Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> 480mbps isn't enough for good quality video? It's 3.75x the maximum bitrate of a 4K Blu Ray.

Webcams need to be very near real-time to be useful. That severely limits what kinds of compression you can use on the video stream.



That's absolutely true but I still very much doubt it's so bad that you would exceed 480mbps even on a decent resolution stream. We're not talking multiple orders of magnitude difference. Like... if all else fails just send every frame as a separate image with a fast encoder and you've still got 1.6 megabytes for each.

Steam in-home streaming needs to be realtime too, but is very playable, and most people aren't realistically getting 480mbps out of their wifi.

4k I don't know... 1080p no problem.

Don't most phones have dedicated hardware video encoders on their SoC now anyway?


You could transmit raw rgba pixels at 1920x1080 and 60 fps in less than 500 mbps.


I don't think so... my maths (for RGB, no need for alpha channel) comes out to 2,847mbps. Did you accidentally switch megabits and megabytes?


And don't forget that 480 Mbps is the line rate. Practical throughput to a device will be substantially less, especially if other devices are on the bus.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: