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

Fyron · #1 January 10th, 2007, 07:12 PM

Streaming video is very bandwidth intensive. Wifi B can barely handle low resolution internet videos. Wifi G is a little better, and can usually stream 320x240 or 640x480 video files tolerably. I can't imagine it working well with high resolution video streaming, though. Any reasonable desktop resolution (1024xY or higher) might be too much for it to handle smoothly. Sending back input data doesn't use much bandwith, so that part probably isn't an issue.

Those small LCD screens probably have fairly low resolutions (compared to what you would want to run a computer at normally), which is why they can work with Wifi <N. When Wifi N becomes finalized, dumb Wifi consoles might become more practical.

Atrocities · #2 January 10th, 2007, 07:24 PM

Within the next couple of years you will see an entire industry crop up simular to that of the cell phone industry, where PC will all come equipped long range wireless capabilities and people will be able to subscribe to a wireless network and be able to connect no matter where they are. I know sprint is working on this system now.

As it stand most laptops have limited range with what they are built with now, you can plug a cell phone into them and get access over a cell phone network.

So the next logical step would be to have a dedicated independent broadband wireless network available for people who want to stay "wired" wherever they may be.

Hell I would love to see this service offered. Give up the DSL and go with a truly wireless and secure broadband ISP. This way I can sit at the beach and be able to go on line in the evening after a day of riding.

Will · #3 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 · #4 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 · #5 January 11th, 2007, 02:59 AM

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

frightlever · #6 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 · #7 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 · #8 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.