I would just like to start off by thanking Scott, Sean and all the Satelliteguys Staff Members for giving us so an excellent site to rant, rave, discuss and argue about everything Satellite.
Now I have a quick question about the upgrades that were completed today. From what I understand is that the new harmonic encoders are now in place and active. I also understand that MPEG4 streams are most likely not too far in the future, and this will enable more streams in the current allocated bandwidth. My biggest concern or question is regarding the quality of MPEG4 to MPEG2. From what I understand, MPEG4 looks great at a standard bitrate, but what about high action scenes? My experience with MPEG4 is that any real time encoding of the stream using a constant bitrate can result is excess bandwidth being wasted in low action scenes and insuffucient bandwidth for high actions scenes, causing pixelation. The usualy solution is that you can do multipass/bidirectional encoding of the stream and allocate the data where it is needed. But from what I understand the stream is being converted and distributed on the fly. Typical variable bitrates I use for MPEG4 are usually around ~1200Kb/s, some scenes will be 400 and others 1600, assuming they want no pixelation, they would choose the highest possbile bitrate, am I right or wrong? These bitrates I refer to are usually at a much lower resolution than HD, typically 640x240 or so. I would imagine that HD would be alot higher, maybe even as high as 2500 to 3000Kb/s. Is that bitrate much lower than they currently broadcast HD at? Im not sure how high HDTV is, or if the encoders are pre-emptively scanning ahead and anticipating larger bandwidth allocation and dynamically borrowing it. I'm just hearing some people complain about PQ loss and i know that all DBS providers will be going this route eventually, I just want justification that we wont be sacrificing the thing that we love most about our favorite DBS solution, Voom.
Im not making a statement, but just looking for clarification...
Thanks again,
Brendon
Now I have a quick question about the upgrades that were completed today. From what I understand is that the new harmonic encoders are now in place and active. I also understand that MPEG4 streams are most likely not too far in the future, and this will enable more streams in the current allocated bandwidth. My biggest concern or question is regarding the quality of MPEG4 to MPEG2. From what I understand, MPEG4 looks great at a standard bitrate, but what about high action scenes? My experience with MPEG4 is that any real time encoding of the stream using a constant bitrate can result is excess bandwidth being wasted in low action scenes and insuffucient bandwidth for high actions scenes, causing pixelation. The usualy solution is that you can do multipass/bidirectional encoding of the stream and allocate the data where it is needed. But from what I understand the stream is being converted and distributed on the fly. Typical variable bitrates I use for MPEG4 are usually around ~1200Kb/s, some scenes will be 400 and others 1600, assuming they want no pixelation, they would choose the highest possbile bitrate, am I right or wrong? These bitrates I refer to are usually at a much lower resolution than HD, typically 640x240 or so. I would imagine that HD would be alot higher, maybe even as high as 2500 to 3000Kb/s. Is that bitrate much lower than they currently broadcast HD at? Im not sure how high HDTV is, or if the encoders are pre-emptively scanning ahead and anticipating larger bandwidth allocation and dynamically borrowing it. I'm just hearing some people complain about PQ loss and i know that all DBS providers will be going this route eventually, I just want justification that we wont be sacrificing the thing that we love most about our favorite DBS solution, Voom.
Im not making a statement, but just looking for clarification...
Thanks again,
Brendon
