) in the next version.