Real HDMI?
The two other systems are WirelessHD and WHDI. Both of these are more firmly focused on replacing the display connection. WHDI operates at 5GHz, while Wireless HD uses the 60GHz band. Both claim to provide ample capacity for full HD, and even 3D video.
While the 5GHz WHDI standard can penetrate walls, the 60GHz of Wireless HD operates at a much shorter range and only really works within a single room. Amimon is the main chipset manufacturer for WHDI, and the owner of the "video modem' technology that squeezes 1080p into the 5GHz band. Chip maker SiBeam is behind much of the WirelessHD equipment.
WHDI promises HD video streamed through walls
Many of the major consumer equipment manufacturers have a foot in both camps at the moment, though Panasonic, LG and Sony have all released TV sets with Wireless HD built in, and Haier has announced a range of TVs that will come with a WHDI adaptor to plug into the HDMI ports on one of your other devices.
What to buy?
Right now, there’s still a limited amount of wireless HDMI kit available, and it’s probably too early to say which will be the most dominant specification in future. But if you want to dip your toe in the water, Cable To Go’s WirelessHD TruLink kit contains both a transmitter and receiver and can now be picked up for about £99 online.
If, that is, you’re one of the few people who’s found a problem that can be solved by wireless HDMI. ®
WTF is... wireless HDMI?
COMMENTS
Goose objection.
This seems like a great way to spill gigabytes of traffic into the air making it even harder to use WiFi. All for devices which for their years of life; NEVER MOVE!
It should be illegal for stuff that sits still to use wireless connections, use a cable FFS!
OFA?
So in the days of cables the "big sell" was oxygen free, gold plated, diamond encrusted uber-cables to link kit.
Hmmm, I wonder if Dixons et al will be eager to sell some extortionatly priced "Oxygen Free Air" for the pre-requisite inter-connect between devices?
The wrong solution
I'm with Bracken. There are plenty of good reasons for wireless connectivity, but not being bothered to hook up a 3m HDMI cable between two completely static devices is not one of them. There isn't an infinite amount of wireless bandwidth available; I live in fear of a neighbour getting a wireless TV extender that lives in the same band as my existing 802.11 and will cripple my bandwidth through the wall. Even the 60GHz solution has the ability to interfere, depending on what your walls are made of.
If you're going to stream video wirelessly, better to transmit the original h.264 bitstream and decode it at the display device. Decoding it wastes vast amounts of bandwidth; decoding it and recompressing it will introduce horrible artifacts (ever used a DVD recorder on the output of a digital receiver?) Better yet, just use some cables, then they won't interfere with (or be interfered with by) anything. Doing this wirelessly is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist nearly so much as the average consumer might think it does, and people have been trying to punt various version of it for years - fortunately with limited success.
If you really want to get an uncompressed video from the back of the room to a display at the front, make your neighbours happy: buy a projector.
Wireless communication is all good and well but people live too close to each other
I was in Toronto a short while back staying over in an apartment on the 15th floor of a building. Scanning for service I found I had 71 WiFi signals detected using a TP-Link directional antenna. These included 5 coffee shops, two McBarf outlets (not the same one), and other commercial establishments along with all the domestic installations.
There are simply insufficient channels to accommodate all these co-located signals.
Likewise, at a very nice hotel in the Far East, all the rooms had TV and audio equipment from the same manufacturer and every so often the programme would be interrupted by signals from an adjacent room.
Things are unlikely to improve from an accommodation standards point of view so it is incumbent upon the standards people to enable systems that at in close proximity to operate without interference. Infra red, possibly, is an answer.
An apartment
Can't wait to see how brilliant these things are in a high density environment. In an apartment block, if this ever took off, it would be a nightmare. It's bad enough with WiFi, and that's not transmitting all the time!
Also as previously pointed out it's dumb as hell to be re-encoding content and then transmitting it, just shuffle the encoded content over the air so quality isn't compromised.
I can see these things working if they join the WiFi fabric, and stop trying to be an HDMI replacement, just make them a tranport for encoded content! Could work well for laptop/projector use as well.
