Electronic Giants Agree on Wireless HD Standard

Key to new WHDI technology is a video modem operating in the 5 GHz unlicensed band

A group of leading names in high-definition video has announced support of a new standard for multi-room audio, video and control connectivity utilizing Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) technology. The companies are Sony, Sharp, Hitachi , Samsung and Motorola.

The key to WHDI technology is a video modem that operates in the 5 GHz unlicensed band to enable wireless delivery of uncompressed HD video (including 1080p) through homes and offices. WHDI allows secure, encrypted HD video delivery through multiple rooms and other potential signal obstructions, including people and furniture.

The objective of the consortium is to enhance the current WHDI technology to enable wireless streaming of uncompressed HD video and audio between consumer electronics devices such as LCD and plasma HDTVs, multimedia projectors, A/V receivers, DVD players, personal computers and set-top boxes. The new interoperable standard aims to ensure that devices manufactured by different vendors will simply and directly connect to one another.

WHDI is owned by Amimom, a manufacturer of semiconductor technology for HD video. The company has demonstrated its wireless modem technology, with a 100-foot range and a latency of less than one millisecond, at various trade shows over the past year. Amimom is headquartered in Herzkia , Israel .

Wireless streaming of high-definition video is a tricky engineering problem that many companies have long sought to master. It can be done with the fastest versions of Wi-Fi, a technology already in many homes, but that requires compression with picture quality degradation as a result. There's also a delay in transmission as chips on both ends of the link work to compress and decompress the image.

Competitors with WHDI are UWB, for ultra-wideband, and WirelessHD from SiBEAM Inc. of Sunnyvale , CA . So far, HDTV installers have been wary of wireless technologies due to reliability issues and signal loss.

The WHDI spec is set for finalization at the end of the year, with products to be shown at CES in 2009.

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