[opendtv] Re: Another Wireless PC-to-TV Idea

  • From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2010 13:56:15 -0500

Craig Birkmaier wrote:

> As long as the PC can negotiate with the server and ask for a page
> formatted for TV...

Doesn't even have to do that. I watch wide screen "HD" news from the French TF1 
network all the time. When I click it to full screen, in my 16:10 TV monitor, 
you see slight letterboxing. If I sent this same TF1 program to a 16:9 TV 
display via the new ATSC dongle, the dongle would fill in the entire screen, as 
it was meant to be from TF1.

I don't need a single thing from AppleTV, from Google TV, or from anyone else 
to do this.

The same goes for content on the major networks' web sites. I can watch cath-up 
TV from any of these, exactly the same way as TF1. No need for any walled 
garden to solve any non-problem.

Whenever you see the pundits in the trade press or popular press gushing over 
things that are completely unnecessary, you need to look for the angle of those 
feeding this info to the uninformed in the press. Examples are DVI/HDMI (whose 
only excuse was to introduce encrypted baseband), IPTV (nothing more than cable 
with a new protocol), 60 MHz (nothing more than what UWB had tried to do, or 
what you can do with unused VHF frequencies), 4G cellular (nothing that 3G 
can't do, at least as far as the users can tell), and I'm certainly forgetting 
countless other examples. A few valid innovations in these schemes, but most of 
the gushing you see over them is clueless hype.

> Apples and oranges. These techniques send "baseband video" not
> compressed packet data.

Nonsense. They send uncompressed *packet* video, vs compressed *packet* video. 
The only difference is that you don't decompress. On the other hand, since all 
TVs sold since 3/1/2007 have the MPEG-2 decoder built in, that one minor 
difference is taken care of rather nicely, at the sink end anyway. And guess 
what. No need for any stinkin' UWB or 60 MHz.

Furthermore, the MPEG-2 compression is actually a great idea, because it allows 
the RF link to be narrow and to use an existing standard. Instead of requiring 
new schemes, with new royalties and new production issues to resolve, and no 
installed base.

Bert
 
 
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