WHDI Reviews – Wireless HDTV News

Warpia StreamHD Wireless PC to TV Full 1080P

The Warpia StreamHD is a WHDI based wireless HD transmission kit that is designed to work with PC’s. It consists of a base station style receiver and a transmitting dongle that plugs in to the USB port of a laptop or a desktop. The base station connects to the display via an HDMI port. This ensures that the receiver base will be able to connect to anything that accepts HDMI, including HD projectors and HDTV’s.

The receiver base also sports an S/PDIF port for full 5.1 digital surround sound and you can directly connect your home theatre system to it. If you are looking for plain stereo and do not have S/PDIF compatible audio devices, there’s also a 3.5mm stereo jack port. Warpia thus scores well on the audio connectors area where most comparable solutions tend to just leave it up to the HDMI out.

Since the StreamHD Wireless is a PC-based solution, it is as much at home in a boardroom as it is in a living room. The transceiver kit can easily be adopted in an office scenario where computers can easily be connected to HD projectors without the need to run cables through the length of the room.

This kit has a standard 30 feet range with a line-of-sight requirement. That means the transmitter has to be able to ‘see’ the receiver base in order to transmit a proper signal. There cannot be anything blocking the transmitter completely from the receiver, like walls or furniture.

However, once you have a clear line of transmission, the image quality is crisp and true HD. This kit supports full 1080p HD with a native resolution support of 1920×1280 pixels. Customers report an inconsistent experience when it comes to lag. There are reports of some online services having minimal lag and other having some noticeable lag. Skype performance seems to be consistent throughout with a slight drop in call quality but otherwise stable performance.

This kit plugs in to your PC and behaves as a standard external display for your computer. Hence, you can either mirror your desktop or extend it to make more screen space. For most home entertainment purposes, a mirrored set up would do. However, an extended screen would allow the user to work on something else while the extended area was occupied with something else.

This kit is a good option for watching high-resolution images, online videos and local media files on your HDTV or HD projector. However, this kit cannot support Blu-Ray movies played on your computer. Another point to keep in mind is that this kit supports only Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. There is no proper Mac OS support as of yet but some of Warpia’s other kits have beta versions of Mac drivers.

The StreamHD has received a fairly good line of customer reviews on Amazon and other places. Most professional reviewers have also rated it well. The only caveats are the minor lags in specific applications and the line of sight requirement.