Smart Home Blog

Yesterday the list of features which will be incorporate into upcoming HDMI 1.4 specification, was announced. The major ones are two-way data and two-way audio support. The two-way data transferring will allow to use HDMI cable to send or receive data in the local network with speeds of up to 100 Mbps. This means that the only one device from the A/V stack should be connected via Cat5. The rest will get their IP connectivity over HDMI.

If TV has a built-in tuner the S/PDIF cable should be used to get sound on the audio receiver. With HDMI 1.4 it won’t be needed thanks to supporting of upstream audio. As result only one HDMI cable will be used instead of three.

The rest features are following:

* HD resolutions up to 4096×2160
* 3D up to 1080p definition
* “Real-Time Content Recognition” (adjusting video settings automatically based on connected device)
* Additional color spaces, especially for digital still cameras
* Micro connectors
* Automotive connectors

HDTV becomes a standard de-facto in home entertainment area. Technology of wireless transmitting data is also very popular (who likes those annoying wires!). So, it’s time to develop a comprehensive new industry standard for multi-room audio, video and control connectivity” utilizing the aforementioned Wireless Home Digital Interface technology. Currently a special interest group includes AMIMON (WHDI creator), Motorola, Samsung, Sony and Sharp. New standard will be based on WHDI – Wireless Home Digital Interface, the key ingredient of which is a revolutionary video-modem that operates in the 5GHz unlicensed band to enable robust wireless delivery of uncompressed HD video (including 1080p).

Hope that new standard will make life of producers, installers and consumers easier.

[via Engadget]

Yesterday ZigBee Alliance announced a free public availability of “the ZigBee Home Automation (HA) public application profile that offers manufacturers a standards-based approach to introducing new wireless home automation products globally, eliminating the need for proprietary technology”. ZigBee is gonna to be a good competitor to Z-Wave. Both use “a standards-based technology with world-wide approval”, have reliable and flexible network topology and offer elegant devices.

ZigBee is used in the commercial home automation systems Control4 and Colorado vNet. Spanish on-line shop offers many ZigBee based devices approved for Europe. LinuxMCE currently supports only Z-Wave but people from Malaysia started to request of support ZigBee as well. Because Z-Wave frequency is not allowed there. So, I hope that LinuxMCE will support ZigBee in the nearest future.