| Video Noise March 2009
Crystal Ball Time Again
 It’s
important to have some idea of where home theater is likely to go in the future -- having
some sense of how things might evolve could influence your next product purchase. But even
if you decide not to let tomorrow’s developments dictate today’s
purchase, at least you can have some idea of what’s likely to be coming over the
horizon.
It’s fair to say that wireless signal transmission is
the future of home theater. This will mean many things. First, your components will have
no cables other than power cords -- all communication with other components will be
wireless. HDMI will no longer be needed, nor will older connection protocols (unless you
want to keep using that old laserdisc player or VCR). But it’s safe to assume that
your new disc player will talk to your new AVR and video display via some sort of wireless
digital technology. At some point, there will probably even be wireless hubs for those
older components that lack their own wireless interfaces.
Wireless transmission will also mean that physically
packaged movies, concerts, TV series, and video games may disappear from store shelves --
or, if they do continue to be sold in stores, what you’d take home would be not a
disc but a download code, which you’d then use to download the program to your media
server. The prices of external 1TB hard drives (1 terabyte = 1000 gigabytes) have dropped
to under $125 -- yet all that storage space will still hold only about 40 high-definition
(i.e., Blu-ray) movies, without extras. "Owning" a movie may turn into
something very different from storing a physical disc on your shelf, or downloading the
film to your media server and keeping it there. Ownership may become what the film studios
have wanted all along: They will keep the movie data for you, and allow you to
watch it when you like, based on some sort of payment plan -- unlimited viewings for, say,
$5/week, $10/month, $20/year, or $25 for five years. Perhaps Sony will sell subscriptions
to their catalogs of films and music recordings for an annual fee that will entitle you to
watch or hear all new and older titles for the next 12 months. The possibilities are
endless.
But the hundreds of millions of people who have grown up
owning physical discs or cartridges may find these possibilities difficult to deal with.
The day may come when none of the media you "own" are tangible. I can’t say
I look forward to that. There’s something comforting about having physical objects to
hold, touch, browse through. Transferring music and movies to a PC or media server is
convenient, but as much as I enjoy selecting from a list without having to rise from my
couch, I’m still drawn to shelves full of discs to browse.
Still, the twilight of physical media will mean the dawn of
things we’ve never seen -- perhaps animated "cover art" for movies or
music. Because you’ll be browsing titles on your computer or mobile device, very
little data-storage space will be needed to include a few seconds of animation instead of
a still cover image. Movies could entice you with an effects shot or an especially juicy
exchange of dialogue, or something a little or a lot more explicit.
Wireless transmission will also mean whole-house
distribution of media via an emerging or as yet unknown technology that will link every
home-entertainment product to every other, using a compatibility standard such as the
Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA; see www.dlna.org
or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Living_Network_Alliance). One of my
frustrations with satellite TV is that I can’t watch high-definition video on every
HDTV display in my house. Only two of us live here, but at the moment we have eight TVs,
five of them HDTVs. The satellite services limit me to having just two HD tuners, and
those work with only one TV each. (Hardwiring for whole-house distribution to so many
displays would be very expensive.) Wireless transmission would make it easy to watch
hi-def on any TV in the house, and two HD tuners would be enough -- unless you need to
please every member of a large family.
I have several DLNA-compatible products right now, and
others have come and gone for reviews for this and other publications. Amazingly, every
one has mostly worked well with the others. Sure, there are occasional glitches: sometimes
something can’t be found because a folder on a PC or media server wasn’t shared,
and some types of files that play fine on the PC may not be supported by some other
devices. But these will be fixed over time.
Just the other day, I wanted to listen to some music. My
wife had the CD in her car, but a copy of it was on the laptop upstairs. I fired up my
Sony PlayStation 3, located the file on the laptop, and the PS3 sent it to my A/V
receiver, which expanded the stereo signal to glorious 7.1-channel sound using DTS Neo:6
Music. Later that night we watched an episode of Heroes we’d missed, from www.NBC.com via the PS3’s
"wireless g" interface with our DSL high-speed Internet connection. When I
discovered how crappy and small NBC’s Heroes feed was, we resorted to
other means to watch the episode we’d just seen in full-screen semi-HD. I can see
this being a much bigger deal in the not-too-distant future. It can be really attractive
to have access to entire seasons’ worth of TV series to watch over as long or short a
period as you like.
The biggest challenges for wireless HDTV are in the
transmission of sufficient bandwidth and data rate. How do you transmit a huge amount
of data without interruptions? Lossless 1080p with lossless 5.1-channel audio requires a lot
more bandwidth than is available in even the fastest download speed common in home
wireless Internet products, 802.1/n. The fastest of the three emerging wireless standards,
WirelessHD, has a bandwidth of approximately 2GHz and a maximum data rate of about 4Gbps,
while the "wireless n" standard peaks at a bandwidth of 20MHz and a little less
than 300Mbps, or 40MHz and 600Mbps. WirelessHD can currently be used in only one room;
whole-house distribution is still on the horizon.
You could potentially create your own custom evening of
wireless entertainment by combining family photos, music, and a home video or theatrical
movie. Your theater control program will allow you to script the entire thing yourself,
pulling resources wirelessly from multiple locations: Set the playback sequence and
content, and the whole thing will automatically unfold. This could take home theater to a
whole different level. By 2011, wireless home theater should be so simple to operate that
anyone who could set the clock on a VCR should be able to go wireless. The more
adventurous and technically adept may have solutions that provide full HD video and audio
capabilities by 2010.
. . . Doug Blackburn
db@hometheatersound.com |
