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What went wrong with wireless USB

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Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#181

Post by redeeman »

bombela wrote: post #139
marcosdumay wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the "headphone" versus "headset" mode dichotomy that is inherent to Bluetooth, all those other issues are due to stupid product decisions that most OSes do to themselves independently on the same way. If you use Linux + KDE, you can still use any microphone or headphone, many at the same time, or in whatever mode you want.

Linux + KDE user here. It used to work on kde/plasma 5 at some point. And after a minor version update it stopped working. Now the mic of my headset doesn't work because KDE insists that only the high quality sound output without mic is available. The mic + low quality output is gone from the settings. Lucky for me this update also brought proper handling of the stereo positioned noise cancelling microphones on my th…

if you use pipewire it works fine both in plasma 5 and 6.

but the audio quality in the sound + mic profile is very poor, the codec is only meant for speech

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#182

Post by bombela »

redeeman wrote: post #181
bombela wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux + KDE user here. It used to work on kde/plasma 5 at some point. And after a minor version update it stopped working. Now the mic of my headset doesn't work because KDE insists that only the high quality sound output without mic is available. The mic + low quality output is gone from the settings. Lucky for me this update also brought proper handling of the stereo positioned noise cancelling microphones on my th…

if you use pipewire it works fine both in plasma 5 and 6. but the audio quality in the sound + mic profile is very poor, the codec is only meant for speech

I am using pipe wire. The option to select the handset mode is gone! I can only select the various output codecs with my increasing quality. But not the mic & output mode. It's gone from the list...

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#183

Post by adrr »

nurettin wrote: post #15
variaga wrote: post #10

I worked on the design of wireless USB chips around 2008 - 2010. They worked - you really could get USB 2.0 full rate connections wirelessly and we had some neat demos. I would say the major problem it had with adoption was that wired USB also provided power . (A lot more people use usb to charge their phone than to sync their phone.) So great - wireless connectivity... but you still have to plug the device into a ca…

I don't see why Bluetooth took off and wusb didn't. It must have something to do with marketing.

Bluetooth took off because it was easiest path to do wireless headsets when handsfree driving laws passed.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#184

Post by ndriscoll »

giantrobot wrote: post #173
ndriscoll wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your player scans your library and indexes/sorts it however you'd like. I think this is how basically every player with a library function works? Like jellyfin loads my library in the same structure I've had it for 20 years, and it gives me various ways to view by name, artist, release date, rating, etc. and builds search indexes. I just point it to the roots of my libraries. I said it needs a place to write playlist…

> Your player scans your library and indexes/sorts it however you'd like. Which means the concepts of files and folders becomes immaterial. If a music player is only interfacing with a database of music metadata it doesn't matter how the bytes on disk are organized. There's a reason there's been 30+ years of file systems trying to tack on database functionality (BeFS, WinFS, etc) or over the top metadata indexing (Sp…

The music player isn't the only thing interfacing with those files. Backups do. Network file shares do. Pendrives, dedicated music players, and children's toys that can load music do. The player changes over the years (winamp, VLC, amarok, clementine, jellyfin, etc.). Sometimes "apps" go wonky and the only way to fix them is to "clear user data", which is opaque, and you'd rather control that/be more selective.

I don't really care how the player stores its metadata (the secondary indexes it makes after the scan), but I don't want it mucking with the original data, which I've had and will continue to have far longer than the player. Files in a known format (e.g. .flac) offer a standard, common interface for storing that data that's easy to organize and exchange across computers.

Google drive also shows what a world where people don't use folders looks like: I can never find documents at work without a link even when I have an idea of what I'm trying to search for. Folders at least push the user to do some organization. GDrive happily encourages you to do none.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#186

Post by phire »

seltzered_ wrote: post #132
phire wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "early days", I was more thinking about the 1999-2005 era, before low-end Nokias even got Bluetooth and the ability to play MP3s. The wireless headset was the killer app that drove bluetooth adoption within cellphones, driving down costs until eventually the lower-end models receiving it too. While sharing files was possible in the 1999-2005 era (especially with PDAs), most phones were lacking enough flash storage…

It may be worth articulating the Bluetooth headset specifically as the one-ear little clip headset executives and IT staff seemed to use to answer calls. Remember companies like jawbone? I vaguely remember a cultural stereotype of bmw drivers driving aggressively and wearing Bluetooth headsets. [edit: this is the clip https://youtu.be/UqfAMvXpSw4?t=25 from top gear of jeremy clarkson wearing a bluetooth headset in su…

Yes... there is a very interesting generational thing going on here.

Bluetooth headsets were very popular among a certain market segment (business people who made a lot of phone calls), but saw very little adoption outside of that. At that time, you often had to buy an expensive business grade phone to get bluetooth functionality.

Then once Bluetooth was common in cheaper phones, we see a completely different market segment (students at schools) rapidly adopting bluetooth for a completely different usecase (file sharing). It's hard to find two market segments that are more isolated from each other.

I don't think file sharing could have ever driven bluetooth to mass adoption on its own, partly because companies always overlook what school students are doing with technology. But mostly because the file sharing usecase required mass deployment of the technology before it could take off.

When I was in high school, I had a palm PDA with IrDA that could do file sharing. But did I ever use it for file sharing? No, because nobody else had devices with IrDA. IrDA never hit the market saturation it needed to be actually useful, so there never was much demand for it (despite the hardware being really cheap, especially compared to a dedicated bluetooth radio)

Bluetooth headsets worked as a killer app in those early days, because a single BMW driver could buy both a high-end phone with bluetooth and a headset from the cellphone store and get the complete experience. It worked without market saturation.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#189

Post by mystified5016 »

Findecanor wrote: post #17
numpad0 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluetooth isn't too bad, Logitech Bolt is based on BLE and it's just fine. Bigger problem is integration into x86/x86_64 platform.

Bluetooth mice use the HID protocol borrowed from USB, except with Bluetooth as carrier. But HID had not been designed for the possibility that packets could get lost: it sends movements as a relative vector since the previous packet. I don't know how Logi Bolt works, but Logitech has claimed that it should work better than BLE when the 2.4 GHz band is congested. Also that it would have better security than BLE.

I mean, they aren't putting raw HID packets on the air, they're encapsulated within another protocol that does handle reliable retransmission.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#190

Post by mystified5016 »

jajko wrote: post #54

That's one thing, but what happened to wireless HDMI? That would save a lot of cable pain in literally all households out there too.

Because once you have more than a handful running at once (say an apartment building) the interference causes them all to fail
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