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Originally Posted by popper
well not exactly new news or even good news, but it seems the current postal advertising "Look Into The Future,its 24mm across and it's called cable" the one with a hole drilled through it(more cost), states that it is the TVdrive(with old tech mpeg2 instead of AVC) that "It Should Be Available To Everyone By Early 2007".
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Whether you get any advantage with MPEG 4 (whichever type) depends on the codec used by channel broadcasting. Sky (for instance) buy mostly American TV. A lot of their Hi Def shows are (AFAIK) encoded for the American market. Therefore, the source material Sky transmit from may well be MPEG 2 encoded. They would then have to re-encode this as MPEG 4. As both MPEG 2 and MPEG 4 AVC are lossy codecs, you will lose quality each time you re-encode. If Sky do this, then their quality is actually LOWER than MPEG 2. Of course, if NTL then take the MPEG 4 AVC encoded Sky Feed and re-encode it as MPEG 2, you will lose quality again.
The main advantage of MPEG 4 (all forms) over MPEG 2 is that it can encode higher quality video using a lower bitrate. Therefore, there is room for more channels. However, Cable has a higher bandwidth than Satellite, so is not so much of an advantage on Cable.
Having said all that, I would still prefer MPEG 4 as it gives NTL more room for expansion.
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in other news, it seems Virgin Mobile (aka NTL:tw) are going to use another off the wall standard (for todays and future markets) handheld mobile video format, instead of the growing DVB-H (or its future incarnation DVB-H2) they are going with the failing 'DAB digital radio system'.
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As hi definition footage is NOT practical on mobile phones (at least not for the forseeable future), discussion of mobile phones is off topic in a thread about HD TV.
We have rules about thread topics for a reason, please respect them.