Wireless HDMI HDTV coming, need to get this in LMCE!!!

[dthrock]

Westinghouse Unveils Wireless HDTV

Las Vegas (NV) - Users will soon be able to send high definition signals to their HDTV sets without any physical cable connection, thanks to a new partnership between Westinghouse Digital and semiconductor company Pulse Link.

"HDMI digital transport provides the full HD resolution our customers expect," said Westinghouse VP John Araki in a statement. Through the wireless HDTV technology, users will be able to set up their television anywhere in a room, and have HDMI connections sent from sources like HD DVD players or the Playstation 3 wirelessly.

The technology uses Pulse Link’s CWave UWB chipset, which has a 1.35 Gbps over-the-air signaling rate and can deliver 890 Mbps. According to Westinghouse, the signal was still as strong as 115 Mbps when the devices were 40 feet apart.

It "is an experience beyond comparison with anything that has come prior to now," said Pulse Link president Bruce Watkins. He claims, "This really changes everything."

The new TV will be on display and will make its official unveiling at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show.

[Matthew]

The HDMI support is supposed to be transparent, therefore LMCE wouldn't need any special support beyond plain HDMI.

Also, there are other wireless HDMI products announced, including a chipset that replaces just the cable with components that can connect between existing equipment (this TV embeds the receiver). Since UWB can carry something approximating HDTV and UWB chipsets are in commercial production, there will be lots of these kinds of products.

But 1audio posted this past week that it's not really HDMI:

I have had hands on experience with virtually every wireless HDMI solution being proposed. First for the UWB solutions 30' (10M) MAX and worse in many environments. Second, they all truncate content somehow- either recompressing or artfully dumping some image component not deemed necessary. Third and most important they will be between $450 and $800 retail.

[teedge77]

for videophiles that may mean something. its basically doing the same thing as an mp3 does but for video instead...even similar to divx. anyone ever use divx or mp3s???

[golgoj4]

“There is no such thing,” Chard says, noting that the moniker is “misleading” because it suggests the technology is standardized through the HDMI camp. “Basically it means that there’s HDMI on one end and a wireless link on the other. … We asked them to start calling it wireless for HDMI.”

taken from slashdot earlier this morning - http://www.cepro.com/article/hdmi_execs_discuss_13_displayport_cec_wireless_hdmi_more/

[colinjones]

I agree, nonsense! HDMI 1.3 is over 10Gbps. Even a basic 1080i signal at 30Hz frame rate with only 24bpp colour depth would require approx 1.5Gbps just for the video signal! Taking a video signal that was already compressed (HD DVD for instance) professionally and not in real time and then decompressed with your player, and then attempting to recompress it real time just to send it wirelessly, and then re-decompress it again is asking for trouble. They would have to get a compression ratio of at least 3:1 reliably and time-averaged to support this working over the distances they are talking about - and that spells doom to the picture quality.

I don't think this is a consideration for videophiles alone - if you've gone to the expense and effort of getting HDMI, HDTV and an HD source like HD DVD or worse BluRay, then I don't see why you would compromise all that with this "weak link"....

[teedge77]

what i was saying was videophiles would give a crap about losing stuff most people wont notice. like the so called audiophiles who hate mp3s. the average person will have an hd signal they think is better than the old 480.

[Matthew]

what i was saying was videophiles would give a crap about losing stuff most people wont notice. like the so called audiophiles who hate mp3s. the average person will have an hd signal they think is better than the old 480.

Probably only because they paid for something called "HD", not because it has any better quality. Better than 1080i or 720p, anyway.

What I wonder is whether H.264, which usually gives 50:1 compression, will shrink the uncompressed HDMI from 10.2Gbps to 204Mbps. Which would sail across Gb-e wires, and even fit in a couple-few WiFi 802.11g channels. If so, cheap multichannel 802.11g transceivers could be right around the corner, like at the 2009 CES .

[colinjones]

teedge77 - no, I realise that's what you meant. What I was trying to say was, this is a very different situation because of 1) the sheer data quantity involved in the compression, and 2) the fact that it has to do it real time.

That would mean that either the hardware needed to do this compression would be wildly expensive (which I'm assuming it isn't), or the compression quality would have to be so poor to achieve the 3:1 (or more) that anyone, not just videophiles, would notice it.

By analogy, if you have a decent jpg program, not only does it allow you to trade off between quality and size, but you can also get it to do more detailed passes to achieve better quality even at lower file sizes ... but as they say, you never get something for nothing. The trade off then is that the algorithm takes much longer to do the work. So to get that level of compression real time, either the hardware is going to be impressive, or the compression artifacts will

[colinjones]

what i was saying was videophiles would give a crap about losing stuff most people wont notice. like the so called audiophiles who hate mp3s. the average person will have an hd signal they think is better than the old 480.

Probably only because they paid for something called "HD", not because it has any better quality. Better than 1080i or 720p, anyway.

What I wonder is whether H.264, which usually gives 50:1 compression, will shrink the uncompressed HDMI from 10.2Gbps to 204Mbps. Which would sail across Gb-e wires, and even fit in a couple-few WiFi 802.11g channels. If so, cheap multichannel 802.11g transceivers could be right around the corner, like at the 2009 CES .

Matthew - realise that the comment was tongue in cheek... but same principle, I'm sure H.264 can get as high as 50:1, but certainly not in realtime without some real kick arse hardware

(btw, it often only achieves this because it can handle a dynamic number of frames in buffer of upto 16 prior frames to do the motion deltas from, wherease most of the previous MPEGs only held 1 or 2 prior frames. Having to wait an indeterminate amount of time with frames in buffer would also cause more "realtime" issues in a realtime stream, lipsyncing is bad enough now!! I'm guessing that the algorithm would have to disable such a deep frame buffer for realtime streams, and that would dramatically impact the ratio, too)

[teedge77]

what about the coax adapter? any better?

[colinjones]

Don't see why not, shouldn't need any compression then ... but its still a wire... you don't like the HDMI cables, or is the the length limitations you don't like?

[ddamron]

Possibly the termination... Coax you can terminate easily.  HDMI, you can't.

[teedge77]

yeah its really just the lengths. i need just over over 50 feet to get it to all the places id like. the living room would be the only one that might be less. ive seen rapidrun cables and the reviews were good. i am considering those right now i guess.

[colinjones]

hmm.. that's always the prob isn't it? I guess as the standard develops in new versions they will extend the standard cable run lengths. Think you are just going to need to set up HDMI MDs everywhere! Certainly doesn't sound like the Wireless would get you the 50' you are looking for, they say themselves it reduces to just over 100Mb/s at 40'...

[teedge77]

well...its only about 20 feet as the crow flies and then running the cable up and over in the attic and down to the tv would be about 50 for the living room and more like 75 for the other rooms. so the wireless might have covered the living room....probably wouldnt look so great. ive got coax to every room already. so i suppose that would be an option depending on price. i wanted to use the direct hdmi output on the blu ray and hd dvd players to the tvs. if lmce gets it working so i can watch blu ray and hd dvd stuff from there then id just do that with MDs.