Home theatre and the IP Revolution?
So recently I was setting up an home theatre system. TV, DVD Player, Sky, PS/2, etc. and an AMP/Reciver. After dealing with S/Video, Component, Composite, RF, Scart, HDMI, DVI, and VGA as well as power and speaker cables, I came to the conclusion that convergance couldn’t happen fast enough.
Imagine having all your components plug in via ethernet. They could be anywhere in the house, audio video could be streamed over IP. Devices could be discovered via mDNS. No need for limited numbers of inputs, want 6 DVD players? Sure, no problem. Want 4 SKY decoders? No issue.
Your reciever would have one ethernet uplink, and terminals for your speakers, maybe preamp outputs. It would decode whatever codecs are the current fads (much as it does now). Assuming enough bandwidth it may even use 802.11 wireless reducing the need for even more cables. Other components (DVD, TV, Sky etc) would all also take power and ethernet as their ownly source.
You could converge your home theatre with your phone (video conferencing? why not!), when your phone rings your DVD (or DVR) pauses the current output, and brings up a nice overlay with the callerID.
Your remote control could be 802.11, which while it might chew through batteries could easily detect all your components and provide a consistant interface to them anywhere in the house.
If people really care about DRM (personally I think it hurts everyone more than it helps, but I could be wrong…), then all of this can be easily authenticated/encrypted by IPsec and X.500 certificate CA’s.
HDMI is close. It provides an integrated point-to-point audio/video connector which sends uncompressed video and encoded audio. It has no theoretical maximum cable length although it has a pracatical limitation of about 15m. compared to 100m for Ethernet. You can get HDMI repeaters, you can get ethernet switches. Ethernet lets you address multiple devices on the same subnet allowing you to have multiple sources (eg DVD/CD/sky/etc) and sinks (TV’s/recievers/etc) on the same network. HDMI has i2C to do autodetection of devices (eg for EDID), and supports AV Link for remote control features for multirooming etc. IP has a wide variety of protocols that could be used for this. Ethernet is well established and things such as ethernet switches/cables/etc are all mature products.
So, I wish everything spoke Ethernet, it would rock. I guess I’ll just have to wait until more than just DVD players have HDMI to get close.