Guy Kewney

Most people are still saying the same thing they were saying three years ago: 'I'd be perfectly happy with a 233MHz Pentium II. All I do is a little web surfing and the bottleneck is my connection.'

That's not true. Part of the problem is perception. I don't know a web designer who doesn't pour scorn on any site that opens with a megabyte Flash download. It's a waste of their time and lacks taste, they say.

But many users love it. And some of these animations are very CPU hungry. What they struggle to do on a Pentium II 233MHz is run a Flash animation and view video at the same time. What people absolutely can't do on a Pentium II is run a Flash animation and compress video at the same time.

But who wants to compress video anyway? Increasingly, I would predict, all of us. Video compression - in real time - is the only way to distribute full multimedia content around the home. It's a technology that's time has still to come.

As so often seems to be the case, the villain in the piece is wireless. In a true geek household, CAT5 Ethernet at 100Mbps or even gigabit speeds links every room, The true consumer, however, turns pale at the idea of the domestic disharmony that would result from all those cables.

Ten years ago, your true geek had a hi-fi in the sitting room and co-ax cabling under all the floors to take the sound to separate speakers in the kitchen and even the bedroom. But today, it's all digital, so you can have several audio and video channels.

Devices are starting to appear on the market that make it possible to take the output of your stereo and pipe it around the house, so you can walk from room to room listening to the same tune.

Linksys has already started selling a digital wireless media adapter, based on an Intel reference design. It takes audio from a standard co-ax jack, digitises it and broadcasts it wirelessly around the house over Ethernet.

As soon as I get one of these devices, I'll be able to report on whether it solves the big problem all these digitising network devices will have: synchronisation. The problem is the difference between unicast and multicast.

It's easy enough to create a digital media stream with a PC. And streaming this around a local area network (Lan) is relatively simple. But getting the same sounds, at the same time, in two rooms isn't so simple.

Unicast is the process of sending a digital stream to each separate client. Multicast sends a single stream over the internet so that multiple clients pick it up.

If you use unicast on your home Lan, you'll find that the difference between two client stations will usually be as much as two seconds. You will walk from kitchen to lounge and discover that several seconds have been lost for ever, or that you have to listen to them twice.

Multicast could solve this. It uses the same digital stream to all clients. It can cut the synchronisation latency to fractions of a second, but it can't eliminate it and a tiny delay can be very disorienting to the human ear.

Several software gurus are now working on the problem, and it should be fine by the end of this year, if not sooner.

Now, you can argue about the 'usefulness' of this technology. But the fact is that when it becomes possible to have an audio stream simultaneously in every room of the house, there are people who will want it.

And they can have it. But on a Pentium II? Well, just about, if all you want is audio. But if you want to watch cable TV in each room of the house, you'd need a lot of CPU grunt.

Apple is already aware of the market for video editing. It takes serious hardware, but it doesn't have to be in real time. With live TV you want to see the video stream.

You may say that this is Intel's way of selling high-powered chips to consumers. Well, just suppose it works?

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