Novel architecture for using HDTV as the home terminal of a remote computer server

Recently established high definition television (HDTV) standard is expected to replace the conventional analog television standards such as NTSC, PAL and SECAM in the next few years. However the high cost of HDTV is proving to be a major factor impeding its popularity. Integrating HDTV with other home appliances is likely to increase its usefulness and popularity. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme to use HDTV as a computer monitor in addition to its entertainment role. In the proposed scheme, we assume that the main computer is situated in a remote location. The computer raster in the remote server is compressed using an MPEG-2 encoder and transmitted to the home. The built in MPEG-2 decoder in HDTV decompresses the bit stream, and displays the raster. The HDTV will be fitted with a mouse and keyboard, through which the interaction with the remote computer server can be performed. The HDTV can thus be used as a high-resolution computer terminal. The experimental results show that the performance of HDTV as a remote terminal is very good, with marginal degradation in text quality due to compression noise.