Short Range Wireless HD Video Transmission

General Electronics
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Hi,
Wondering if someone can provide some suggestions for low range (<5m) HD video transmission, low latency, no audio, one-way.

Due to the nature of the implementation I am completely discarding wi-fi cameras, the solution needs to be an OTS camera module plus some sort of wireless module or IC

I wonder what ICs the FPV modules for drones use.

Thanks,

2

Analog video is great for low latency one-way with reasonably graceful degradation.

Early HD video was analog. It just was not bandwidth efficient.

I’m totally guessing, but I would think something like SDI digital video with some intelligence for gracefully handling loss-of-signal/loss-of-sync using predictable re-synchronization would be how to do real-time digital HD transmission…

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Last I checked, these were all still analog and not at all spectrum efficient. It’s been a few years, but the basic tradeoff between compression and latency still holds.

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Though I see Airbeam are claiming 5 ms latency. This has got to be for the already compressed video stream, so the compression latency would be on top of this.

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Lots of FPV folks moved to DJI after they released a pair of goggles and a unit that goes on the drone (any FPV drone, not a DJI turnkey). If I recall it’s an HD resolution.

I’ve seen a couple of these floating around, more for the movie director to see what the drone camera is seeing, not sure if either of these are useful, good luck!

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Thanks everybody, I did expect this to be simple but it seems that most of the modules that are use for FPV just don’t have any privacy/security, right? I am considering now video streaming over wi-fi just because of that. Thanks

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Consumer FPV drone systems are not designed for privacy. They’re also designed to prioritize mid-range transmission.

Divimath / HDZero has a cool chipset and open reference design for video transmission: HDZERO

However, I don’t know if the parts are actually obtainable in small quantities and I don’t think they have a solution for your security requirements.

You could look into WirelessHD modules, but I don’t know if you’ll get much traction for low quantities.

If your application is short range and your latency requirements aren’t too strict, WiFi is not a bad option. I’ve led WiFi security camera projects in the past with good success. Tweaking H.264/H.265 encoders to produce low latency streams is not difficult, but you will want some minimal rate control feedback loop to ensure signal degradation doesn’t immediately turn into a full dropout.