Gizmodo
MVIX announced a wireless enclosure for a hard drive that will work as a video server using WiFi 802.11g. Under ideal conditions that might be barely fast enough to wirelessly stream HD across your network, where the company says it can handle MPEG 1, 2 and 4, DivX, XviD and WM9 at resolutions up to 1080i. We're hearing this MVIX unit is on its way to the US market in July or August for an as-yet undetermined price.
Even though the theoretical throughput of wireless G is 54Mb per second, in the real world about the best you can expect is 20 to 25Mb. That's plenty of bandwidth for HD clips compressed with DivX or XviD, but it might be dicey at that 19.2 megabit-per-second bandwidth required for a lot of MPEG-2 video. Still, it's nice to know someone's working on solving this problem of wirelessly serving HD video throughout the house. Of course, this problem will be easier to solve once the MIMO standard is completely worked out.
MVIX Wireless HD Media HDD Enclosure [I4U News]
Comments
There's not a chance in hell that you could get HD to play reliably over 802.11g. Most of the devices like this are based on the Sigma chipset and the current interations have trouble doing HD over 100-base Ethernet without stuttering.
Wouldn't you transfer video to the hard drive wirelessly, and then play the video through a cable? You wouldn't be streaming HD to it, you'd be copying an HD file to the HDD (or managing files) wirelessly, to have it play back directly. HDDDD
It's not even really 'plenty of bandwidth' for the MPEG-4 based standards at top quality HD; even Microsoft claim that 10-12 Mbit/s is needed, and that's only because they're in the HD-DVD group and HD-DVD isn't big enough to store more. Charles is presumably right about copying files to it first but that could be a bit tedious (although a lot better than otherwise if you can start watching it while it's streaming the later bits).
It may have some issues, but the MX-760HD is a pretty feature-rich media player and compares rather favorably with Apple TV.
You can probably debate all of this to your heart's content over at MvixCommunity.com.
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