5 ms·

I think the main takeaway is that yes, lightning is future proof and can adapt to any output you want it to. I do wonder what's the reason for encode/decode cy

by dmishe 14y ago

I think the main takeaway is that yes, lightning is future proof and can adapt to any output you want it to. I do wonder what's the reason for encode/decode cycle was in the first place though.

revelation 14y ago
He doesn't say, but probably because they just don't have the bandwidth. And thats where all this future proof talk goes deaf. New interfaces will only have more bandwidth, thats the whole point. Meanwhile, Lightning still has the same bandwidth and theres still a considerable penalty in serializing any other interface. If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future.
- taligent 14y ago
  I might be really confused but why is Apple going to be in deeper trouble ? Surely the future will be H.265 content which will have better quality for the same bandwidth. And it's unlikely that people are going to be demanding a higher output resolution than 1080p from their mobile device for anytime soon.
  - revelation 14y ago
    Again, this is a connector from your mobile device to a display. Nobody has ever done any lossy compression on that pathway; both because you can drive simple circuits at frequencies high enough to have plenty of bandwidth and because it would actively destroy information (hence lossy). This is such a big problem because the video you are playing has already been lossy compressed (H.265) and it will most certainly not get better by a second pass that only has the raw pixel data available. I could imagine people want to play 4k movies from their mobile device on their TV, but you wouldn't install a 4k screen as the display on the mobile device. Edit: Yes, computer is inaccurate. I wanted to get the idea across that we are talking about connectors (DVI, HDMI) that you would normally use to hook up a computer or laptop to a TV or LCD. They have only recently appeared on mobile devices, but serve the same purpose here: video (and audio, for HDMI) out.
    - mbell 14y ago
      > Again, this is a connector from your computer to a display. Huh? Its the plug on the bottom of a phone (and ipads now i guess). Lightning isn't on any computers.
    - taligent 14y ago
      a) This is a connector from a mobile device to a TV. That is the primary use case here. I doubt anybody is hooking up an iPhone to any other type of display. b) Why is there a second pass compression/decompression stage ? Isn't iOS outputting the compressed H.264 stream and the adapter decoding it i.e. one stage ? c) Given that Retina displays by definition are the best resolution we will need and it is far less than 4K it is questionable whether there will be a use for 4K on mobile devices. Other than using your iOS device as a media player for your TV (very small use case).
    - dmishe 14y ago
      I think that if you have a 1080p source on your phone, it goes to tv as 1080 and without another compression step, it's only mirroring that reduces the resolution (which, for ipad mini, is less than 1080p btw) and introduces compression pass
      - justincormack 14y ago
        rescaling does not mean you need to do compression.
- gilgoomesh 14y ago
  Do you mean the future where we're streaming 4k video? If HEVC (aka H.265) lives up to its promise, 4k video will come in around a mere 50% more than 1080p does now. Meanwhile, lossless 1080p would require 20000% more space (no I didn't add too many zeros, that's 200 times more).
  - FireBeyond 14y ago
    A mere fifty per cent more than something that Lightning already can't handle...
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - gilgoomesh 14y ago
      There's every indication that Lightning can handle much more than this but in order to get the hardware running quickly, they've reused settings that were previous used for WiFi data rates. All we can guess is that Lightning can handle somewhere between 10Mbps (AirPlay over WiFi) and 2Gbps (native HDMI rates). We have absolutely no idea where in that range its actual capabilities lie.
      - dmishe 14y ago
        How is that estimation done, I'm very curious?
      - makomk 14y ago
        I'm guessing its actual capabilities are basically just USB 2.0. Someone tore apart a Lightning-to-USB sync cable ages ago and the data pins are apparently wired straight through - so we know that Lightning can speak it natively - and given all the focus on simplicity and not doing multiplexing at the expense of more complexity in the adapter I can't see any reason why Apple would develop their own protocol.
        giovannibajo1 14y ago
- glitch 14y ago
  So, you're saying bandwidth increase while maintaining backwards compatibility won't be possible through the Lightning interface? Surely, USB 1.0 to USB 2.0 demonstrated a counter-example to your statement.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    Notice the 2.0 there?
    - glitch 14y ago
      Yes, and? Lightning 2.0. Sure. That doesn't mean the physical interface changes. That doesn't mean there isn't backwards compatibility. That doesn't mean there isn't forwards compatibility. "And thats where all this future proof talk goes deaf" argument made no statements to support itself. "Meanwhile, Lightning still has the same bandwidth" is like saying "Meanwhile, USB still has the same bandwidth with USB 2.0 as it did with USB 1.0". There will be higher bandwidth Lightning 2.0 peripherals with Lightning 2.0 devices; but Lightning 1.0 peripherals will still be compatible. The Lightning interface doesn't establish some sort of permanent bandwidth cap to its future backwards-compatible revisions.
- mbell 14y ago
  > If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future. Unencoded video is about the most bandwidth intensive thing I can imagine coming out of or going into a phone, and will remain so for a long time. 1080p30 @ 24bit is roughly 1.5 Gbit/sec before you talk about transport level ecoding (8b/10b) or audio.
  - dmishe 14y ago
    But then there's 4K, if we're talking about future proofing. Well, say right now it cannot transmit 1080p60 raw. Could it with new hardware in device and adapter? Or put another way — does number of pins limit bandwidth in any way?
    - mbell 14y ago
      > Well, say right now it cannot transmit 1080p60 raw. Could it with new hardware in device and adapter? Or put another way — does number of pins limit bandwidth in any way? Based on what has come out about lightning it appears to have 2 differential data channels (same as USB2). There will be some upper limit on frequency but its impossible to know without detailed specs. Its also not clear if one is locked as send and one as receive, or if they are configurable, there is an ancillary control channel so anything seems possible. For comparison, HDMI has 3 data channels, each with raw bit rate of up to 3.4Gbit/sec (~2.7Gbit/sec data).
  - revelation 14y ago
    And HDMI does it effortlessly. That's exactly what these interfaces were designed to do: raw massive data with low latency over short distances, suitable for processing in dedicated circuits, not SOCs.
    - mbell 14y ago
      > suitable for processing in dedicated circuits, not SOCs. Your splitting hairs. Pretty much all HDMI transmitter ICs have a microcontroller on board, they need a processor to deal with the protocol configuration, DDC and HDCP. Probably most are using some 8051 design plunked into the chip. They are SoCs by any reasonable definition.
- drewcrawford 14y ago
  > If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future. Let me try and shed some light on this mystery. Consider this rumor. Also, I am not an electrical engineer, so I may be talking out of my ass. As best as I can tell, Lightning is not (yet, anyway) a real protocol like Firewire, USB, etc. What it is so far is USB with a different connector and some negotiating chips. So when connect your lightning-USB cable to your iPhone, your iPhone squawks and says "What is this?" and the cable says "I'm USB". The iPhone then sets its pinout to USB mode and off you go. What's so great about this, why not just use USB? I think the secret sauce is that Apple wants to surreptitiously invent new pinouts with faster data rates, without consulting any standards bodies and having to rally industry support on TVs, computers, et al. They just build some new controller to push Lightning at 2Gbps+, put it in new iPhones, and build active cables that spit out HDMI or UHDTV or USB3 or whatever it is the kids are doing these days. The active cables degrade gracefully for hardware running at the slower data rate. What I think you are seeing right now, is the dry run with the off-the-shelf controller. Get manufacturing ramped up. You need this to plug your phone into a computer anyway. But it's just the tick. Wait for the tock. Now the only thing that puzzles me is why they settled on 8 pins, when USB3 is 9. Obviously they wanted an even number so you could plug it in every which way, but you would think stepping up to 10 pins would let them use off-the-shelf USB3 controllers instead of USB2. Maybe they can do USB3 on 8-pins somehow, or maybe the tock will be ready fast enough that it's not worth it. Further reading: http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/23/boom-pins/ http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/23/boom-pins/
  - dmishe 14y ago
    Yep, and the comment about them using already existent h264 support in hardware I think supports dry-run-fastest-to-deadline solution. Re pins, I'm not EE either, but I don't get why people concern about number of pins so much, as I asked earlier in this thread, is there a relation between number of pins and bandwidth (well with physics involved there is _some_)?
    - taligent 14y ago
      Why wouldn't they use H.264 and their existing hardware ? Do you really think it makes more sense to decode H.264 on the device then re-encode it in another format and then decode that on the adapter ? Sounds slow, illogical and bound to introduce more artifacts.
bitcartel 14y ago
I think the main takeaway is, why pay for a $50 widget when a $5 cable will do the job? For the consumer who just wants to connect their device to a HDTV, it's crazy they have to pay 10x more just because they're in the Apple ecosystem and not Android. As for being future-proof, by the time some cool new A/V interface hits the market, and we've all updated our TVs, the Lightning devices of today will be in a museum.
- taligent 14y ago
  You know you can buy Lightning cables off eBay for $5. And that the original dock connector first appeared in the iPod 3G nearly a decade ago. So yes today's devices will be in a museum. But the connector could still be in use in 2023 and beyond. Worth keeping in mind.
  - bitcartel 14y ago
    Yes, you can get a Lightning to USB cable for charging and syncing for $5, but to connect to a TV you need to get the Lightning AV adapter which costs $50.
  - esolyt 14y ago
    Can you buy Lightning to HDMI adapters off eBay for $5? Because I can buy MicroUSB (MHL) to HDMI adapters for $5.
- dmishe 14y ago
  >the Lightning devices of today will be in a museum. Why? They'll plug another $50 adapter on it and it'll work.
  - signed0 14y ago
    I think they meant that the by the time successor to HDMI is invented today's smartphones will be obsolete.
    - bitcartel 14y ago
HNLogInShit 14y ago
"lightning is future proof and can adapt to any output you want it to" Uh, no. It can't even deliver HD resolution video. In fact, it can't deliver shitty degraded video riddled with compression artifacts at HD resolution. How is that "future proof"? It's not even up to present-day standards. But keep shilling for Apple.
StringyBob 14y ago
The interesting point to me is that a device can be future proof through iOS updates - i.e. for as long as apple is prepared to create software drivers/updates to support the peripheral. Obsolescence is now almost entirely a software rather than hardware problem. Features can be added or removed via updates. Firmware loaded at runtime is not new (see many of the wifi/bluetooth dongles that don't work in linux). However, would apple let 3rd party peripherals download driver code? I wouldn't have thought they want to keep baking it into iOS itself as the number of peripherals increase. Perhaps drivers embedded in a controller app via the app store? I like the idea that with a thunderbolt<->lightning adapter (and a huge amount of hacking) iOS peripherals are a blank canvas and could be used with other non apple devices or for purposes never originally intended (that VGA card as a software radio transmitter springs to mind...)

by dmishe 14y ago

I think the main takeaway is that yes, lightning is future proof and can adapt to any output you want it to. I do wonder what's the reason for encode/decode cycle was in the first place though.

revelation 14y ago

He doesn't say, but probably because they just don't have the bandwidth. And thats where all this future proof talk goes deaf. New interfaces will only have more bandwidth, thats the whole point. Meanwhile, Lightning still has the same bandwidth and theres still a considerable penalty in serializing any other interface. If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future.

taligent 14y ago
I might be really confused but why is Apple going to be in deeper trouble ? Surely the future will be H.265 content which will have better quality for the same bandwidth. And it's unlikely that people are going to be demanding a higher output resolution than 1080p from their mobile device for anytime soon.
- revelation 14y ago
  Again, this is a connector from your mobile device to a display. Nobody has ever done any lossy compression on that pathway; both because you can drive simple circuits at frequencies high enough to have plenty of bandwidth and because it would actively destroy information (hence lossy). This is such a big problem because the video you are playing has already been lossy compressed (H.265) and it will most certainly not get better by a second pass that only has the raw pixel data available. I could imagine people want to play 4k movies from their mobile device on their TV, but you wouldn't install a 4k screen as the display on the mobile device. Edit: Yes, computer is inaccurate. I wanted to get the idea across that we are talking about connectors (DVI, HDMI) that you would normally use to hook up a computer or laptop to a TV or LCD. They have only recently appeared on mobile devices, but serve the same purpose here: video (and audio, for HDMI) out.
  - mbell 14y ago
    > Again, this is a connector from your computer to a display. Huh? Its the plug on the bottom of a phone (and ipads now i guess). Lightning isn't on any computers.
  - taligent 14y ago
    a) This is a connector from a mobile device to a TV. That is the primary use case here. I doubt anybody is hooking up an iPhone to any other type of display. b) Why is there a second pass compression/decompression stage ? Isn't iOS outputting the compressed H.264 stream and the adapter decoding it i.e. one stage ? c) Given that Retina displays by definition are the best resolution we will need and it is far less than 4K it is questionable whether there will be a use for 4K on mobile devices. Other than using your iOS device as a media player for your TV (very small use case).
  - dmishe 14y ago
    I think that if you have a 1080p source on your phone, it goes to tv as 1080 and without another compression step, it's only mirroring that reduces the resolution (which, for ipad mini, is less than 1080p btw) and introduces compression pass
    - justincormack 14y ago
      rescaling does not mean you need to do compression.
gilgoomesh 14y ago
Do you mean the future where we're streaming 4k video? If HEVC (aka H.265) lives up to its promise, 4k video will come in around a mere 50% more than 1080p does now. Meanwhile, lossless 1080p would require 20000% more space (no I didn't add too many zeros, that's 200 times more).
- FireBeyond 14y ago
  A mere fifty per cent more than something that Lightning already can't handle...
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - gilgoomesh 14y ago
    There's every indication that Lightning can handle much more than this but in order to get the hardware running quickly, they've reused settings that were previous used for WiFi data rates. All we can guess is that Lightning can handle somewhere between 10Mbps (AirPlay over WiFi) and 2Gbps (native HDMI rates). We have absolutely no idea where in that range its actual capabilities lie.
    - dmishe 14y ago
      How is that estimation done, I'm very curious?
    - makomk 14y ago
      I'm guessing its actual capabilities are basically just USB 2.0. Someone tore apart a Lightning-to-USB sync cable ages ago and the data pins are apparently wired straight through - so we know that Lightning can speak it natively - and given all the focus on simplicity and not doing multiplexing at the expense of more complexity in the adapter I can't see any reason why Apple would develop their own protocol.
      - giovannibajo1 14y ago
glitch 14y ago
So, you're saying bandwidth increase while maintaining backwards compatibility won't be possible through the Lightning interface? Surely, USB 1.0 to USB 2.0 demonstrated a counter-example to your statement.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  Notice the 2.0 there?
  - glitch 14y ago
    Yes, and? Lightning 2.0. Sure. That doesn't mean the physical interface changes. That doesn't mean there isn't backwards compatibility. That doesn't mean there isn't forwards compatibility. "And thats where all this future proof talk goes deaf" argument made no statements to support itself. "Meanwhile, Lightning still has the same bandwidth" is like saying "Meanwhile, USB still has the same bandwidth with USB 2.0 as it did with USB 1.0". There will be higher bandwidth Lightning 2.0 peripherals with Lightning 2.0 devices; but Lightning 1.0 peripherals will still be compatible. The Lightning interface doesn't establish some sort of permanent bandwidth cap to its future backwards-compatible revisions.
mbell 14y ago
> If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future. Unencoded video is about the most bandwidth intensive thing I can imagine coming out of or going into a phone, and will remain so for a long time. 1080p30 @ 24bit is roughly 1.5 Gbit/sec before you talk about transport level ecoding (8b/10b) or audio.
- dmishe 14y ago
  But then there's 4K, if we're talking about future proofing. Well, say right now it cannot transmit 1080p60 raw. Could it with new hardware in device and adapter? Or put another way — does number of pins limit bandwidth in any way?
  - mbell 14y ago
    > Well, say right now it cannot transmit 1080p60 raw. Could it with new hardware in device and adapter? Or put another way — does number of pins limit bandwidth in any way? Based on what has come out about lightning it appears to have 2 differential data channels (same as USB2). There will be some upper limit on frequency but its impossible to know without detailed specs. Its also not clear if one is locked as send and one as receive, or if they are configurable, there is an ancillary control channel so anything seems possible. For comparison, HDMI has 3 data channels, each with raw bit rate of up to 3.4Gbit/sec (~2.7Gbit/sec data).
- revelation 14y ago
  And HDMI does it effortlessly. That's exactly what these interfaces were designed to do: raw massive data with low latency over short distances, suitable for processing in dedicated circuits, not SOCs.
  - mbell 14y ago
    > suitable for processing in dedicated circuits, not SOCs. Your splitting hairs. Pretty much all HDMI transmitter ICs have a microcontroller on board, they need a processor to deal with the protocol configuration, DDC and HDCP. Probably most are using some 8051 design plunked into the chip. They are SoCs by any reasonable definition.
drewcrawford 14y ago
> If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future. Let me try and shed some light on this mystery. Consider this rumor. Also, I am not an electrical engineer, so I may be talking out of my ass. As best as I can tell, Lightning is not (yet, anyway) a real protocol like Firewire, USB, etc. What it is so far is USB with a different connector and some negotiating chips. So when connect your lightning-USB cable to your iPhone, your iPhone squawks and says "What is this?" and the cable says "I'm USB". The iPhone then sets its pinout to USB mode and off you go. What's so great about this, why not just use USB? I think the secret sauce is that Apple wants to surreptitiously invent new pinouts with faster data rates, without consulting any standards bodies and having to rally industry support on TVs, computers, et al. They just build some new controller to push Lightning at 2Gbps+, put it in new iPhones, and build active cables that spit out HDMI or UHDTV or USB3 or whatever it is the kids are doing these days. The active cables degrade gracefully for hardware running at the slower data rate. What I think you are seeing right now, is the dry run with the off-the-shelf controller. Get manufacturing ramped up. You need this to plug your phone into a computer anyway. But it's just the tick. Wait for the tock. Now the only thing that puzzles me is why they settled on 8 pins, when USB3 is 9. Obviously they wanted an even number so you could plug it in every which way, but you would think stepping up to 10 pins would let them use off-the-shelf USB3 controllers instead of USB2. Maybe they can do USB3 on 8-pins somehow, or maybe the tock will be ready fast enough that it's not worth it. Further reading: http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/23/boom-pins/ http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/23/boom-pins/
- dmishe 14y ago
  Yep, and the comment about them using already existent h264 support in hardware I think supports dry-run-fastest-to-deadline solution. Re pins, I'm not EE either, but I don't get why people concern about number of pins so much, as I asked earlier in this thread, is there a relation between number of pins and bandwidth (well with physics involved there is _some_)?
  - taligent 14y ago
    Why wouldn't they use H.264 and their existing hardware ? Do you really think it makes more sense to decode H.264 on the device then re-encode it in another format and then decode that on the adapter ? Sounds slow, illogical and bound to introduce more artifacts.

bitcartel 14y ago

I think the main takeaway is, why pay for a $50 widget when a $5 cable will do the job? For the consumer who just wants to connect their device to a HDTV, it's crazy they have to pay 10x more just because they're in the Apple ecosystem and not Android. As for being future-proof, by the time some cool new A/V interface hits the market, and we've all updated our TVs, the Lightning devices of today will be in a museum.

taligent 14y ago
You know you can buy Lightning cables off eBay for $5. And that the original dock connector first appeared in the iPod 3G nearly a decade ago. So yes today's devices will be in a museum. But the connector could still be in use in 2023 and beyond. Worth keeping in mind.
- bitcartel 14y ago
  Yes, you can get a Lightning to USB cable for charging and syncing for $5, but to connect to a TV you need to get the Lightning AV adapter which costs $50.
- esolyt 14y ago
  Can you buy Lightning to HDMI adapters off eBay for $5? Because I can buy MicroUSB (MHL) to HDMI adapters for $5.
dmishe 14y ago
>the Lightning devices of today will be in a museum. Why? They'll plug another $50 adapter on it and it'll work.
- signed0 14y ago
  I think they meant that the by the time successor to HDMI is invented today's smartphones will be obsolete.
  - bitcartel 14y ago

HNLogInShit 14y ago

"lightning is future proof and can adapt to any output you want it to" Uh, no. It can't even deliver HD resolution video. In fact, it can't deliver shitty degraded video riddled with compression artifacts at HD resolution. How is that "future proof"? It's not even up to present-day standards. But keep shilling for Apple.

StringyBob 14y ago

The interesting point to me is that a device can be future proof through iOS updates - i.e. for as long as apple is prepared to create software drivers/updates to support the peripheral. Obsolescence is now almost entirely a software rather than hardware problem. Features can be added or removed via updates. Firmware loaded at runtime is not new (see many of the wifi/bluetooth dongles that don't work in linux). However, would apple let 3rd party peripherals download driver code? I wouldn't have thought they want to keep baking it into iOS itself as the number of peripherals increase. Perhaps drivers embedded in a controller app via the app store? I like the idea that with a thunderbolt<->lightning adapter (and a huge amount of hacking) iOS peripherals are a blank canvas and could be used with other non apple devices or for purposes never originally intended (that VGA card as a software radio transmitter springs to mind...)