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Ask Slashdot: Are There Any USB-C Wireless Video Solutions?
jez9999 writes: Sometimes it feels like we're on the cusp of a technology but not quite there yet, and that's the way it feels for me after searching around for USB-C wireless video solutions. There are several wireless video solutions that use HDMI on the receiver end, of course, but these aren't ideal because HDMI can't provide power. This means you need a separate receiver box and power cable going into the box, but cables are what you're trying to get away from with wireless video!
So the answer to this would seem to be USB-C. It supports HDMI video as well as power, so in theory you could create a receiver dongle that just plugged into a TV (or monitor with speakers) and required no external power cable. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything like this on the market.
There is Airtame, but that doesn't work with a 'dumb' TV -- it needs to plug in to a computer that you can install software on to stream the video. What I'd like is to be able to wall-mount a new TV and just plug in a wireless dongle to stream the video with no extra setup required on the receiver end.
Does anyone know of a solution like this that exists right now, or one that's being developed?
So the answer to this would seem to be USB-C. It supports HDMI video as well as power, so in theory you could create a receiver dongle that just plugged into a TV (or monitor with speakers) and required no external power cable. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything like this on the market.
There is Airtame, but that doesn't work with a 'dumb' TV -- it needs to plug in to a computer that you can install software on to stream the video. What I'd like is to be able to wall-mount a new TV and just plug in a wireless dongle to stream the video with no extra setup required on the receiver end.
Does anyone know of a solution like this that exists right now, or one that's being developed?
Hi. I want to develop a new hardware solution, but I'm too lazy to do due diligence. Can you do my work for me?
No... Just no.
Most TVs come with a USB port, so you can power some of those HDMI devices right from the TV, albeit with an extra cable on the back.
I did this for a while with a Fire Stick, but it would complain that it wasn't getting enough power sometimes so I ended up using an external USB charger with it. Newer devices should have lower power requirements though, and better TVs might have more powerful USB ports.
Wouldn't a chromecast do what you're looking for? Just plug your device into power and stream from wherever. You can plug the chromecast itself into a USB port on the TV for it's power if you need to.
-SaNo
I've been chasing various wired solutions for a decade, and they just aren't coming. The various copyright industries have been sitting on standards for a long time - they generally dislike anything that could give the remotest chance you could, say, jack a phone or a homemade DVR to a TV, or anything to a DVR without massive restrictions and monitoring. They like Chromecast, because Chromecast forces your activities to be logged by Google. WiFi Direct (Miracast) is almost dead, Slimport is dead.
It's possible there are professional solutions, expensive and bound to licenses and remote logging an monitoring, that can sing and dance they way we'd like. But as you note, no dumb TVs. Even dumb antennas are being phased out for encrypted antenna feeds that require internet based authentification to watch (next broadcast standard).
Miracast seems to be taking over this space. Almost everything has WiFi already, and old stuff that doesn't is old. Companies would rather you buy new stuff, so making something for older systems isn't worth it and sort of a niche market, so very small market with low returns. For anything else you can easily by a dongle like the MS display adapter and convert the receiving device.
jez9999, first of all do you know of a TV that has a USB-C port on it? I haven't seen any of those beasts yet, but it will happen someday.
Second, not all USB-C ports are the same. Some USB-C ports only support USB protocols, while others can support Thunderbolt and/or video. So you'd need video support on both sides of the connection; the computer side is likely to be common either as raw video or a USB video device, but again it's about finding the TV with the support for video over USB-C...
HDMI can't supply power, but MHL can. Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) can (but is not required to) provide power back to the video source from the TV, and a lot of TVs already support MHL. MHL can use either a USB Micro B connector or an HDMI connector, so maybe you should be looking for a solution with an MHL-enabled TV adapter?
What I'd like is to be able to wall-mount a new TV and just plug in a wireless dongle to stream the video with no extra setup required on the receiver end.
Sounds like what you need is the TV equivalent of those ultra-low-power "FCC Part 15" FM transmitters people used to "broadcast" their portable CD player's music to their car stereo systems 20 years ago.
As far as I know, they don't exist, but it sounds like there is a market for them.
The more common application for something like this would be at weddings or other parties, where a big-screen TV tuned to an unused channel could show a live feed from a camera that is walking around the party.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The TV or monitor, and often separate speakers, already require AC power. What benefit are you getting from a video that gets power from the television's USB-C connector? Couldn't it just get power from the same AC plug?
First you simply can not stick to dumb TV sets. You need a smart TV and they are not expensive these day unless you buy a huge one. i have Netflix that is sent by wifi in my home. It can appear with no problem on three TVs in my home. You simply need the Netflix plug in on each TV. With a smart phone all you need is my password and user name and you can watch movies anywhere you want. A TV has to plug in anyway. Plugging in a wall wart is no problem and the wires are quite tiny so you should be able to make it pleasant to the eye. With computer tech advancing the way it is i think we could have strong computers inside our TV sets much like the all in one desktops we see these days. It would be just an extension of what we already have going from mild all in one units based on acomputer console to a tV with really strong and fast PCs behind the screens.
This is clear as mud. My best guess is subby wants a TV equipped with USB-C ports that accept AV input and provide power output. Otherwise I'm lost.
Wouldn't this run afoul of the recording industry mafia?
My understanding was that the lightning-fast adoption of HDMI had everything to do with the ability to use it to hardware-validate copyprotection from device to device.
Does (or could) USB-C have the same capability? If not, I can't see any mainstream hardware mfg adopting it for their products.
-Styopa
This means you need a separate receiver box and power cable going into the box, but cables are what you're trying to get away from with wireless video!
So you want to go from two cables down to one? That's fine though a litlle silly for a wall mounted TV.
So the answer to this would seem to be USB-C. It supports HDMI video as well as power, so in theory you could create a receiver dongle that just plugged into a TV (or monitor with speakers) and required no external power cable. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything like this on the market.
There are some cables being worked on. Unclear if this solves the problem you are working on.
What I'd like is to be able to wall-mount a new TV and just plug in a wireless dongle to stream the video with no extra setup required on the receiver end.
If you are wall mounting the TV already, why the need to worry about having a separate power cable? I don't understand why you can't just use a receiver with wires since you'll need them anyway. Sounds to me like you are making perfect the enemy of good. I'm not aware of any TV that can be powered by USB-C so it's kind of a moot issue anyway.
but cables are what you're trying to get away from with wireless video
The reason Chromecast and Firestick use wireless is because people generally don't have ethernet outlets adjacent to their TV. But everyone in the world has a power outlet adjacent to their TV, so few people have objections to using that.
If I understand right, your objection is that although you'll tolerate seeing the power cable go from our outlet to your TV set, you're reluctant to see a second wall-wart and cable alongside it. Your proposal (power over USB-C) is one solution to the problem, but there are several other more straightforward solutions...
1. Replace an outlet with one that has a USB socket and a power socket e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Leviton... to eliminate the wall-wart. Or you could go for a recessed outlet to hide it further e.g. https://www.amazon.com/PowerBr...
2. Use a "cable tidy wrap" e.g. https://www.amazon.com/uxcell-... so the two cables look visually like a single cable.
3. Use a "wall-mounted cable concealer" e.g. https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod... so you don't even see the cables at all; you just see the thing on the wall. (Note: when I moved house and took down the cable concealers, they were so firmly attached that they took some paint with them, and I had to re-spackle and paint).
superMHL was something I stumbled across a while ago when looking for a compute stick that might be bus-powered. It's a standard developed for connecting mobile devices to displays.
It doesn't address the wireless portion of the question, but it does provide power-over-HDMI (to charge mobile devices while plugged in) and supports USB-C, so a wireless receiver could in principle both transmit video and receive power over a single cable.
It doesn't seem to have achieved adoption, but I don't know if that's just because it's still too new.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.mhltech.org/technol...
How about telling people what you actually want to do?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
fine, but for that to work youâ(TM)d have to give up your guns first, and that isnâ(TM)t a solution because then youâ(TM)d have nothing to shoot the disney generation with.
Chromecast.
This is an askSlashdot?
these aren't ideal because HDMI can't provide power. This means you need a separate receiver box and power cable going into the box, but cables are what you're trying to get away from with wireless video!
No? Well... not personally. All my desires for wireless video have stemmed from wanting a real-computer interface with a phone. Instead of thumbing shit into a 3 inch screen, I want to walk up to a desk and have the devices wake up and connect, simply becoming part of my computer by my proximity. Ideally. But even ideally, the screen (and even mouse and keyboard) can be plugged into wall power and I don't have to worry about batteries. Yeah, worrying about ONE battery is enough of a headache. Keyboards and mice draw so very little it's moot, but screens are going to be hungry no matter what*. What the market has to offer is a couple docking stations, all of which are niche, proprietary as hell, and you'd really have to go out of your way to make it happen.
The only place you'd want the screen to be wireless and run on battery would be..... a tablet. Specifically splitting the processor from the front display. Meh. If both are mobile, just... carry both together.
What I'd like to see in the future is a screen in a restaurant or bar you could direct your phone to stream to. Some sort of time-sharing or juke-box queue system. ...And then some system for dealing with assholes. ....How does chromecast handle multiple people fighting for the resource?
(*Although I think an exception would be that low power screen that they made for the OLPC X0.)
They do exist and you can build them yourself.
The problem is the bandwidth required to transmit your signal. You're talking about bidirectional, uninterrupted 10Gbps over wireless.
What most HDMI dongles do is convert the signal to lower resolutions (VGA) and compress it. You need a decompressor on the other end but more than possible on 2.4GHz. There is also no bidirectional communication thus it is not "really" a wireless HDMI signal. USB-C is pure data packets, you'd have to find a USB-C to VGA converter, transmitter and then on the other end an upscaler.
I haven't looked into the USB-C spec but I don't think the sink (receiving end) is supposed to provide any power
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I'd be looking for something that I could watch with my regular ATSC television, but with the transmitter in the same room or an adjacent room.
Obviously, what I am looking for would be very very low power - any TV more than a few hundred feet away wouldn't be able to get a lock on it with just plain old rabbit ears, and anyone more than a block away would be hard-pressed to tune in with even a decent outdoor antenna.
Unlike the "transmit your CD player to your car radio" ultra-low-power transmitters, I don't think such devices are legal in the United States for consumer use.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What am I missing here? One does not go with the other.
Oh, you just want to plug the wireless gadget into USB-C.
Oh, God. They probably sell them in Shenzhen and the Akihabara, the size of a gumstick and in white or Hello Kitty. For $8USD.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
http://videolink.ca/
Ask for Hugo. Tell him "Colossus" sent you. He should be able to get you set straight.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The problem you are likely to find is two fold.
1. Most USB Type-C implementations in devices are half assed and skips a whole ton of features, including the video transmission support. Unfortunately, it's just the way it goes... for all the promises made with USB Type-C, it mostly carried all of the problems standard USB already had.
Among USB Type-C implementations on the market right now there must be at least half a dozen ways it's implemented or more... two or 4 lane for data, HDMI support or not, 2 way power or not, daisy chaining capabilities or not, a variety of how much power it can handle and all sorts of other stuff. Not only that, but device manufacturers makes it incredibly hard, when not downright impossible, for you to find out what exactly they have in their devices. Particularly for smartphones, it's never explicited, not even in technical specifications.
Much like USB OtG in the past, plus MHL, and several other capabilities, those were all hidden from the costumer.
So, it highly depends on what device you have if you'll even be able to get a video signal or not. Which in turn demotivates manufacturers to develop dongles, accessories and devices with a full USB Type-C implementation in mind;
2. Proprietary standards for video transmission. As far as I know, since before USB-C, you had Miracast (Microsoft and others), AirPlay (Apple), WiDi (Intel) and something called DIAL which is the standard Chromecast uses. Those are all for wireless video transmissions, and all of them are proprietary. And these are not the only ones, just standards tied to better known brands.
For wired via USB you had stuff like MHL and SlimPort, the later pretty much dead now.
As far as I know, USB Type-C potentially has wired video support (implementation depends on manufacturer) for one standard alone: HDMI Alt Mode, which is an extention of MHL. Some USB Type-C dongles designed more for laptops have it, but again, it depends if the device itself will work with it. I don't know of any smartphones that can handle it, potentially because of power limitations, but perhaps there is some out there. If you wanna go this route, look for the full featured hubs that Kensington makes - but those are wired, so I guess it's not your case.
Then there's Thunderbolt 3, which shares the same connector of USB Type-C, which can also have support for DisplayPort Alt Mode in a similar fashion. Kensington also makes full featured hubs for those. There are several other brands, but this is the one I've seen tested and working.
So you see, it's not only about having the connectors or not, it's also about having the hardware, firmware and software - protocols for video transmission and whatnot. And those are why it's pretty hard to find the solution you are looking for. I don't know about any dedicated protocol specific for USB Type-C devices to work with wireless video transmission, and I'm not sure if there's any real advantage to make something this specific... wireless transmission protocols are usually developed as an independent thing regardless of what standard for connector is used.
The closest thing I can suggest for what you want is a Miracast compatible dongle. I personally have one from Actiontec model ScreenBeamMini2. It's similar to a Chromecast, it came before Chromecasts were around, you'll need to connect it to the TV's HDMI port and also power it with a regular USB cable. The difference to Chromecasts is that it's not tied to Google or Chrome, for compatible devices it'll mirror the entire screen. But you'll need to see about that compatibility... Windows tablets and laptops usually are compatible, and several brands of smartphones also are. But if it's not explicit anywhere that the device is Miracast compatible, you'll have to dig deeper to see if it is.
The problem with development is that the tech is low selling, didn't catch a mainstream market, is spread out because of proprietary standards, and has to deal with that extreme fragmentation in standards implementation and compati
Let's see if I understood the question right: You want a receiver device that plugs into a single USB C plug on a TV, draws power from it, and delivers received wireless video through it?
For the reason you don't see these, look at some TVs. How many have USB C video inputs? Very few. How many have HDMI inputs? All of them. Most also have a USB 2.0 port that can deliver power, and if not, it isn't a big deal to run a wire to a phone charger -- the goal of wireless video isn't to have no wires attached to your stationary TV, it's to have no wires attached to the portable device sending video to it.
USB C on the sending end (and still HDMI on the receiving end) is a more reasonable request. Many laptops have it now, and having a single plug to connect on that end is more valuable than on the TV end where you plug it in once and leave it.
Samsung sells at least 4 non-smart TV's with USB inputs. I wanted to add external and portable (Roku, in this case) devices for my "smart" capabilities.
That said, I agree with the rest of your post.