Bluetooth Video
How would you like to send and receive video over Bluetooth? Could happen. Wouldn’t need any cables at all between components. Wouldn’t that be nice? Get a new BD or HD DVD player, bring it home, plug in the power cord, pop in a disc, and voila! Beautiful picture. Nice….
The Bluetooth special interest group (SIG) said it hopes to develop a new Bluetooth specification that will allow wireless video streaming from one device to another, via ultra-wideband (UWB), to be in consumer products by early 2008.
The new version of Bluetooth would allow users to wirelessly transfer large amounts of data as well as high-quality video and audio for portable devices, multimedia projectors and television sets. At the same time, it will continue to allow the wireless connections of low power devices such as mice, keyboards and mono headsets, “thereby offering the best of both worlds,” said the group.
The Bluetooth SIG estimates that a specification will be finalized in 2007, with prototype samples ready towards the end of 2007 and the first products offering the new Bluetooth bandwidth in early 2008.
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March 29th, 2006 at 10:46 am
This is cool. Any idea on quality impact (vs cables)? Distance Limitations? Risks of interference?
March 29th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Well it’s all speculation at this point. It all depends on the bandwidth and how good the system is at recovering from errors. It’s supposed to use UWB (Ultra-Wide Bandwidth) technology. UWB has a range of up to 10 meters, according to Intel. I don’t know what the bandwidth is though. To transport DVD quality video, you need up to 9Mbps, if I remember correctly. For MPEG4 compressed HD, it’s about the same. For MPEG2 compressed HD, you need 36Mbps. And those numbers are for steady bandwidth with no dropouts. So the techology’s bandwidth would have to be higher than that. Does anyone know what UWB is capable of?