At 3:16 PM -0700 8/31/05, Ron Economos wrote: >Your statement doesn't make sense. Almost everything that's different in >MPEG-2 from MPEG-1 is for interlace. If all video was progressive, >we'd still be using MPEG-1. > At the tool level there is some merit to what you say. But MPEG-2 brought many new things to the table, some of which have never been commercialized. I believe you will find that the interframe prediction tools are more refined in MPEG-2 than with MPEG-1. And MPEG-1 is very limited in terms of the rasters that it supports, although this is just a "paper" limitation. MPEG-2 also includes the systems work that is now used to transport MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 content. I would suggest a much different outcome if all video were progressive. Initially, it would have been possible to improve the inter-frame prediction tools as more Mips (wasted on coding interlace) would have been available to improve the prediction routines. And I suspect that the innovations in AVC would have been standardized much sooner as well, if interlace were not a concern. Software codecs tend to be updated more frequently than the algorithms that get mass produced in silicon. Reading between the lines of my previous post, it should be obvious that the companies that co-opted MPEG-2 have little interest in continuous innovation - they wanted, but did not get a standard that would last for decades. In this case history is NOT repeating itself. Regards Craig ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.