Wireless, except for the monitor...

[damocles]

Heya,

Just curious for feedback on this.

I run an HTPC box, that can sit on my Home Theatre Rack (my preference) . I can use a wireless mouse/keyboard across my room- but that isn't an option for my monitor.

Is running a long DVI cord the only way to have most of my box across the room and my monitor on the desk?

I assume so, but just in case there is another option...

 

[trOver]

if there is wireless for what your talking about, i gauruntee you you will lose quality. Video that is DVI quality going over the air cant be good...

 

[Malak]

Originally posted by: trOver
if there is wireless for what your talking about, i gauruntee you you will lose quality. Video that is DVI quality going over the air cant be good...

And yet I pick up digital cable over the air just fine...

I haven't heard of anything like this, but it's certainly possible.

 

[amheck]

you get digital cable over the air?

 

[TanisHalfElven]

Originally posted by: amheck
you get digital cable over the air?

he probably means over the air HD.

 

[chizow]

Considering the quality of your video can vary greatly with the quality of your DVI cable, a wireless solution probably isn't a viable alternative (if it even exists).

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Malak

Originally posted by: trOver
if there is wireless for what your talking about, i gauruntee you you will lose quality. Video that is DVI quality going over the air cant be good...

And yet I pick up digital cable over the air just fine...

I haven't heard of anything like this, but it's certainly possible.

The HD you are picking up is highly compressed. Most 720p/1080i HD streams are somewhere around 10-20Mbps -- on lower-bandwidth ones you can easily see compression artifacts in fast-moving scenes. DVI can transmit uncompressed 1600x1200@60FPS. That's around 350 megabytes per second, or about 140 times more bandwidth than an OTA HDTV feed.

Now, you could compress/decompress the video output in real time, and then send it wirelessly. However, this will result in either lower quality, lag, or both, and will generally require hardware on each end to compress/transmit the data. There are solutions to do this, but they aren't cheap.

You could also look at using a laptop on a wireless connection and running VNC (or other remote desktop software) to access the HTPC's desktop. However, this usually doesn't work well for things like video playback, and it also suffers from lower quality and usually some lag. If you only need this for administration, VNC/Remote Desktop is probably the best solution. Video files can be streamed directly to other devices over a wireless network without needing access to the desktop of the server.