Zotac delivers HD and gaming over IP

Cebit 09: New remote device from Zotac will be your home entertainment hub.

It is called the Remote PC concept, and right now, it is just that, a concept, far from final. It is a full hardware solution that lets you essentially have remote mouse, keyboard and video over a standard network. Unlike software implementations, it won't suck CPU power, doesn't require a PC on the other side, and will do high-def video with little lag, and you can game on it.

The hardware consists of two parts, a PCIe 1x card and a little white box on the far side. The PCIe card only uses the PC for power, it pulls no data from the bus, so they could make it an external box with ease. It has a video in and out port so you can do pass-through, no rewiring necessary, a gigabit network port, audio in, keyboard and mouse inputs. Think of a KVM switch on a card and you will not be far off.

As you can see, the little white box is a little simpler: USB for the keyboard and mouse, video out, GigE and sound. You plug the little white box in, and it pulls an IP address via DHCP, or you can hard set it. Once paired with the card, your uber-gaming rig works on your big screen TV without having to put that loud box beside the TV.

If you are thinking you can accomplish the same thing with VNC, you either haven't looked at the bandwidth that takes, or are totally blind to lag. The Zotac solution does lossless compression on the video and will get a 1680 x 1050 x 32 image at 60 fps down to a 56Mbps stream. The hardware is limited to 250Mbps, so 1080p is quite possible.

While the hardware currently will pass DDC info, it won't do HDCP, so DRM bites another good product. If you pirate a movie, no problem, but if you buy them and keep everything legal, it won't work. That said, this is a prototype based on a corporate solution not meant for movies. Zotac thinks that adding HDCP support is a must before the product goes on sale, and we both agree that it won't be that hard to do, especially with the DSP power available.

Should you not have the full 250Mbps available, there are several options to degrade quality while keeping frame rate. You can set the bandwidth used to whatever you want, and it will deliver the best quality it can at that rate. 30fps has noticeable pixelation but the frame rates keep up. One nice touch is that the data isn't lost on the far side, if you pause a video, in a few frames time, it will build the image back up to full rez. If you think about this, it will work really well for productivity apps, not as well for gaming and video. The bandwidth limitations and handling are fairly graceful, much more so than others we have seen.

Setting it up is also pretty elegant, if you have a DHCP server, it is mostly plug and go. If not, and you can type in an address, or plug in an ethernet cable (remember kiddies, GigE has auto-crossover) and you are basically done. 802.11n should be more than enough to make this solution fly, but for the full experience, you want GigE. That said, 8-port GigE switches are cheap now, and if you already have a Cisco 2960G under your desk, all the better.

The hardware itself is made by a company called Teradici, and you can buy it now for the enterprise space under the PCoIP brand. That said, it has enterprise pricing, so don't expect it to be cheap or very user friendly. The heart of the system is an unspecified SoC coupled to Rambus XDR memory, their own purpose-designed hardware. It was made to do what it does, and from the looks of it, Teradici did right.

As we said earlier, this is a prototype, no price is set, features will definitely be added or removed, and the looks will undoubtedly change before launch. Right now, Zotac is gauging interest in the whole idea, so if you think you would buy one, write the company and tell them about it.