Tom McMahon wrote: > Another thing that came out at CES 2005 was the > fact that the forced, non-market-driven, premature > US jump to ATSC HD has effectively locked in US > DTV terrestrial MPEG-2 for the rest of our natural > lives. > ... > Europe's delay on terrestrial HD means they can > adopt more enlightened compression technologies > for their HD services, thereby enabling a great deal > of latitude on quality and channel capacity and > business operations management. They are going to > use H.264/AVC. Sorry, Tom, but this is one of those glass half full glass half empty situations, and you have ignored the other half. Europe's decision to delay HD introduction means that they will "forever" be saddled with having to transmit simultaneous MPEG-2 SD streams, to keep the SD-only sets from going black. So in both Europe and Australia, HD will come at the expense of enforced simulcasts. Since AVC is at most twice as effective as MPEG-2, and in some cases only 50 percent better, enforced parallel program streams, one SD MPEG-2, the other HD AVC, won't save much, and might actually require more bandwidth than having a single HD stream compatible with all receivers. Simple arithmetic: MPEG-2 HD stream compatible with all sets requires 10 to 19 Mb/s, the lower figure being non-sports. MPEG-2 SD + AVC HD requires about 5 + 6 Mb/s to 5 + 12 Mb/s, which means about 11 to 17 Mb/s total. Is there some compelling argument to go to separate streams? > While the ATSC might someday offer a new standard > for mobile (EVSB) services using an advanced video > codec(s), it is unlikely that can do anything for > the legacy, mainstream HD part of the ATSC standard > in this country. The installed base of ATSC HD > receivers cannot change, and, short of terrestrial > simulcasting HD using an advanced video codec > (which won't make a whit of business sense), there's > no way out of that MPEG-2 box. Broadcasters *can* take the European approach in the US, just as easily as they can in Europe. Use MPEG-2 just for an SD transmissions, use AVC or VC-1 for HD parallel streams. ATSC can easily accommodate this. The only question is whether it buys you anything. US HD users *can* be forced to buy STBs which support AVC or VC-1, to keep HD programming on their HD sets. This would, at worst, p*ss off a lot of HD owners. And with good reason. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.