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Do You Think iTV should / will be used for gaming?
- Thread starter speakerwizard
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it would be cool to have tetris type games, maybe breakout etc. But the chances are they'll be using the current front row remote which isn't really suited to button mashing, and it only has a small lithium cell powering it so i doubt it would run for very long 
i could also maybe seeing it be able to play your downloaded ipod games? if not the proper games from your computer, if ipod games catch on that is
No, it's more that iTV isn't a Mac, it's a device, and its purpose isn't to play games, it's to play your digital media files.
I mean, honestly. We already have three gaming consoles this generation, we don't need another gaming device in our living rooms. It'd just be silly.
I mean, honestly. We already have three gaming consoles this generation, we don't need another gaming device in our living rooms. It'd just be silly.
To try to compete with Nintendo/Sony/MS would be insane. Even Sony is currently finding this tricky.
I'd like to see it simply used as a conduit for playing multiplayer games on my Sony LCD in the living room rather than a direct competitor for the PS3/Xbox360/Wii. That'd be perfect imo.
What do you mean by a conduit? It's just a streaming device (possibly with caching) that allows viewing of media remotely over a network. There's no possible way it'll be able to do what you want. The latency would be too high fo a start. Games are interactive, any delay and you've ruined the game.
yes but it streams from your mac / pc, potentially allowing to play them games from the living room, not built in games, we're all pretty sure itv will have draft/pr n wireless so the lag shouldnt really be noticeable i wouldnt have thought
It's not streaming over raw display thoughit's a little computer in its own right (in the same way an iPod is). Files stream to it, they're then decoded and spit out the back. Even 802.11n isn't fast enough to stream a raw, uncompressed HD video signal.
So, no, it won't. It would have to run games locally.
ok, i wont pretend i know but ive read this
"draft 802.11n-compliant networking products offer truly blazing throughput: fast enough to handle streaming high-definition video and multimedia, VoIP, gaming and large-scale file sharing without the aggravation caused by latency problems."
and others in quite a few places. i kinda thought that was half the point in 'n'
"draft 802.11n-compliant networking products offer truly blazing throughput: fast enough to handle streaming high-definition video and multimedia, VoIP, gaming and large-scale file sharing without the aggravation caused by latency problems."
and others in quite a few places. i kinda thought that was half the point in 'n'
AKA the NETWORK APPLICATION of those things. Do you know what the data rate is for a raw digital 1920 x 1080 signal at 60Hz and 24-bit color? 355MB/s. That's megabytes. The typical throughput for 802.11n is 200Mbit/s. That's Megabits, aka about 25 megabytes per second. Not nearly enough. To send a full HD display wirelessly you'd need to encode it to something to compress it in REALTIME (tremendous CPU power required for this) and it'd be lossy.
No, 802.11n is fast enough to move around lots of files and network traffic, but not raw digital display signals. iTV will be receiving encoded files over your network at the data rate of that file and then decoding it in the box and spitting it out the back to your TV. If the iTV plays any games at all, they'll have to be games that live on the iTV itself. Which is why I'm thinking we won't be seeing that.
I seriously doubt this will be a solution for gamers. I mean, look at how gamers whine on these boards if they get less than 60fps on a computer game, even though movies that you see at the theater are filmed at 24fps. I just don't see wireless technologies being able to handle fast action games. Simpler games, sure, but not fast action games.
Well, when they say "gaming" they mean multiplayer gaming over a network. Just like when they say high definition video and all those other services, they're talking about streaming of compressed digital data. Obviously 802.11n will be fast enough for this802.11b is fast enough for multiplayer network gaming for Chrissakes. That's latency dependent more than bandwidth.
And yes, 20mbit/s is JUST fast enough for a single full ATSC MPEG-2 1080i HD transport stream w/ audio at 19Mbit/s. Not that anyone is too likely to be playing these over their home networkit's much more likely they'll be playing MPEG-4 compressed SD video (or HD, which is still much lower bitrate than 19mbit/s). But that's still an encoded, compressed stream that needs to be decoded by a box of one sort or another.
Oh, didn't realise the specs were that limiting. I'd just thought that with the wireless new standard being so quick that any lag wouldn't be an issue.
Would be a shame if the option wasnt there. Wireless keyboard/mouse + Lcd TV + comfy sofa= gaming bliss. Suppose we'll have to wait and see whats technically possible next year.
Fair enough. Gamers generally get sniffy about millisecond differences in response times on lcd displays. Network lag is a whole order of magnitude (at least) difference.