Live Intel WiDi Demonstration At CES 2010 45
MojoKid writes "As we saw earlier this week, Intel's new WiDi (Wireless Display Interface) technology will start to be bundled with various Core i5 and Core i3 notebooks
later this month, promising to address the Home Theater and Multimedia PC markets with a solution that enables wireless connectivity of your notebook over HDMI to an HDTV using standard 802.11n wireless technologies for transmission of the data. Intel was also demonstrating this technology live at CES 2010 and HotHardware captured video of the technology in action, with Intel Product Manager Joshua Newman. This new technology is obviously fairly mature at this point with retail products waiting in the wings, just a few weeks away."
Not good enough (Score:5, Interesting)
I expected a true lossless wifi link to the DVI/HDMI connector, this is a vendor-specific dirty hack.
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I'm not sure who moves their monitor often, though, and it'll still need AC power anyway...
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The idea is that you can convert any display into a WiDi. The monitor isn't wireless. At least not yet anyway. Right now you hook up a box which looks like a wireless router to your TV or display device. It snags the WiDi signal and pipes it out to your display via HDMI.
Re:Not good enough (Score:4, Interesting)
802.11n doesn't have the bandwidth for lossless video of a decent resolution. Uncompressed 1080p is something like 3Gbps, right?
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have wireless connections pushing 3Gbps. We just aren't there yet. You can get decent video quality at 802.11n rates, though. More than anything, I'm just a little surprised by the idea that they're able to do real-time high quality transcoding.
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802.11n is more than enough bandwidth for 1080i, though. An uncompressed broadcast TV at 1080i is under 20 mbit. Outside of enthusiasts, most people really can't tell the difference between 1080p and 1080i.
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1080i is actually VBR MPEG-2 at somewhere between 5 and 40mbit/s depending on if you are OTA or using a cable/sattelite provider and how much they re-compress their streams.
uncompressed video at the 1080i resolution is HUGE: 1920widthx1080heightx30fpsx24bpp = 1,492 mbit/s
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And twice the temporal resolution - so it works out the same.
Re:Not good enough (Score:4, Insightful)
That doesn't sound quite right to me. 1080i is the same resolution as 1080p but interlaced, which would lead me to guess that it would require half the bandwidth of 1080p.
I mean, I think the 3Ghz number is for 1080p/60, completely uncompressed. So I figure 1080i/24 is about 600Mbps, and you may be able to run that through some kind of lossless compression and bring that down a bit. However, I suspect that your 20Mbps number is based on a lossy compression (high-quality though it may be).
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1080i 1080p
1080i = 1920x540
1080p = 1920x1080
typically 1080i has twice the framerate of 1080p.
this may sound strange, but 'some' viewers will actually find 1080i video of sports better on low end 1080p plasma TVs. 1080i in this circumstance actually reduces the perception of motion blur because it provides twice as many images for the brain to process. The image will break down under close scrutiny but from the couch at 10' away the NFL looks better at 1080i on a crappy plasma TV.
I archive videos digital
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Sure every frame only updates every second pixel but the actual display is 1920x1080 pixels.
The idea is to make the transitions between frames appear smoother, update every second pixel but have twice the framerate.
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Do you know of a wireless router that can get a throughput of 600Mbps? I thought the 802.11n topped out at 300Mbps, but I've never actually gotten anything close to that in reality.
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This is not true.
1080i is very noticeably different for the majority of the population. The 'WIN' that 1080i got was that is looks much better than standard broadcast. 1080i is only half the resolution and uses a perception trick to emulate 1080p. Most people, after watching a 1080p set for a couple of days, would see a drastic loss in fidelity moving to a 1080i set.
720p on the other hand looks outstanding. Though the perceived resolution is lower than 1080p(or "i"), the framerates are still excellent an
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1080i and 1080op displays have the exact same number of pixels. Sure, 1080i updates only half the pixels per frame but it has the same number of pixels on the display.
There's so much disinformation about 1080i vs. 1080p. Guess what format requires more bandwidth and processing on Blu-ray? 1080i does.
1080i Blu-ray plays at 60 frames per second, where each frame updates every second pixel on the 1920x1080 display, a total of 1920x1080x30 full frames per second.
1080p Bl
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Just a little research:
For live broadcast applications, a high-definition progressive scan format operating at 1080p at 50 or 60 frames per second is currently being evaluated as a future standard for moving picture acquisition. This format will require a whole new range of studio equipment including cameras, storage, edit and contribution links (such as Dual-link HD-SDI and 3G-SDI) as it has doubled the data rate of current 50 or 60 fields interlaced 1920 × 1080 from 1.485 Gbit/s to nominally 3 Gbit/s. It will improve final pictures because of the benefits of "oversampling" and removal of interlacing artifacts.
source [wikipedia.org]
As 802.11n max speed is 600Mbit/s (according to wiki [wikipedia.org]), there is no way that it can handle the necessary raw data stream for high-defintion input. Surely at lower resolution rates it would be fine though, for average users that don't require such high resolution, as long as you don't mind maxing out on your graphics capabilities.
Maybe in a few years when the bandwidth is available. We're not there yet
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Uncompressed 1080p video using MPEG2 is 38.0 mbps. This is a speed that is theoritically available to most wireless networks, but as soon as you have other wireless devices in the mix, it is very improbable. Even with 802.11n, when you mix in that you are most likely talking to a WAP with both devices, plus distance limitations, and other bandwidth contention (oh, you wanted to stream that YouTube video from the net, and display it wirelessly from your laptop?), you are in a world of hurt.
The other issue
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Uncompressed 1080p video using MPEG2 is 38.0 mbps
That may be lossless, but I'm quite sure that's not uncompressed.
I've read that 3Gbps number elsewhere, but it makes sense if you do a quick calculation. 1920(width)x1080(height)x24(bits per pixel)=50Mb per frame. So if it's 24 frames per second, that's just over 1Gb per second. 1080p/60 would then be 2.986 Gbps.
I'm sure you can do quite a lot with lossless compression, but I don't know how much. 38Mbps sounds like amazing compression, though, for it to be completely lossless, and I was under the impr
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And in any case, cities are already full of mobile phones using pretty similar frequencies.
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Definitely more WiFi congestion (Score:2)
In general, I think the best use of this kind of technology is business, mainly all those "consultants" that come on site to do their powerpoint presentations. Having it easier to access a projector has it's benefits, and the lag is not
cool, but what about sound (Score:3, Interesting)
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Given that the intent here seems to be for media streaming, it would seem silly to not include sound. From what people are saying, it sounds like it's just doing something like this:
Your wireless router has an HDMI port that you wire to your TV. Your computer then encodes its output in real-time to a streaming video format and sends that to your router. Your router has enough processing power to decode the stream, and pipes the output to your TV.
If this description is accurate, then it's not really new
Oh boy that was laggy! (Score:5, Informative)
Watch the video demo. There's a good 200+ms delay from the laptop to the HDTV. Reminds me of [Remote Play] on PSP+PS3. It's nice to watch movies but unusable for anything interactive.
You'll be cursing a lot if you ever try to use a mouse with this setup.
Not good enough, sorry, try again.
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Or a 99 cent hdmi cable and a netbook.
Video of it in Action (Score:4, Insightful)
So instead of getting a crisp clean video feed from my PC, I can make it look like a youtube video? How exciting!
WirelessHD is already here (Score:5, Informative)
I know this is news because Intel has said its got a new product to launch for laptops, but full-definition HD is already being streamed wirelessly. Check out the top-end Panasonic Z1 plasma [engadget.com].
See a review [wirelesshd.org](pdf) of the TV, which does mention the wireless aspects:
Streaming Full HD video and high-res audio is no mean feat. It takes considerable bandwidth to ensure a constant and clean feed of 1080p24 footage over 10 metres, yet the gizmos here perform that task admirably. Not once during testing was the signal interrupted or hampered by additional artefacts. Admittedly, I remained within the recommended catchment area, but it is highly unlikely that, with a set like this, you'll set the separate media box more than 32 feet away. And anywhere within that area offers as clean an image as a normal HDMI cable is capable. That's it.
There's no more to it than that. To be honest, it's weird being so impressed by something actually doing what's it's meant to, but I am. And you will be too.
It uses WirelessHD [wirelesshd.org] which is (I guess) designed for home theatre, but it should work with any HDMI port - so your laptop could send out wireless signals using this too, it doesn't need any fancy processing from the CPU or OS (as if my cheapass DVD player works with it, my $2000 laptop should be able to!)
It doesn't have super range (32 feet), but it does 10Gbps by all accounts, and 4k support (that's 4x the resolution of 1080p) in the next version.