At 4:50 PM -0700 7/27/08, John Willkie wrote:
Oh, yes, I mentioned it earlier this year, and I can talk about it. At the NAB show, what everybody was showing for ATSC mobile and handheld was 1/4 VGA video: 240 x 320. How happy would you be watching that -- with short form video, mostly -- in your home? Would you rush out and buy a new tv set so that you could watch something less than SDTV on a big set.
Much of what people watch today on their TVs at home is not significantly better than 320 x 240, which by coincidence, is roughly the resolution of the VHS tape machines that have been used to video billions of movies in the home.
320 x 240 is actually quite good, IF it is properly downsampled from high quality source and encoded as a progressive scan stream.
By the way, the iPhone display is 480 x 320 and apple now encodes most TV shows and movies at 640 x 320 progressive scan. This stuff scales up to big screens QUITE NICELY!
The major problem with the 320 x 240 stuff we saw in the M/H demos at NAB is that they were created from interlaced TV shows and were bit starved.
I guess it's possible that M/H will come out with different video formats than 240x320, but I don't think there is much of a niche for postage-stamp quality video on large sets.
Tell that to You Tube. Regards Craig ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org
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