Quote:
Originally Posted by BenMcr
As far as I was aware there is no difference in quality between a properly encoded MPEG2 program and an MPEG4 program
The only difference is size
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Not true at all, mpeg2 gives you blocks in scenes with lots of objects on the screen like footballers, scenes with lots of animals etc. You should read up about mpeg4. The size could obviously be reduced yes, but the quality could also be improved, BBCHD didn't look great at 17.8mbps MPEG2, now virgin have reduced it to 16.5mbps MPEG2 and its really looking poor now, it needs to be around 20mbps but with mpeg4 this could be reduced alot and still give us higher quality than we currently have.
You could also increase the quality and reduce the size of the SD channels which are blocky as HELL, you could also give us 720x576i for each channel with the bandwidth saved instead of giving us crappy 544x576i for some channels.
As far as i'm aware virgin have given customers boxes with MPEG2+MPEG4 support for the past few years, there can't be that many that would require a new mpeg4 supporting box, this cost of upgrading boxes would be ofset by the reduced bandwidth costs and viewers would have a much better picture.