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Comment by stefan_ | Hacker News Reader

> this can shave a significant amount of latency off controller inputs

How on earth would it do that? WiFi alone is a significant part of the latency here! Not to mention the huge jitter it brings. Screw in your smart cheap-ass 802.11b light bulb and watch your game feel off.

No, they want this stuff to work with Chrome out of the box and so they needed to cut out the middle-man anyway, and people aren't exactly prepared to put an Ethernet cable into it. But let's not pretend WiFi is somehow an improvement over connecting it to a PC that just blasts your input out through Ethernet (where it then traverses all the same boxes that it does "over WiFi" anyways, minus the shared medium that is used to stream 4k to your TV)

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> How on earth would it do that? WiFi alone is a significant part of the latency here!

Today there is input and display lag. You send the input to the box for processing. In streaming you send the input to a box who then relays that to a server. If you can cut out the server you can reduce a bunch of latency. It won't have lower latency than a locally played game but you can make it close enough.

> Not to mention the huge jitter it brings. Screw in your smart cheap-ass 802.11b light bulb and watch your game feel off.

Your knowledge of WiFi seems to be about 8 years out of date. Not only is it really difficult to find 802.11b anything anymore (even stuff buried in a basement; seriously 802.11b devices started coming out in 1999) but this is pretty much a non issue in almost any router made in the past decade. The majority of routers (especially the better ones) use dual or tri bands to better handle interference and backwards compatibility with older standards.

If you have issues with your WiFi I'd suggest upgrading your router. Seriously, they're pretty great nowadays especially if you get a triband almost anything :)

However much latency a wifi network has, making the controlled connect to another local box and that box to relay the signal through the same wifi would definitely by the latency of the wifi + T right? They are shaving off T.

I think where this gets tricky is when the display is plugged in via Ethernet.

But the Chromecast Ultra they're selling with it doesn't support USB or Bluetooth (or Ethernet), which makes it not really an option for that. The controller I believe works through Bluetooth and USB if you're using a device that has those.

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