News - ZOTAC replicates monster via tiny box of tricks

[HEXUS]

Leave your ultra-high-end system in the bedroom and stream gaming and content in the living room.

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[MSIC]

I can't decide if i find this interesting or not.
With current bandwidths it's almost less useful than a 10 yr old 'TV Sender' box i own that transmits video over short-wave radio to a reciever (so you can watch Sky on bed etc).
However i understand the potential for the future, and given better bandwidths we could be playing crysis on our netbooks.
I one sense, VNC software has been doing aspects of this for many years, although can't do video or anything with frame rates.

This goes on my 'maybe' pile of interesting things

[TheAnimus]

given that for £50 with change you can buy HDMI to Cat5 adaptors, which allow HDCP etc, it will really have to work on Powerline type adapters at minimum of 720p to be much use.

[iggy]

sooooo, this is a hdmi cat5 kvm, without the keyboard and mouse?

[Deylon]

I saw the Dell workstation with PC overIP at CEBIT and if the Zotac solution is using the same technology then all I can say is wow. The device that connects to the monitor or TV is giving the performance of the GPU that is on the PC side. Too bad that it was not show to the public.

This is not anything like VNC, it is truly un-noticeable latency. I saw HD video clips running, standard workstation style applications. You can move the mouse and interact and feel no lag whatsoever. Plus it worked with the standard GPU in the system. Remoted web video in SD and HD also (could only get Vimeo) to work as CEBIT internet in Dell booth in Intel stand didn't allow BBC IPLAYER or other country specific contents. You could not get any content to fail! Dell person said it had a PC over IP chip in the monitor side device and a similar chip in the host system, so fully hardware encode and decode of video. I did see on the Dell system that they had a standard USB keyboard and mouse - the playing around the Dell person let me do did show no special drivers needed, looks like PC over IP does a USB extension that the OS doesn't see. Dell person did mention it can support all USB devices, but I did not have anything to try on it.

From what I saw it had no distance limitation as you could use a standard switch between the host side and monitor device side. So this is not like the CAT5 products extending DVI - as I recall they have some 100 meter distance limation. The Dell person showed that any monitor side device could connect to the host - so it's possible then to access one gaming style PC from maybe multiple locations in the house! The PC over IP can use any existing networking you have. Would be nice if WiFi was supported but I can assume that will make latency a problem.

Now can we get this beyond a trade fair demonstration to an actual product. I could easily keep my gaming system on a monitor in another room but have it connect to by HDTV - the wife does not want a media or gaming PC near the TV ever again.

[zoomee]

in concept it seems great and something I would definately shell out upto £200 for.

To be able to use my gaming rig (located in my office room upstairs) on my TV screen downstairs would be awesome! especially without having to have loads of extra bulky hardware in the living room. BUT - the mere mention of lag would put a gamer off - if I want to strafe right, fire, and duck at the same time it has to be instantaneous otherwise its appeal is lost for any hardened gamer (that this would be aimed at I assume).

There was no mention of being able to connect a keyboard and mouse upto it aswell - I presume thats a given? otherwise it would be quite useless as just a TV sender.

Any hardened gamer would not rely on wifi links to avoid lag, and if Zotac concentrated on the CAT5 side of it that would suit the likes of techno geeks like me down to a tee (having a 1GB network spanning the house )

[Deylon]

The enterprise one I saw had 4 USB ports, so no problem to plug into it a mouse, keyboard, game controllers, or other USB items.