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  1. #26
    Forum Regular hermanv's Avatar
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    The times, they are a changing.

    Wireless connectivity is getting cheap, real cheap. I've seen it as as low as $15, Hong Kong. So soon you wont need to have your TV next to your computer or visa versa, Homes will have wireless LAN (That's Local Area Networks for any non-computer geeks) to distribute everything from e-mail to FAX to video and audio.

    Whether the format becomes wireless USB, wireless Firewire, 802.11 is pretty much irrelevant.

    Some of this technology is already cheaper than decent cables and will soon be cheaper than even the lowest cost cables (if you include connector prices). So given corporate cost conciousness what do you think will be the way our home theater stuff connects in the future?

    It's all digital, noise free, quality as good as goes in, comes out. These people so frightned of digital copies have long ago lost the war, it just hasn't penetrated yet.

    You may recal the entertaiment industry was succesful in delaying the introduction of home CD recorders. Their myopia didn't notice that CD-ROM (same thing) copying for computers was well established and cheap, they lost that war for the same reason, by the time they got dressed for battle, the front had moved well past them.

    Dinosuars inevitably suffer the same fate, a few are able to postpone it for a while.

  2. #27
    nightflier
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    Well, it may take a while to get there. In the meantine: Firewire is it.

    Quote Originally Posted by hermanv
    Wireless... It's all digital, noise free, quality as good as goes in, comes out. These people so frightned of digital copies have long ago lost the war, it just hasn't penetrated yet.
    If you're thinking of something like bluetooth, I don't see that happening soon. The problem with wireless in a hi-fi /hi-def environment like HDTV is bandwith, and perhaps to a lesser extent, interference.

    I'm sure most people would love to get rid of $300 cables connecting two components, but technologically that's a lot harder to pull off. I give it another ten years at least. In the meantime the fat cats and their puppets will have their way with instituting tolls inside the box (probably within a year or two). And then it won't matter if it's wireless or not.

    From everything I've been reading on this, Firewire is the only legal way to record HDTV. And if I'm guessing right, Firewire is the least popular hi-def format so there are very few players that have a Firewire port (Pioneer and some off-brands, I think). The other problem is that HDTV requires far more storage, so a measly 80Gb drive found in most of today's PVR's may not cut it.

    Also, I can't seem to find a VGA to Firewire adapter anywhere online. Anyone know of one?

  3. #28
    Forum Regular hermanv's Avatar
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    wireless bandwidth

    I have little real data on MPEG4 compression ratios. I know they are an improvement over MPEG2 (used in DVD). DVD players have a peak bandwidth of near 12 Megabits/second averaging closer to 4 or 6. (With a cheap RAM buffer, peak to average ratios can be evened out considerably if a delay of say 1 second is added to the stream).

    So where do bandwidths of popular network connections stand today?

    All these are raw bandwidth, overhead takes anywhere from 5 to 25%
    Standard USB: 12 Mbit/s
    802.11: 47 Mbit/s
    USB2: 480 Mbit/s
    Firewire: 100, 200, 400 Mbit/s

    As you can see, if dedicated to a single signal, even standard USB can present a credible HD picture if the data is reasonably compressed. MPEG4 is a lossless compression algorithm.

  4. #29
    nightflier
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    12Mb? Not so fast...

    Quote Originally Posted by hermanv
    I have little real data on MPEG4 compression ratios. I know they are an improvement over MPEG2 (used in DVD). DVD players have a peak bandwidth of near 12 Megabits/second averaging closer to 4 or 6. (With a cheap RAM buffer, peak to average ratios can be evened out considerably if a delay of say 1 second is added to the stream).

    So where do bandwidths of popular network connections stand today?

    All these are raw bandwidth, overhead takes anywhere from 5 to 25%
    Standard USB: 12 Mbit/s
    802.11: 47 Mbit/s
    USB2: 480 Mbit/s
    Firewire: 100, 200, 400 Mbit/s

    As you can see, if dedicated to a single signal, even standard USB can present a credible HD picture if the data is reasonably compressed. MPEG4 is a lossless compression algorithm.
    I don't know the exact specs, but I can tell you that a real-time video stream over anything but firewire's 400Mb is choppy; and that's on a computer screen. I can't imagine what that would look like on a large TV, but it can't be acceptable, expecially for HDTV. I've also seen video stream over 802.11g and that's not impressive either. I would say we would need an improvement (in bandwidth) of an order of magnitude before these technologies become viable.

  5. #30
    Forum Regular hermanv's Avatar
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    Digital bndwidth.

    Quote Originally Posted by nightflier
    I don't know the exact specs, but I can tell you that a real-time video stream over anything but firewire's 400Mb is choppy; and that's on a computer screen.
    It's very hard to scale a computer generic machine to a dedicated video device, that's one reason game consoles like the X Box exist. I agree that computers surprisingly seem to need more bandwidth than for example DVD. DVD isn't HD but I've never seen it be choppy, as I said earlier DVD bandwidth runs an average of around 6 Megabits/second. Doubling the quality of DVD video or better yet 4 times would make for a pretty nice picture. If MPEG4 is twice as good as MPEG 2 (I think thats about right) the bandwidth barier seems less of an obstacle than you might think. I could be confusing megabits with megabytes when talking about DVD that would sure help explain our different perspectives.

    I could easily be wrong about how long it will take to introduce some of this technology, since there seem to be more lawyers than engineers involved. However, I stand by my prediction that wireless connectivity will become mainstream for entertainment consoles.

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