[HH] CES: AIRTAME: Wireless HDMI

[Tom Metro]

A wireless HDMI link for $90:

http://airtame.com/

It's sort of a cross between a Chromecast and VNC.

When I first saw it, I thought it was a purely hardware solution. Plug a
transmitter into the laptop, a receiver into the monitor or projector,
and no software. The neat bit is that you can have two (or more)
receivers...

But it turns out there is no hardware transmitter. It uses software,
similar to VNC. You install software on the machine generating the video
content, then send it via WiFi to the receiver, which is a thumb-size
dongle computer that acts like a VNC viewer. (No actual mention of VNC,
so who knows what they're using.)

They actually have more details on their crowdfunding campaign page than
on their own web site:
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/airtame-wireless-hdmi-for-everyone--2

  We have written our own custom protocol and application which supports
  more features than other solutions out there. The protocol and the
  software will be released under an open source license.

(They mention FFmpeg and other open source projects they build on, but
nothing like VNC or NC.)

For a conference room or lecture hall setting, it offers some advantages:

-it theoretically eliminates the need for video cables and adapters;
Doesn't matter if the speaker's laptop is HDMI, VGA, or Displayport as
no hardware attaches to the laptop.

-there is a software-only receiver, so anyone in the audience can view
the video stream on their laptop, which is handy for a large room where
you might not be able to read code on the projector screen;

-access to the receiver can be handed off; anyone in the audience can
contribute visually to the presentation by being granted access to feed
their screen to the projector; (this could be real handy for hackathons.)

But...

-a big down side is that the machine used for the presentation needs to
have this special software. On the up side, they claim to support
Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (with Android to follow).


Less clear that this would be a good device for a home theater setup.
I'm more skeptical how well it can handle interactive things, like
games, given they are adding latency for software to capture and
compress the screen, and sending it over WiFi.

Android Authority recently published a video review:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hodgChDwwk0&feature=share&list=UUgyqtNWZmIxTx3b6OxTSALw&index=3

comparing the Chromecast to Belkin's Miracast. They noted that due to
the way the Miracast mirrors what is on the transmitting device's
screen, it does introduce lag, and makes playing games this way problematic.

But lag shouldn't be a problem for passive video, as long as the
processing chain can keep up with the bitrate, and you aren't trying to
synchronize across multiple devices.

 -Tom