4 ms·

Wireless everything. Why is my A/V receiver such a mess? Yes! We moved house recently and setting up our projector, wii and mac-mini so that the cables didn'

Wireless everything. Why is my A/V receiver such a mess? Yes! We moved house recently and setting up our projector, wii and mac-mini so that the cables didn't look horrific was way too much work. Maybe it's a bandwidth thing? I suppose wirelessly transmitting video and not interfering with your neighbors' setups might need quite a significant amount of spectrum? Live events (sports, etc.) could be live-streamed. Heh. Over the content-owners' dead bodies apparently.

derobert 17y ago
HDMI 1.3 delivers 10.2Gbps according to the Wiki, and some simple math says 48-bit 1920x1080@60p is ~6Gbps. So, that should explain why it can't be wireless. It can be done over fiber—something the article's author apparently didn't bother to research as a Googling for "HDMI fiber" finds equipment. "HDMI cat5" tells me it can be done over CAT5 ("ethernet") cable as well.
- abstractbill 17y ago
  HDMI 1.3 delivers 10.2Gbps according to the Wiki, and some simple math says 48-bit 1920x1080@60p is ~6Gbps. So, that should explain why it can't be wireless. I don't think this math alone shows video can't be wireless (all TV content used to be wireless, and many more channels were broadcast that way than I have close neighbors). I would guess there's not enough unused spectrum to make it work right now though.
  - derobert 17y ago
    Wireless TV uses a much lower bandwidth, and picture quality, than HDMI offers. ATSC (current US over the air HDTV standard), for example, delivers around 18mbps, three orders of magnitude less than HDMI. SDTV did not use bits, it was analogue (and had even less quality than ATSC).
- jurjenh 17y ago
  Just need to shift the decoder to the screen - Audio was like that once as well. Just because the raw bandwidth isn't sufficient doesn't mean it can't be done. A few months back I read something about streaming H264 but haven't got the time to dig up the link. That should likely be able to get the bandwidth down to something reasonable.
smlacy 17y ago
The thing you're forgetting (at least, for the A/V space) is that these days there's pretty much no such thing as video content that hasn't been compressed at some point along the way. Broadcast ATSC tops out at 19Mbps (yes, mega-bits per second), and that's the best quality signal I can bring into my home. Everything else is compressed even more. So, there's plenty of bandwidth out there in a 54Mbps WiFi-style system to transmit several channels of "distribution quality" video & audio. I guess the only sources of "pure" HDTV content are the rendered sources, like XBox, PS3, or a PC's framebuffer. Those are all never-compressed video sources.

derobert 17y ago

HDMI 1.3 delivers 10.2Gbps according to the Wiki, and some simple math says 48-bit 1920x1080@60p is ~6Gbps. So, that should explain why it can't be wireless. It can be done over fiber—something the article's author apparently didn't bother to research as a Googling for "HDMI fiber" finds equipment. "HDMI cat5" tells me it can be done over CAT5 ("ethernet") cable as well.

abstractbill 17y ago
HDMI 1.3 delivers 10.2Gbps according to the Wiki, and some simple math says 48-bit 1920x1080@60p is ~6Gbps. So, that should explain why it can't be wireless. I don't think this math alone shows video can't be wireless (all TV content used to be wireless, and many more channels were broadcast that way than I have close neighbors). I would guess there's not enough unused spectrum to make it work right now though.
- derobert 17y ago
  Wireless TV uses a much lower bandwidth, and picture quality, than HDMI offers. ATSC (current US over the air HDTV standard), for example, delivers around 18mbps, three orders of magnitude less than HDMI. SDTV did not use bits, it was analogue (and had even less quality than ATSC).
jurjenh 17y ago
Just need to shift the decoder to the screen - Audio was like that once as well. Just because the raw bandwidth isn't sufficient doesn't mean it can't be done. A few months back I read something about streaming H264 but haven't got the time to dig up the link. That should likely be able to get the bandwidth down to something reasonable.

smlacy 17y ago

The thing you're forgetting (at least, for the A/V space) is that these days there's pretty much no such thing as video content that hasn't been compressed at some point along the way. Broadcast ATSC tops out at 19Mbps (yes, mega-bits per second), and that's the best quality signal I can bring into my home. Everything else is compressed even more. So, there's plenty of bandwidth out there in a 54Mbps WiFi-style system to transmit several channels of "distribution quality" video & audio. I guess the only sources of "pure" HDTV content are the rendered sources, like XBox, PS3, or a PC's framebuffer. Those are all never-compressed video sources.