Quote:
Originally Posted by spiderplant
The channels are bundled together into fixed-bandwidth multiplexes. The set of channels in each multiplex is carefully calculated to fit into the bandwidth available If the 5.1 streams were simply added to the channels, the bandwidth of the multiplex would be exceeded, and picture quality would suffer. So instead some channels would have to be moved to other multiplexes. This needs to be configured and tested in each of the 54 headends. A lot of work.
No-one has said it can't be done. It may be in the future, but at the moment things like adding new channels, and TiVo, are higher priority.
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Thanks again for the more detailed explanation.
I don't think I'll hold my breath for 5.1 on SD versions then
For me, the picture quality on the SD version is very good and 5.1 sound brings more of an overall 'experience' improvment than an HD picture. That's not to say the HD picture is not a good improvment, it is. However, if the SD had 5.1, I would think twice about paying the extra £7 a month for HD.
My main concern with HD though is the way it eats up hard disc space; at 8 hours per movie, you're soon runing out of space. For that reason, assuming the TIVO has a bigger hard drive, then putting effort towards that does make good sense.