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joshwest

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 27, 2005
1,157
7
Hey Guys do you think this is possible? I just think if apple can stream audio to an external source i think they could stream front row running of a local computer... I know the Mac Mini is pretty much this, but I Still think apple could throw this together...
 
It's not technically impossible, and we'll probably see it eventually, but remember that audio takes up more than an order of magnitude less bandwidth and/or at least an order of magnitude more processing power to decode.

With audio, 150K/s is uncompressed CD quality and can easily be handled by current wireless technologies (with little processing power required on the other end to convert the data into sound, since it's uncompressed). Even so-so quality video would eat up about 20MB/s totally uncompressed, which current wireless technologies are not capable of supporting. A DV stream would be down to 4MB/s, which would probably be doable, but that's already significantly bumped up the re-compression and decompression requirements at both ends. A more realistic alternative would be to stream something like h.263 or h.264, which would have modest bandwidth requirements, but are going to require a hardware decoder at the receiving end and a fair amount of processor grinding to do the realtime re-compression on the sending end.

None of this isn't something that can't happen, but I'm guessing it's not in the immediate future. Some sort of dedicated media box (basically a repackaged Mini) seems a lot more likely.
 
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