HDMI, thy end is near: Qualcomm's Wilocity gobble will let mobes, tabs beam 4K vid to TVs Qualcomm has snapped up WiGig pioneer Wilocity so it combine traditional Wi-Fi and super-fast 802.11ad on a single chunk of Snapdragon silicon for mobile gadgets. "WiGig will play an important role in Qualcomm's strategy to address consumers' increasingly sophisticated smartphone, tablet and computing requirements," said Amir …
Anything from Qualcomm comes with strings; lots of strings. There is a reason why the majority of industry leading companies don't use Qualcomm IP. Qualcomm does well with SoC's but the industry has no need for Qualcomm in other aspects from their past behavior. 4G Qualcomm wasn't looked at, 5G is the same way. Qualcomm looks to lock the customers in and then make sure they don't have a way out but to stay on the path Qualcomm deems as best. See how well Qualcomm did with 3G; Verizon and Sprint had the lowest speeds and Qualcomm never did offer a good 4G that would be considered a standard. They also never allowed voice and concurrently on 3G in fact they never allowed voice on 3G at all, that was handled by 1xRTT. Verizon had no choice but to go with LTE as Qualcomm was a dead-end.
A bit OT so apologies...
I run an external monitor from a laptop connected through the HDMI port and I get regular "black screens" as I call them where the monitor goes completely blank for a second or two then the image returns. I can go hours without it happening then it might happen three or four times in the space of a few minutes. It's very annoying particularly when watching video.
This doesn't happen when the same monitor is connected through VGA but I'm limited on resolution then of course.
It's not a power-thing i.e. the monitor isn't going to standby and back or some such.
A quick Google suggests this isn't that uncommon but people usually get told it's a dodgy driver or card etc but the problem never seems to get resolved.
I'm of a mind that it might be the DRM related hand-shaking between the monitor and lappy (i.e this fails for some reason and the signal is cut) but I doubt there's a fix for that.
Also if the laptop goes to sleep it takes ages for the monitor to respond after it wakes up again, not so on VGA again.
Any experts in Register land that might have a solution or at least a handle on what the issue is?
Both the lappy and monitor are Acer btw (cue the never buy acer again.....talk)
@Pete 47
Yes, drivers are a common cause of all manner of issues and this sounds similar. I presume you've tried updating the GPU drivers but have you tried updating the display firmware?
Another possibility is simply a bad or poor-quality HDMI cable. If you have a shorter one then give that a try. The reason being that HDMI is super-dependent on timing and cheaper cables can be fine for short runs but develop issues the longer they are.
If you've got another HDMI cable then try that first because it's quick. Otherwise, the firmware is the better first step as it's free!
@Pete 47 - HDMI connectors are crap, Put your face real close to the monitor and see if you can see a very fine white snow moving and sprinkled around the image. If you can you have connector issues; the same issue will also cause lipsync errors if you have a AV amp with HDMI inputs. Try some bluetac or chewing gum to hold them in until the snow goes away. You'll also find it depends on the content, never used to get issues playing blurays back but had real problems playing DVDs; that turned out to be the following: bluray->1080p24, DVD upscaled->1080p50; DVD playback was running with a much higher pixel clock and made the connector issues much more of a problem!
I had black screens when playing PS3 over HDMI cable, and the whole reason I use HDMI is to get the full 1080p resolution. Playing Gran Turismo 5 and getting black screens exactly when you must brake to make a turn is, to put it lightly... aggravating.
Since I am using a bog-standard Playstation 3, no drivers issue, since it isn't even a PC. The DRM is in full swing, if any. Remember it has a fully locked Blu-Ray player, so the DRM is there.
The whole problem went away when I got another cable.
Yep, the dodgy cable caused intermittent 'lost signal' blackout. Occasionally it would black out long enough for the TV to show exactly that message. Not just that, the new cable relayed other bits of information (it's got ethernet in it too...) , and would turn the TV on by itself upon turning on the PS3, what scared the bloody hell outta me at first. Likewise, turning it off would signal the TV to change to tuner or other source.
So now, my PS3 is my yard-stick to measure quality in HDMI cables. It runs at 1080p, won't downscale to 720p unless it is told to do so, and it will work on hot-plug situations. If it runs, the cable is OK.
Yes, HDMI takes longer to wake the monitor, I found it to be standard upon testing at least seven cables of different brands so far. I didn't buy those stupid 'monster' cables that cost £50 though. I guess the 'hotplug handshake' has something to do with it.
Standing back and looking at this:
1> Use more electricity to generate/receive RF
2> To transfer data at a maximum of 7Gbit/sec
3> Over a maximum range of 10 meters.
4> I'm sure that the interference will be dire, "No dear, don't do the vacuuming now, you know how the TV goes all freaky when you do"
Instead of using one cable and less electricity ? Using more electricity is fine, but when you scale this by 100 million to 10 billion TV's every watt/hour wasted makes a difference. It is not like the stupid encryption in HDCP is not wasting enough already.
Still if movies are transferred across this you can bet your last dollar that the security will be better than military spec, but this probably is not very good these days anyhow.
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
“O, brave new world that has such people in't!”
“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”
“Thou shalt be free as mountain winds:
but then exactly do all points of my command.”
“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
“Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.”
“Good wombs have borne bad sons."
“Awake, dear heart, awake. Thou hast slept well. Awake.”
“...and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.”
― William Shakespeare, The TEMPEST
The question that I don't see an answer to is: why?
Why do we need to move data between devices faster than the devices can handle it?
I can't see it being used in the data centre because of lack of sufficient individual channels and I have yet to find a home use that requires that speed of data transfer/
At the moment this is very much a solution looking for a problem to attach itself to.
I want a desk with wireless power built in meaning I only need one power cable plugged in to the table and this will power both my monitors, laptop, phone etc and with this wireless display there will be no need to have extra cables for each screen. Just pick what monitor / TV you want to send the output of your phone / laptop to and it receives it. Couple this with wireless keyboards, mice, wifi etc you have a very uncluttered flexible and mobile environment. No more messing around plugging things in and out sounds great.
I'm tired of dodgy cables that can't even show a PS3 home screen with half-second blackouts every 30 secs. Anything that won't even use cables should be great, provided it works at all. I went through a hand full of cables before finding one that works. I won't pay £50 on the original cable, or 'monster' cables.
4k should be worse. Why don't we use ethernet CAT6 cables at once, and be done with it? It is shown to work in Gbps range (er, 200Mbps will do too), why can't it be used to broadcast raw 4k video? It could even detect wrong plugging, stating "this monitor is connected incorrectly to a router, review your connection" sorta message. Or just including the DRM-out warning that will prevent you to play encrypted stuff, who cares.
TL; DR why did we have to put up with another cable standard, when we could use CAT6 cables and RJ45 connectors? HDMI is a complete sham.
Watching a video at a distance where, without turning my head I can see the whole screen, the good old trusty 55" Full-HD TV is as good as one can get, You cannot make out the pixels and that is equivalent to the retina display of Apple's products. If my 55" is a 4K display, and I still view it at the same distance as before, would it make any difference? If I have an iPad, which has a retina display that displays brilliantly a foot from my face, I should buy the newest 4K TV so that I can transmit via WiGig to it a few feet away, and watch it on the TV at a distance that still cover the same angle of view visually? And possibly get warmed up by the intense radiation spewing non-stop from mobile device, just so that I could disconnect the HDMI cable and be smug about it? In today's context, nobody but nobody is so ignorant as to do up a home without putting in the basic wiring - cat 5/6 utp from central point to all rooms/levels with provisions for bridges, hubs and access points; fiber optic cable across areas prone to electromagnetic interference, etc. Then at least those wired points will not suffer any degradation in speed when compared to wireless relays.
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