A million-[insert currency] idea: For free!

Will · #1 January 11th, 2007, 12:39 AM

Just to add some concrete numbers, streaming 1080i video will take about 1.5Gbit/sec bandwidth. That is currently beyond the capability of standard wireless technology. However, adding in a chip that can do hardware MPEG decoding should reduce the needed bandwidth to on the order of 300Mbit/sec. Which is still outside the range of the 54Mbit/sec of current standard wi-fi (802.11g), but is within reach for the draft 802.11n standard. As long as there is dedicated hardware encoding and decoding to prevent taxing the general CPUs, it should be do-able soon-ish.

Combat Wombat · #2 January 11th, 2007, 12:53 AM

Soon we will have USB 3.0 which will be a wireless standard that has the same transfer rates as USB 2.0 has over wires and is deisgned to work with stuf like this. I am afraid its planned range may not be enough for this.

Fyron · #3 January 11th, 2007, 02:59 AM

Can you provide us with a source for that info, CW?

frightlever · #4 January 17th, 2007, 05:39 PM

Can't you basically do this with a PDA running Remote Desktop Software to access your base PC?

Fyron · #5 January 17th, 2007, 05:49 PM

No. You can use remote desktop/vnc to access a PC from a laptop too, but neither one is a solution to the problem at hand. You can't do much with hardware video streaming over vnc/rd. They can display the slow rate software video layer fine (the windows desktop), but they have much trouble with high frame rates (such as video files and 3d games).

Will · #6 January 18th, 2007, 12:31 PM

Remote Desktop is a little different from video streaming or VNC. Video streaming would be taking a fixed framerate capture of the remote screen, and VNC takes a series of screenshots and JPEG compresses them to send over to the viewer (no guarantee of fixed framerate). Remote Desktop, however, sends the actual Windows API messages to the client as well as the base machine. So, it would require a bit more computing power at the receiving end, but would lower bandwidth because all that would be needed to be sent is the theme information at the start (what color are titlebars, etc.), and the information Windows uses to set up a window. The result is instead of sending a picture of a 500x500 empty window that has a titlebar saying "Hello, world!", you send the messages Windows sends to create a 500x500 empty window with the same titlebar. The result is a much snappier response compared to VNC/video streaming for the interface (especially the mouse position), while having similar performance to sending something like a JPEG being displayed. --edit: or playing a movie, or a 3D game... you get the idea.

Fyron · #7 January 18th, 2007, 03:09 PM

3d games don't do much at all with the win32 api though...