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Originally Posted by popper
yea, thats what we have been saying for a very long time now, the fact is, AVC/H.264 was always going to be better quality per bit rate as thats what it was intended to do from the very beginning and the lossless part of AVC will be used more and more as time and the whole EU get going, the new DVB-H (handheld) will also become the industry standard for lower than SD (CIF 384x288 or Widescreen versions of that?)or perhaps even SD.
when/if all the commercial streaming TV stations dump the old and antiquated MS codec's and start using AVC/H.264 the better for everyone as it just gives far better quality even at CIF sizes scaled to full screen monitors.
if the OP wants to see more use of their 'HD ready' TV then they might look to getting one of the new 'HD ready' PC gfx cards coming to market and stuff all the PC content through that, while not really HD, it will be far easyer to scale the output to HD type forms than anything NTL in the 80% non TW area's can produce for some time yet.
also they might look to getting the FTA (free to air) sat pci/USB DVB-S2 card (but DVB-S will do for know at least until/if they change to the S2 format later in the test)
and then they can also get the BBC/itv/c4/c5 HD trials , although your going to need a really fast dual CPU and coreAVC codec to display it at the required 25fps.
iv not seen anything much on DVB-C2, DVB-T2 or DVB-H2 for that matter, does anything exist yet for them?.
not that its ever likely that NTL will ever let you rent or buy a DVB-C(2) card to put your payed for smart card into and just take the .ts content directly to your monitor or HD ready display and hence get a far better quality picture without the anologue conversion that the SD STB does today.
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VC1 or Windows Media 9 codecs offer similar performance to H.264 or MPEG4 Part10 codecs.
Curently for the UK market, only the BBC and Sky are doing transmissions over satellite with MPEG4 Part 10. Level 4 (HD).
DVB C2, T2 and H2 do not exist. The DVB are not developing them. Certainly DTT and Cable have higher order modulation methods available to them (QAM256 for example for DVB C) as part of their original spec. DVB S2 allows Higher order modulation settings not specified in the DVB S spec.
---------- Post added at 22:27 ---------- Previous post was at 22:15 ----------
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Originally Posted by popper
the NTL feed to the STB is the same spec .ts feed my DVB-T is receaving, but by the time its gone through all the conversions at both ends its a lot werse , its all relative, sure, but it comes down to people wanting a better quality picture.
SNIP
its all pritty clear really, DVB is the standard all the UK should be using, along with wireless networking tech, and AVC content, not kitting up today with the old junk just to milk the last bits of profit out of it, the uk used to be full of inovators, were are they now, the TV drive isnt inovating, its junk milking the last profits out of the UK end users, do you not agree ?.
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The DVB specs only specify the modulation method to use for DVB T, DVB C and DVB S (S2). The Transport Streams are identical in each case. Hence the Transport stream getting to your DTT box is the same as the ntl signal for example for ITV (taken from DTT in the headend). theres no degradation in the conversion process.
However I have to agree, the muppet who chose MPEG2 over MPEG4 for ntl/Telewests HD offering is a clown. Theres two possible reasons,
1) Cost -The kit is cheaper than MPEG4 stuff.
2) A contract with STB supplier (SA) which they couldn't get out of.
---------- Post added at 22:56 ---------- Previous post was at 22:27 ----------
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Originally Posted by jtwn
h.264 handles artifacting better then MPEG-2 video however, you would see that blocking would not be a big / issue at all with HD, given correct bitrates.
The only thing Neil that MPEG-2 is inferior to h.264 is the the amount of bandwidth used, an issue that remains transparent to the customer.
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Each multiplex has a finite amount of bitrate available to it. A statistical Multiplex shares the available bitrate between the channels sharing that Multiplex. Hence given an MPEG2 HD multiplex where each channel needs around 16 or so Mb/s and cable has approx 38Mb/s available, that approx 2 programs per transport stream.
An MPEG4 HD channel is more along the lines of 10Mb/s, hence allowing 3 or so channels per multiplex.
As statistical multiplexing relies upon differences between the component channels, the more channels the better. Hence MPEG4 is the far more attractive method (by example a third in this case).