Optical audio port as network interface?

[hermanator]

Has anyone looked at the possibility of using the optical audio port as a network interface? Is it possible? Would it be practicle?
:confused:

[daurora]

Why not use the Tivonet board. Those opticals are only designed for output anyway.

[Pointfreak!]

>>Has anyone looked at the possibility of using the optical audio port as a network interface? <<

Yes! And then someone should work on using the card slot to charge cell phone battery's. And what about using the Infrared emmiter to perform mind control and/or as a garage door opener?

I cant wait until I can use my CD-Player as a microwave. Those little pizza's will fit perfectly!

:p

[SMART-ASS *OFF*]

Sorry my friend couldnt resist. Apples & Oranges. Just wont work.

[BubbleLamp]

Don't forget recycling the extra heat to warm your snake cage, and the RF out to control your house alarm! Almost as good as the guy who wants to use multi-link PPP with the modem, serial, and IR instead of opening the box. (No disrespect implied.)

[slothman]

Bubblelamp: None taken. I hadn't thought about using the optical audio out. It could be done, but it would approach the same type of costs as the turbonet, sorry to say. I mean with the costs of getting toslink cable and optical audio ports for your computer, and I haven't even gotten to the software side yet. You'd have to write a program that would encapsulate data into ac3 format. Kinda a pain in the rear.

Forgot to add it will be a sending interface only. Which means most likely you will not be able to use tcp/ip. Just pipe over raw data from the tivo.

[hermanator]

:) Well, I guess thats that.. I am just wondering, does anyone know the max data rate for the optical audio port?

[lsmod]

Originally posted by BubbleLamp
Don't forget recycling the extra heat to warm your snake cage,

Hey, one of the (rejected) floorplans when we moved into our new house had the server closet adjacent to a closet I wanted to convert to a vivarium for our iguanas. My plan was to have the exhaust fans from the server closet dump into the vivarium. :D

Almost as good as the guy who wants to use multi-link PPP with the modem, serial, and IR instead of opening the box. (No disrespect implied.)

Well, screw the modem, but using both serial ports for MLPPP isn't a bad idea, actually.

-Z

[xannor]

hermanator, your intent is good, but unfortinalty impractical. Most stereo equipment audio ports are single band one way opticals. This is to make them cheaper and prevent reverse loops and other problems. So a receive port would have to be installed into the system and you would need an SBLive Drive or similar I/O optical interface. Also unless you wanted to hack the interfaces you would have to do sound modulation. You would basically end up with the equivilent of an optical PCI winmodem. On the plus side is that a single band filber channel can hold aprox 2.4gigs of data... that is a lot of bandwidth... You would be better off trying to convince the guys that make the tivonet to do a multiple port version (so you could run to multiple nics on a pc,) and then have the tivo and pc throttle betwen them.

[AlphaWolf]

Nevertheless, what your talking about could be possible with some hardware modifications. Remember the digital optical standard is toslink (TOShiba LINK), origionaly used to transfer data in toshiba laptops. Toslink also happened to be compatible with s/pdif.

I wouldn't count on it though.