Wireless HDMI for Everyone
indiegogo.com
indiegogo.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Living_Network_Alliance
Here's Panasonic's page outlining such features in their TVs:
http://www.panasonic.co.uk/html/en_GB/Products/VIERA+TV/VIER...
It's a lovely idea for retrofitting to older TVs, and sharing between laptops is really neat. For anyone who's bought a TV in the last couple of years, though, the device is redundant.
(it's also apparently very easy to share content from smartphones, tablets and so on, but I haven't had the need (or a chance) to independently play with this)
Yes you do, on their page it says "Install our AIRTAME application on your computer..." under step 2.
And can you stream to multiple tv's with that panasonic setup. And if you have multiple tv's from diferent models?
You have the choice of which screen to stream to.
If you mean "can you stream 1 video from 1 laptop to multiple screens as the same time," then I honestly have no first-hand experience so couldn't say.
DLNA has many members, so I would presume different models and brands would work.
From the Wikipedia page I linked, the members include:
ACCESS, AT&T Labs, Awox,[12] Broadcom, CableLabs, Cisco Systems, Comcast, DIRECTV, Dolby Laboratories, DTS, Ericsson, Google, Hewlett-Packard, HTC, Huawei, Intel, LG Electronics, Microsoft, Nokia, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Sony Electronics, Technicolor, and Verizon.
Would be nicer to simply have a wireless standard that devices - DVD players, boxes, etc - would bundle so that we didn't needs cables to the TV box. Or... hey - maybe just wireless audio from a TV to external speakers (bluetooth 4?) to cut down on wires.
No gaming, other apps, etc.
On the other hand I can clearly see that this project supports it, "Duplicate your screen" is the first feature listed there.
Honestly, I've no idea; if you like I can have a play tonight when I get home and let you know?
I can clearly see that this project supports it, "Duplicate your screen" is the first feature listed there.
Hah, that's quite funny; if you skip to the "Use Cases" section, it's all about consuming media, whereas the screen mirroring is highlighted as an extra feature. I guess the page neatly segmented you and I into our respective markets!
The result was pretty because source -> youtube -> my screen -> mp4 -> mpeg.
Although it won't be so bad, I really see re-encoding artefacts being the problem here. Although Wireless N can have enough bandwidth to send video at a good quality.
DLNA will die an instant and painful death the moment a truly open solution is adopted.
DLNA is the solution that TV companies and PC makers came up with to keep the lid on streaming and make the viewing of pirated content more difficult.
DLNA is widely despised for the same reasons that all DRM-crippled products are always despised.
I question how despised DLNA really is, as I believe you might be letting your personal prejudices get in the way.
Non-techies (and plenty of techies, including myself) just don't care as long as a given solution works, and the DLNA solution is pretty hard to beat:
Plug in your TV, connect it to the network, and click on a video on your laptop to watch.
Out of interest, what kind of open source solution do you envisage when you say that "DLNA will die an instant and painful death the moment a truly open solution is adopted"?
Would it involve hardware, or something installed on the TV, or something else entirely?
All Apple products are, similarly, not supported.
FYI, my iPhone and iPad work just fine with it.
Did you click the link? This is an example of a truly open solution, and it involves hardware.
And it wouldn't lead to me replacing my DLNA-based setup, hence my question.
I also question your description of "truly open," although that's me being a bit Stallman, granted.
Since the wifi stream can't be raw 1080p video it has to be re-encoded on the fly which will lead to some visual artifacts. If the encoding is well done it shouldn't be much of an issue however.
Second, while it looks good on paper, last time I've tried even playing movies sucked:
* it's buggy and "almost, but not really" compatible. Getting a Sony TV to see anything non-Sony took an entire evening. There were no error messages, the only feedback was "it works" vs "it hangs up for 30 seconds and then timeouts".
* Because it's build around sharing files, if you want to play a movie you need to make sure it's using a codec supported by your TV or it'll need to be transcoded it on the fly. Only some DLNA servers support transcoding, user-friendly ones and the servers built into devices often don't. Then the only video codec that works reliably with all/most devices is MPEG2 with limited bitrate. There was a small but perceptible loss in quality when playing high bit-rate x264 video.
* There's a difference between a DLNA "server" and a DLNA "controller", the "server" serves files, the "controller" is the user interface you use to select a movie to play, play/pause/stop, change volume etc. Many apps support one but not the other. If the app you put on your phone is a "dumb" DLNA server without a controller, then you can select the movies/music/pictures only by navigating the menus on your TV (which hopefully has a controller built in).
* All problems have workarounds, but these cause more problems. E.g. in the server i settled on the, transcoding data was saved to disk to a separate video file that grew and grew until i ran out of disk space. Would you know that before playing a movie you need to make sure you have 100GB of free disk space? Yes, in theory the software could hide all this from me, but it isn't there yet and it doesn't look like it ever will be.
I want bluetooth for displays (and high def audio and devices, etc...). I just want to walk into a room and have my phone, computer, tablet, etc. find my printer, display, mouse, and all other useful devices.
This level of convenience requires either an up-front pairing process with each individual device, or a gaping security hole that anybody with a high-gain antenna can exploit (imagine mischievous teenagers driving around neighborhoods with small kids and beaming illicit videos onto unprotected wireless TVs).
I see no issue with this. Everything I mentioned already works with bluetooth (for the most part) except for display.
I use it daily on an Arch Linux server as well as occasionally threw an Ubuntu VM on Windows 7. Works seamlessly in either case, and better than most other DLNA servers I've tried in terms of file format support and reliability.
http://reliablybroken.com/b/2010/12/running-minidlna-on-mac/
minidlna -d -f ~/minidlna.conf
with media_dir=..., this exactly what I was looking for, thanks again.
Here are my thoughts 1. DLNA != this and many have already outlined why so no point repeating.
2. Great features and the need for software is a minor hiccup considering how feature rich the s/w makes the solution. I would consider making the software portable for windows.
3. Not all platforms have hdmi. What about display-port compatibility (adaptor?)
4. I'm less concerned about b/w like some have pointed out here. The use case is not always high quality video as long as the quality is above SD and wifi doesn't cut out.
5. I'm guessing that with a s/w option, it should be possible to do this wired on the laptop end. But, the TV end is always wireless. I would love to see a wired option to eliminate wireless as an option. Not sure if there is a wired solution that exists today to do this.
Anyway, congrats to the team. Seems like a great product.
I don't think there is any physical component for the computer, so the lack of HDMI ports on laptops is not a limiting factor. Almost every TV has HDMI inputs today. An HDMI -> DisplayPort dongle should work if you wanted to turn your monitor into a head for this, but you might lose the audio channel.
I might be misunderstanding the product, but to me it seems like Chromecast [1] without any DRM bullshit.
(1920 * 1080 * 3 * 60) / 1024.0 / 1024.0 => 355.96 MB/s
300mbps wireless n:
300 / 8.0 => 37.5 MB/s
Given that the whole point of HDMI is image quality, how are they going to shove 355MB/s through a 37.5MB/s link without lowering the quality hugely?
It all seems rather pointless to have a large, high quality display and content, and force it through a small link.
There are a few protocols out there that manage to send high-performance video across remote devices without requiring lots of bandwith: RemoteFx is an extension of Window's RDP for instance; Citrix has stuff like HDX-3D Pro, etc.
You certainly do not need to send every pixel through.
Sky HD in the UK probably encodes each channel at around 12-18 MB/s.
The key is in the compression and latency for real time applications.
OnLive and Sony/Gaikai are streaming game A/V over the public Internet, and Amazon has a new platform to do it for arbitrary Windows apps. Again, a decent in-home wireless network is a far superior medium and should have no problem.
Playing games on the output of a 1080p @ 60fps with 3-5k bitrate encoder causes massive delay.
Because that hardware uses an ARM processor and has 512 MB RAM just like the Raspberry Pi model B. Also, I think the Pi is able to achieve the same thing already - Just connect your Pi to the TV (which can have a HDMI/Video In/DVI) and stream what you want from your PC. It would be interesting to see if the software they provide would run on my Pi out of the box. If it does, then I think I can somehow integrate the Pi into my 3 year old Bravio without any fuss and enjoy wireless streaming with the software these guys provide. All in all, a very good effort guys :)
In fact, we will be providing images for raspberrys (based on the raspbian distro)
Also, the guys chanting DLNA, does that work on other things than windows? I've never heard of it, so, have little knowledge of it. Also, I will take a stab in the dark and guess the muliple monitors part and sharing your screen on others computers isn't quite a thing of DLNA...
Or I could buy another Apple TV for a little more and have a lot more functionality and video outlets (HBO GO, Netflix etc.). Although this option only works if you use Macs.
Or as another poster said just use the built in wifi on my TVs in my house.
Also you don't have to "use macs" to watch netflix/hbo-go/etc on Apple tv... well, you only have to use one mac at least.
Roku is a much better choice anyway.
Even though a bit old and single-core, it's more than enough to stream some H.264, and back then it was a quite awesome processor for 7$/ea approx. Now they will be even cheaper.
Can someone please explain to me why no one builds transmitters for these?
[1] http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/low-power-fm-broadcast-radio...
I made this "Works with" (instead of "with both") and it is available at http://i.imgur.com/8VDAlrK.png
Great idea, and good luck.
I get that cable free would be awesome but as I understand it we need significant advances in inductive charging to make that happen.
My dream atm is for a low-cost wireless HDMI sender for projecting stuff like xbox to my office (would be nice to play a bit of GTA while I wait for files to copy ;), that work in a similar way to the RF SCART senders you can pick up from most electronics stores.
That said, my TV has networking and DLNA and has pretty happily played any video file I've thrown at it yet, so I don't really need to hook up my computer.
I simply want any device to send a signal to my TV. It's trivial with cables, modern wireless technology can cheaply carry high quality signals, and the only thing standing in the way is the copyright mafia.
There's absolutely nothing stopping you from loading a DRM-free h.264 file on another one of your Apple devices and streaming that over AirPlay. And HTML5 video in Mobile Safari works beautifully.
That's the problem. Apple has DRMd the protocol so you have to be using an Apple device to send things to it.
For video streaming, you basically just have to send it a URL to a video file, and it'll stream and play it for you just fine.
(1) my guest who recorded the video with his own phone.
A couple of weeks ago I was thinking up this exact idea. I'm glad someone is doing it!
A greate usecase for use would be in our office conference room. Plug it in the projector in the ceilingand all employees can just stream the screen.
Installing custom software might be a barrier for some users.
Congratulations to the team!
Good luck!
Please, please stop making USB dongles which are big and occupy more than one port, if I put that device in my smartTV it will block the other one.
I suspect TV makers will adapt before long and sprinkle HDMI connectors a bit farther apart.
What I want is two HDMI dongles that literally function like wireless cables. Plug one dongle into one device. Plug the other dongle into the other device. The result should be exactly the same as if I had an actual HDMI cable. No software configuration. No wifi setup. Maybe a light on each device to indicate if the signal is strong enough and if they are connected to each other or not.
It's not complicated. That's all I want. Someone, please make this!
For that matter, there's a huge market for all sorts of dongles of this nature. Wireless audio cables that transmit digitally, for example. Basically, I want to just do away with wires and replace them with bi-directional dongles of some sort on each end.
In the mean time if the people behind the AIRTAME are reading this, I'd love to see something like this with support for HDMI Ethernet Channel, since this will half the amount of wireless congestion AIRTAME would cause. I'm under no illusion that this will be added to the first version (I know what hardware dev is like), but it's something to consider for the future.
EDIT: Using DLNA gets annoying. I need to start a software on my laptop and then I have to use my TV remote to select the file I want to watch in the TV menu. A solution like this is so much more quicker.
I suppose with later iterations it could improve, but I would rather just plug the HDMI directly into the laptop and use a wireless keyboard/mouse if needed.
On another note, I find it hard to believe that Apple still hasn't fixed the color space issues on OS X (it only occurs if you use a different profile other than SRGB). It is clearly visible throughout the video showing the purple menu bar highlight when it should be blue.
I know it is a WIP, but this would have been much more attractive/awesome if they managed to power without separate USB and add wifi AC support. That would have made it a serious competitor even if at a higher price point.
Infact you can power it from an HDMI 1.4 + MHL port if your tv supports it!
It also comes with dual wifi cards.
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after POSTing my info on
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/airtame-wireless-hdmi-for...
Kickstarter is the way to gogo!
Open source players are fine, but there's still the problem of finding a streaming service that supports open-source players or even just HD content without DRM. Now, you can go and torrent all your videos you'd like to watch but some of use prefer the ease of use and the legality of using an existing streaming service.
(BTW: I don't think that Streaming Services just implement DRM because they think it's fun and I don't expect right holders will be enlightened any time soon)
http://www.amazon.com/Nyrius-Transmitter-Streaming-Satellite...
I was hoping it'd be the type of dongle that I could plug one end into an HDMI out and one end into an HDMI in and have "wireless HDMI."
This is not that.
s/versoin/version
I want to use my TV as a VNC/RDP client, and either buy a wireless keyboard for it, or just let it act as a passive display.
1.) Android / iOS “receiver” and “controller” is on the ROADMAP, having them as a “streamer” would also be awesome, but requires that people root/jailbreak their devices, which we can not officially support. (Restrictions on hardware access by vendors unfortunately)EDIT: And as of today, HBO Go.
Setting aside tabcasting, Chromecast is for streaming from "the cloud" onto your big screen TV. Your other device (phone, tablet etc.) only sends instructions on what to play and the Chromecast takes over.
This is all about sending the video direct from your device. I'd say that's a much worse solution for Youtube/Netflix/HBO Go etc. but has many other uses, like sharing the screen with others as you interact with it via a mouse.
Tabcasting might evolve, but I'd say what Chromecast does particularly well is the other thing, particularly as a locked down device that Netflix etc. can trust.
But I think there's space for an "open" chromecast-like device too.