[geeks] Whee! Lightning strikes, AGAIN!

[nate at portents.com]

> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 11:39:16AM -0400, nate at portents.com wrote:
>
>> There used to be a lot of buzz that Firewire was going to become *the*
>> home audio/video interconnect, and it would have been brilliant.  64
>> devices supported, isochronous transfers supported, device-to-device
>> direct communication, the option to run TCP/IP over it, etc.
>
> It would NOT have been great.  Firewire has no where near the bandwidth
> needed, not even the new FW 1600 that isn't actually out yet.

It WOULD have been great, if everyone involved would have been ok sending
the compressed MPEG-2 and H.264 unencrypted bitstreams across it.  That's
what I was envisioning.  Seems pretty silly to me that we're doing all the
demuxing and decoding in each device necessitating all these
high-bandwidth interconnects and switches for the decompressed streams.  I
think everything would be better as a network of self-configuring
transports and decoders, but my ideal is far different than the limited
range of stuff we have in this reality.

- Nate