h.264? or just plain old MPEG4?

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I realize this is a repost, but it hasn't been answered yet, and I am wondering if anyone has heard anything about the potential CODEC structure of the theoretical MPEG4 upgrade... Thanks...


What I would like to know is whether BEV is going to skip plain MPEG4 and go straight to h.264... That would make the most sense, especially for the consumer. We would be getting more channels that don't have to be transcoded to a lower bitrate, giving us the most channels and the best quality possible. Instead of what happens now... When a sports match of some kind is on, all of our other HD channels have their bandwidth stolen to beef up the sports HD... Which is unfair to those of us who would rather eat razor blades than sit through a game, and pay the same amount of money per month.



.... although I realize it isn't possible, and would be bad for business... it would be ideal if BEV could dump all MPEG2 content and switch over to MPEG4-AVC ( aka h.264 ) completely... SD h.264 requires very little bandwidth which would leave a ton of room for HD content. When I am encoding SD, 1.7 Mbps-vbr is more than enough, and 4 Mbps-vbr is adequate for 720p, and 6 Mbps is adequate for 1080i.... compared to often more than twice ( sometimes 3x ) that for MPEG2...
 
Go buy yourself an MPEG4 HD FTA receiver and see for yourself.
Or check the specs on the chips, maybe that will tell you.

Chances are it will be the same as DN's so you can always inquire at one of the .US satellite forums sites.

There are confirmed reports of Bev MPEG4 testing already, so maybe you'll be able to tell for certain if their scheme is different than DN's, but last I saw, their MPEG4 test was in 480i.
 
Bell's HD replacement will be something existing from DishNet aka MPEG-4 not h.264. It's been an open secret for some time that the units on sale since Jan 2006 to EchoStar customers will be the ones finally made available in Q4 2007 in Canada to Bell customers. Maybe Bell will surprise us; but not likely.

Interesting notion you posit: When a sports match of some kind is on, all of our other HD channels have their bandwidth stolen to beef up the sports HD ... but does Bell actually do that today? And even if they could, would they? Should they? Can you even "steal" bandwidth from one transponder to another? Or can you just make one signal "better" and the other "worse" when, as today, two HD signals use up an entire transponder?

Bell has not announced, leaked or hinted that they intend to abandon MPEG-2 for SD signals, ever. So Nimiq 1 91
 
I think that with a Stat Mux, like a Cherry Picker, you can only steal bandwidth from other PID's in the mux, so how or why they would do that on others muxes is a mystery to me.
It clearly doesn't have any real value.

The best way would be to pair the HD's as 1 high B/W with a low B/W.
Ideally, 1 HD per TP and top up the rest with SD + audio to minimize any slack space in the mux.

If they balanced their HD across both birds, they could do 64 HD's and keep all the SD with probably little noticeable degradation.
Most of the SD is compressed so badly and very unevenly.

Small market stations runs as low as 1.5 to 2.5 Mbps with some of their feature content maybe hitting 3.5 Mbps.

You can see this yourself with a DVB PCI card and TSReader s/w to analyze their stream. This s/w will not 'open' up encrypted channels, so no violations there.
 
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