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Does this Even Exist
Mai-Kero
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
and is it Ridiculously Expensive if so?
I just scored a wireless audio receiver for my laptop, and assuming it works once I scrounge up some AA batteries, I'd love to be able to find a wireless VGA receiver. Right now the laptop is just hooked up via a regular VGA to my new Westinghouse, and while it is pitifully small and better suited to a large monitor than an actual TV (26") it would be balls awesome if I could do the wireless VGA thing to and have it sitting somewhere else in the house and stream that shit directly to my TV. My 360 works for movies and music, but being able to do anything from any positive of the living room or kitchen would be amazing.
I just scored a wireless audio receiver for my laptop, and assuming it works once I scrounge up some AA batteries, I'd love to be able to find a wireless VGA receiver. Right now the laptop is just hooked up via a regular VGA to my new Westinghouse, and while it is pitifully small and better suited to a large monitor than an actual TV (26") it would be balls awesome if I could do the wireless VGA thing to and have it sitting somewhere else in the house and stream that shit directly to my TV. My 360 works for movies and music, but being able to do anything from any positive of the living room or kitchen would be amazing.
Mai-Kero on
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http://www.google.com/products?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=2.4GHz+wireless+video+transmitter&um=1&sa=X&oi=product_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title
$60-$100 for composite-quality.
http://www.google.com/products?q=wireless+vga&btnG=Search+Products&show=dd
$100-$200 for VGA quality.
Hope this helps.
Holy fuck.
Yes, this helps.
Helps me determine to not buy one. That's ridiculously expensive. How much more difficult can an audio signal honestly be to transmit wirelessly than a video one? My audio adapter was only $15.
Well, I didn't look very hard. You can likely drop it a bit.
Also, keep in mind video has much higher bandwidth requirements.
To give you a general idea, a single-link DVI connection is moving video at 3.9 gigabits (or 490ish megabytes) per second.
for reference, 802.11g wifi is 54 megabits per second.
edit: I mean, seriously, do the math here. Let's say you don't need a full DVI link, you only want (say) 720p.
That's 720 lines times 1280 columns times 24 bits per pixel times 60 frames per second equals 1,327,104,000 bits per second.
Video is very hard to transmit wirelessly.
Option 1: Analog Video. This is how your traditional "rabbit-ears"-style TV works. This basically requires the signal to be diddled at the same rate as the electron gun in your TV. Your TV works on the NTSC standard (or maybe PAL or SECAM if you're not in the US) and, if you're using NTSC, this means a resolution of about 640x480, with limitations on what colors you can display, and it's also interlaced (about 30 frames/second, 60 fields). This is what you get if you have like a composite or S-video output on your video card - resolution generally sucks and is blurry, it cuts off the edges, it has problems with certain colors, etc.
Option 2: Digital Video You can get higher resolutions than the above NTSC-like analog video, but making this work is substantially more tricky. Obviously, you can get HDTV wirelessly - the two most common mechanisms are satellite (like DirectTV) or over-the-air digital TV (like ATSC).
However, as Daedalus pointed out, above, the raw bitrate of this video without any sort of compression or anything is ginormous. The circuits that can transmit signals at the gigabits-per-second rate are incredibly expensive, if they exist at all. So, how does a set-top DirectTV box or ATSC tuner get HDTV resolution over-the-air? Through compression. The video is highly compressed using MPEG-2 before it's sent, and your box decodes it. This substantially reduces the over-the-air bandwidth needed to a manageable level. The catch is that the video must be encoded into MPEG-2 before it's transmitted, and then decoded at the other end. Decoding, done by your set-top box or ATSC receiver, is actually a fairly computationally expensive operation. Your set-top box or ATSC tuner includes a custom MPEG-2 decoder chip just for this purpose. This takes your (relatively-)low-bitrate MPEG-2 stream and decodes it into the hundreds-of-MBPS stream that gets pumped out the DVI or VGA cable.
Getting the video compressed INTO MPEG-2 in the first place is even more compute-intensive - perhaps an order of magnitude. Your local TV station or broadcaster either pre-encodes their content or, for live stuff, has thousands and thousands of dollars of specialized hardware at the studio to do the compression on-the-fly. (If you Google 'real-time HDTV encoder' you can see some of the products, but you're not likely to find price quotes on the Web, since this stuff is so expensive it's in that class of give-us-your-info-and-a-salesman-will-contact-you equipment).
Now what about those products that evilmrhenry linked that do VGA-resolution PC-to-TV? Those are a smattering of different technologies.
Technology 1 is a custom VNC/Remote Desktop-like solution. You install some software on your PC that captures the screen at a very low rate, compresses it with a relatively fast (but low-quality) compression algorithm, and sends the compressed data over something like WiFi, where the box (acting like a remote desktop/VNC client) decodes the signal and puts it out for the TV. This works great for just editing Word documents, surfing the Web, showing a PowerPoint presentation, or whatever, but there is absolutely no way you could, e.g., watch a video over these technologies.
Technology 2 is a video decoder and player in a box with something like a WiFi connection. This relies on you having the video or audio you want to watch on TV pre-encoded in some (relatively-)low-bitrate format - maybe MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, Windows Media, AVI with certain codecs, or something like that. Then, software on your PC streams this file as-is over a wireless connection (maybe WiFi, maybe something proprietary) to your player box, which is a little computer whose sole purpose is to decode audio and video and play them. The box in this case actually has decoders for various media formats - MPEG, Windows Media, DivX, whatever - built in. If you encode your video in a weird format, however, it won't play over these solutions. However, if your videos are in an appropriate format, they will play.
Technology 3 is a hybrid analog solution. This is basically a combination of a VGA-to-TV box (that downconverts your nice VGA signal to a shitty composite signal) and an ordinary home TV transmitter/receiver. This is the same as if you got a box that converts VGA to analog TV signals, but instead of plugging the box directly into the TV, there's a wireless element.