At last! The Wi-Fi chip that'll beam video from mobe to telly Marvell's latest Avastar chipset and TI's next-generation silicon will stream video to a TV, projector or similar over Wi-Fi Direct while maintaining a separate wireless network connection. But why? So you can ensure what's being shown on your touchscreen tablet can be seen on the family telly or lecture hall wall, provided …
"The DLNA standard - which lays down how computers, printers, cameras, phones and other multimedia devices should share media - works acceptably as long as one has a minimum of technical ability and suitably low expectations of success: when it works, it works well."
But that is astonishingly infrequent. DLNA implementations on TVs are VERY picky about the codec, container format, bit rates, codec parameters, resolutions, and I am convinced the user's dress and choice of deodorant. If even one parameter doesn't agree with the TV, the stream will be rejected, with no clue as to why.
I think it is getting better. A combination of TVs becoming a little less picky and servers working around their quirks I've had good results with my 2011 Sony TV and various iPhone apps and MythTV. A few of the iPhone apps can act as controllers directing the server to send to the TV which acts as renderer.
I do accept that 2-3 years ago it was hard to find things that did work but the practical situation has improved markedly.
Actually, it's worse than that. My HD TV and blu-ray player both support MPEG-2 and H.264 for their primary function; both have DLNA clients. Do both support MPEG-2 and H.264 via DLNA? No. Do they support the same codecs from USB storage as they accept via DLNA? No.
Consumer Electronics have thin margins and short shelf lives - the more functionality you add the less time and money there is to design and test. So stuff gets cobbled together sufficiently to tick off the feature lists, regardless of whether it works usefully in practice.
Plus Windows goes mad and literally blacks out the playback area or cripples the resolution if you try to clone the laptop display onto a projector. (At the time HDCP projectors didn't exist, now they are merely almost impossible to buy.)
This all drives us mad, and I took a sneaky joy in reminding a MS exec that the reason they couldn't see their video on their presenter's screen was Windows copy protection.
It would be great to see the things we used to be able to do easily come back, though I somehow doubt that happening.
I have this VeeBeam thingy. www.weebeam.com
Ok, it is line of sight, but for mr that is not a deal breaker. It works very well.
Sadly, Apple have removed technology from OSX 10.7 & 10.8 which means it con no longer be supported on the OSX platform. Win7 works fine as does OSX10.6
There is even a version of the hardware for composite input as well..
All-in-all an easy way to stream content from my laptop to my non-smart TV, until something generic and ubiquitous comes along. I.e. Quite a while
I must admit, the rapid ubiquity of HDMI ports has been great for me. Just before we set off on Holiday with the kids in May I grabbed a £90 Android tablet from Amazon. On the way up the M6 I even manged to get a MiniHDMI to HDMI cable from the bargain bin (packaging damaged) of ASDA. With a USB Memory stick packed with films/cartoons for the kids and a Netflix subscription we were able to plug the cheapo tablet into the HDMI port on the telly in our accomodation to keep the kids/us amused and it even worked with the TV in the cabin on the boat on the way over. Only two years ago something similar could be acheived with a portable DVD player and a case full of DVDs but they were a bugger to cart about, the battery didn't last long and, inevitably with kids, the DVDs all got scratched to feck.
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