With all the HTPC variants of the AppleTV, ChromeCast, Roku, Amazon FireTV, Fire TV Stick, Nvidia Shield Android TV (their naming department needs some cleaning up; but that's been obvious ever since they name their discrete graphics cards), Intel is starting to throw it's hat in the ring. They've been building NUCs for a while now, as has Gigabyte (Brix) and Zotac, and tossed in the Intel Compute Stick. Do you leverage Windows? Or do you try to use Android or some Linux variant? Then we have Raspberry Pi for the ultra cheap DIY crowd, but it appears to be a bit too scaled down for 1080p HD home theater (especially the networking 802.11n without 5 GHz band and triple antennaes). With the cusp of 4KHD (here's where it gets messy with specs) is now becoming UHD because its not really 4096 scan lines - it's actually 2106 lines. Even the new AMD Fury cards fall short for home theater usage since it lacks HDMI 2.0. And then there are the decoders needed because Google is fighting the hEVC (h.265) consortium for the 4K standard with its codec VP9. Amazon is going with hEVC as well with the major Smart TV players like Sony and Samsung. So most major companies are betting on hEVC but we have not heard from the cable companies like Comcast, TWC, Charter, or Verizon. Will they roll out UHD channels? Will iTV-UHD steamroll past the old bundled giants and give cord-cutters what they need a'la carte?
So do we want to constantly replace our televisions in order to play UHD content? Why should the decoder be built into the TV? That's what the cable box or HTPC is for. You rent the cable box so when the cable company decides to upgrade the codec you just replace it. You could buy the DVR outright, but why? Most people buy TiVo for that. And as for the HTPC, the idea here is to bring a lower powered solution with enough power to decode the newest codec. And if you are doing it wirelessly, the HTPC needs 802.11ac for the bandwidth (minimum of 25Mbps with 3 antennas having throughput of 1.3GB - see Netgear's Nighthawk 7000 router). So at this point, all the original gadgets I mentioned up front are dead in the UHD waters.
No comments:
Post a Comment