[opendtv] Re: Trial FOTA HDTV in France
- From: Olivier Houot <olho_avatar_i@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2006 02:42:17 -0400
> "A la location, les r=E9cepteurs TNT HD sont ceux des operateurs payants =
> TNT et ADSL compatibles HD (terminal inclus dans l'offre d'abonnement)."
>
> If Olivier is out there, please clarify?
>
> Bert
Hi Bert,
There are apparently 2 choices :
- either you're already renting a compatible terminal as part of your preferred
pay TV operator
subscription, and can use it to receive those brodcasts without any additional
expense
- or you can buy a decoder from FNAC, for example (a well known store chain in
France) A 250
euros price tag has been mentionned, and get the signal without subscription
There is also the option of using a PC card with software to do the MPEG4
decoding
I've been following this topic (in french, sorry) for some days (it started
around May 28 th) :
http://www.homecinema-fr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=29822446
Sorry for not reporting on it, but there seems to be no clear trend. It seems
largely experimental
at the moment, definitely not Aunt Emily stuff, but rather geek zone.
Emission power seems low. Some SNR figures (given by the boxes themselves)
mentionned are 15.
something (unusable reception), 17, or 18 to 19. People close to the Eiffel
tower seem to get good
results, but not always. In Lyon, i believe, some people manage it some 40 km
away. In Paris it
would be more like 10 km, though for some it reaches further.
Some say the image and sound are magnificent; some say they see macroblocking,
especially when there
is significant motion, other say they see a problem every one or two minutes,
but in between the
picture is perfectly decoded...
One person seems to have witnessed a switch from 60 hz to 50, with a better
result (more fluid) in
the second case, probably related to videoprojector preferences.
Sounds seems to have disappeared for some time and some people.
There are at least four or five different hardware/ software approaches to
reception tested (not
counting the displays to which the receiver are conencted). This,coupled with
the variety of
reception conditions, low power, bugs, and small size of the population
involved makes it impossible to average things out for now. "Mixed results" is
certainly
an appropriate way to sum up things.
So it would be unwise to base one's judgment on those early informal reports.
Among the hardware available is the Freebox HD, which is able to receive MPEG4
HD either through
the TNT (DVB-T) or through ADSL. The tennis events in Roland Garros were
retransmited in "HD" over
ADSL.
The transmission takes 1080i@50 as an input and immediately halves the
horizontal resolution to
960, then squeezes the stream down to 5.2 Mbps, including sound in AAC HE at
64 kbps.
Unsurprisingly, the results are inferior to their TNT equivalent, with some
blurring, frequent
freezes and macroblocking, and of course distance is also a limit here, except
it has to be applied
to the length of the telephone line.
The codec is delivered by Ateme (www.ateme.fr). This company says it will soon
be possible to
deliver good HD at 5 Mbps through MPEG4. Well, if you consider 720@24P instead
of 1080@50i for
the input, maybe.
Interesting times, indeed...
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