Patent Application
20060282780
The present invention relates to networking display monitors, and in particular, to connecting digital monitors to networks.
A network generally includes a communication link and various devices with communication capability connected to the communication link. The devices include computers, peripheral devices, routers, storage devices, consumer electronics and appliances with processors and communication interfaces. An example of a network is a home network for a household in which various devices are interconnected. A usual household can contain several devices including personal computers and home devices such as consumer electronics and appliances that are typically found in the home. As such the term “device” generally includes logical devices or other units having functionality and an ability to exchange data, and can include not only all home devices but also general purpose computers.
Home devices include such electronic devices as security systems, theater equipment, consumer electronics such as VCRs, DVD players, stereo equipment, Television Sets and the like. Further, some home devices can include support for networking using e.g. Ethernet, 1394 standard, etc. and communication protocols such as HTTP and HTML standards for inter-device communication and operation.
In many instances, it is highly desirable to include a display device in the network which provides a display function for use by a variety of network devices to display information and possibly interact with a user. Such a network function has conventionally been reserved for digital televisions (DTVs) as networked displays for displaying information (
In one example home network (
The present invention substantially addresses the disadvantages of the conventional approaches. In one embodiment, the present invention enables a digital monitor to be fully network connected, without including unnecessary components therein, similar to the way fully functional Digital Televisions (DTVs) are connected to a network.
An example network according to the present invention includes a source device, a display monitor connected to the source device via a communication link, wherein the source device provides signals to the display device, the display monitor including a display device and a controller that provides a function in the display monitor that enables the display device to properly display information represented by the signals from the source device. In one example, the controller comprises a compressed video decoder, and the display monitor does not include a tuner function.
Other embodiments, features and advantages of the present invention will be apparent from the following specification taken in conjunction with the following drawings.
In one embodiment, the present invention enables a digital monitor to be fully network connected, without including unnecessary components therein, similar to the way fully functional Digital Televisions (DTVs) are connected to a network (DTV network connections are described in CEA 2027 specification, incorporated herein by reference).
The network 100 may further include a decoder 135 that decodes signals from a source device 120 for a sink device 130. The devices can implement a client-server protocol, using e.g. HTTP protocol and XHTML (Extended HTML) for communication therebetween. For example, an HDTV 130 can include a Web browser and a DSS 120 can include a Web server. In one example, the sink and source devices can communicate via the TCP/IP network protocol in a 1394 network.
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A display monitor according to the present invention, provides a new class of device according to the present invention. Conventional versions of display devices cannot be networked, and as noted, the network display function has conventionally been reserved for DTVs. A display monitor according to the present invention allows addition of a networked display monitor to a home network without requiring any unnecessary tuner functions.
Compared to conventional display devices, a networked display monitor 125 according to the present invention provides a different type of video input, comprising a compressed video (e.g., MPEG2) input via a network connection 235. By contrast, a conventional display device includes a fully decoded video input(s) for digital video, most usually DVI, or an analog high speed digital input such YPbPr.
The implications of such conventional configurations is that a conventional display monitor must accept fully uncompressed video, which for higher definition resolutions, requires bitrates or equivalent bandwidths in the order of 1 Gigabit per second. However, the bitrate of compressed video, used for a display monitor according to the present invention, is much less, usually at a rate of 20 Megabits per second. Further, both the compressed MPEG2 system level transport and the fully decoded DVI/HDMI signals have other requirements for uniformity of delivery rate so as to not overflow or underflow buffers.
The advantage in using a compressed video transport input in the display monitor 125 is that it is much easier to e.g. deliver a 20 Megabit per second stream wirelessly to a Plasma or LCD display monitor, than to deliver a 1 Gigabit per second uncompressed video stream. This speed difference advantage results in lower cost of a wireless channel, making acquisition and maintenance of a display monitor 125 according to the present invention more economical than conventionally possible.
The network display monitor 125 according to the present invention has fewer components than the conventional networked DTV 12 (
While this invention is susceptible of embodiments in many different forms, there are shown in the drawings and will herein be described in detail, preferred embodiments of the invention with the understanding that the present disclosure is to be considered as an exemplification of the principles of the invention and is not intended to limit the broad aspects of the invention to the embodiments illustrated. The aforementioned example architectures above according to the present invention, can be implemented in many ways, such as program instructions for execution by a processor, as logic circuits, as ASIC, as firmware, etc., as is known to those skilled in the art. Therefore, the present invention is not limited to the example embodiments described herein.
The present invention has been described in considerable detail with reference to certain preferred versions thereof; however, other versions are possible. Therefore, the spirit and scope of the appended claims should not be limited to the description of the preferred versions contained herein.
