Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Vista Gets Support for IEEE 1394b (AKA FireWire 800).

I thought this was interesting, Microsoft announced Windows Vista support for the IEEE 1394b (AKA FireWire 800) standard. If you do any digital video editing then you're probably familiar with the IEEE1394 connection.

If you don't know what the IEEE1394, then let me briefly explain. This is a popular connection used by several digital video cameras, to transfer video from the camera to the computer. The use of this port is not limited to digital video cameras, but those are the devices that primarily use it. Just to be fair, I need to note some hard drives support this connection.

The older standard IEEE1394 (AKA FireWire or FireWire 400) was able to support data transfers rates as fast as 400Mbps. The newer IEEE1384b is designed to support data transfer rates as fast as 800Mbps. In comparison, USB v1.0 supports a data transfer rate up 12Mbps, while USB v2.0 supports data transfer rate as fast as 480Mbps.

The 1394 Trade Association has estimated that by the end of 2006, there will be more than five million 1394b equipped Windows and Macintosh computers. For more information read the following press release.

No comments: