4 ms·

I started a company with a friend of mine in 1998 to do this... we're still not quite there, and it turns out we could only sell it to really rich people throug

by cmos 17y ago

I started a company with a friend of mine in 1998 to do this... we're still not quite there, and it turns out we could only sell it to really rich people through high end custom dealers. The 'dream' of a wired + automated house is oddly far away for people outside of the 'wealthy' and 'do it yourself' categories. In many ways the entire consumer electronics industry is so _not_ focused on the 'end customer experience' to the point of just being downright insulting to their customer base. What does it mean to treat your customers badly? Try not trusting them at all. Treat them like thieves. Put in artificial rules for using your products that make it confusing for even us geeky folks. Refuse to agree on anything except methods for screwing over your customers. The last straw for me was HDMI. It is crippling the high end of the industry as it is impossible to distribute throughout a home. It is fraught with basic incompatibilities from one manufacturer to another. It's entire existence is to phase out analog output of high definition audio and video. The 'marketing' approach to the public is 'see, we put everything on one cable' but in all reality, it's just DVI with digital audio that's encrypted so you can't make legal, analog recordings for your personal use. So the good news is there is a lot of room, even beyond the Apple effect, for small companies to make an impact. The existing state of the old school Consumer Electronics industry is pathetic and will likely not be able to churn out anything but louder amplifiers and better resolution displays.

sachinag 17y ago
I get the argument against HDMI, but to insinuate that "it's all one cable" is just marketing speak is crazy. It's a legitimate and useful feature benefit - it reduces clutter and the fewer component types there are on a device, the more ports it can support. At this point, the best differentiator of most sub $3,000 HDTVs is how many HDMI ports it has and where they're located on the device.
- cmos 17y ago
  I wouldn't dismiss the advantages to putting audio, video and lightweight control on one cable. It does help to reduce confusion and clutter. My issue is that the goal of HDMI wasn't moving audio and video to one cable. The goal was to add encryption so that it becomes illegal to try to record off it. (whereas it's perfectly legal to record unencrypted analog + digital signals for personal use) The selling point to the public is a single, pretty cable to make everyone's lives better. We won't know the trap we've fallen into until years from now when we can't even buy a display _without_ an encrypted input. To make a device display anything I need to conform to an industry group to get a key to encrypt my data. But what if the industry group doesn't like my product and denies me a key? What if it has large 'fees' to keep out small companies? So much for a small company building the next pong, atari 2600 or apple I. So the 'single cable' is the perfect trap. It's true that today's LCD's are measured on how many HDMI ports they have. Later in life we'll be bidding for older LCD screens and projectors with analog inputs on ebay. (hopefully an exaggeration)
  - wmf 17y ago
    Realistically, I'm not sure recording uncompressed HD video is a good idea anyway. Given that the video probably arrived in some compressed format, you should record/copy that, not decompress it and record/recompress it.
    - Periodic 17y ago
      That would be ideal, but increasingly that is encrypted and DRMed as well, which further has limits on what you can do with it. It's no longer enough to decode the video once and pass it around the house. Now they want a fully encrypted pathway to make sure you aren't playing it in your bedroom while you watch it in the livingroom too.

by cmos 17y ago

sachinag 17y ago

I get the argument against HDMI, but to insinuate that "it's all one cable" is just marketing speak is crazy. It's a legitimate and useful feature benefit - it reduces clutter and the fewer component types there are on a device, the more ports it can support. At this point, the best differentiator of most sub $3,000 HDTVs is how many HDMI ports it has and where they're located on the device.

cmos 17y ago
I wouldn't dismiss the advantages to putting audio, video and lightweight control on one cable. It does help to reduce confusion and clutter. My issue is that the goal of HDMI wasn't moving audio and video to one cable. The goal was to add encryption so that it becomes illegal to try to record off it. (whereas it's perfectly legal to record unencrypted analog + digital signals for personal use) The selling point to the public is a single, pretty cable to make everyone's lives better. We won't know the trap we've fallen into until years from now when we can't even buy a display _without_ an encrypted input. To make a device display anything I need to conform to an industry group to get a key to encrypt my data. But what if the industry group doesn't like my product and denies me a key? What if it has large 'fees' to keep out small companies? So much for a small company building the next pong, atari 2600 or apple I. So the 'single cable' is the perfect trap. It's true that today's LCD's are measured on how many HDMI ports they have. Later in life we'll be bidding for older LCD screens and projectors with analog inputs on ebay. (hopefully an exaggeration)
- wmf 17y ago
  Realistically, I'm not sure recording uncompressed HD video is a good idea anyway. Given that the video probably arrived in some compressed format, you should record/copy that, not decompress it and record/recompress it.
  - Periodic 17y ago
    That would be ideal, but increasingly that is encrypted and DRMed as well, which further has limits on what you can do with it. It's no longer enough to decode the video once and pass it around the house. Now they want a fully encrypted pathway to make sure you aren't playing it in your bedroom while you watch it in the livingroom too.