MPEG 4 coming to Dish?

[RBBrittain]

I wonder if installing MPEG4 has anything to do with 8PSK tuning? I had figured the way E* would get more compression was to move SD channels to 8PSK. According to http://ekb.dbstalk.com/101 , the 111, 311, 322 and 522 will do 8PSK in addition to all current HD receivers. (The 5000 died when E* switched all HD channels to 8PSK.)

Note that SBC Dish only supports three receivers: 311, 522, and 811. All of them have 8PSK tuning. All SBC Dish customers are on DHA, and SBC (not E*) owns the receivers; I read the contract. Is there something SBC knows that we don't? Perhaps they only support 8PSK tuners because they don't want to be stuck with dead non-8PSK tuners (especially the 501/508/510) a year from now?

 

[John Kotches]

dispatcher_21 says:

Also, how can DBS providers think of doing WM9?? The pc requirments for watching HD-DVD's using this codec are monster, I have a hard time believing a STB could produce that much horse power.

Start thinking in terms of Application Specific Integrated Circuits rather than a general purpose computer and you'll start to see why it can be done on a $5 (or less) part when talking about vast quantities.

An ASIC is a dedicated processor, and is magnitudes more efficient than a computer which has a tremendous amount of overhead just to get to the point where a software decoder can do its job.

Cheers,

 

[Wishbone]

If the MPEG-4 video being sent us has the same PQ (or even double the PQ) and is stored directly to disk on our DVRs, would that mean that my 100-hour 522 now will be able to store 200-400 hours?

I wonder if the MPEG decoder in the DVRs are hardware- or firmware-based... If it is completely hardware based, they would probably have to replace the equipment. To save money they would install smaller hard drives and still advertise them as being able to save 100 hours.

 

[Wayd Wolf]

Does anyone here ever rip a DVD? If you have then you've noted that the best quality you're going to get is an MPEG-4 codec straight from the disc. The disc is ALREADY in MPEG-2 format so you're converting once past the original uncompressed to MPEG-2 conversion.

Ever convert an MPEG-4 AVI to MPEG-2 and then back again? If you check fileshare programs you see it has been done repeatedly. Why? Many movies are splooged onto the net in AVI form only and a lot of people still like burning them to Video-CD which is MPEG-2.

The result is crud. Like a high compression moving JPEG image.

Enough said, really. Unless and until the following take place, it makes no sense:

1. Supermajority of programming delivered to Dish as MPEG-4 to begin with. Anyone remember not long ago the Dish versus Direct, who is compressed and fuzzy more than the other arguments?

2. All installations are cleaned up to even stricter standards

MPEG-4 is even more wonky and less forgiving than MPEG-2. Most satellite guys know absolutely NOTHING about the concept of signal reflection and impedance mismatch. Tight drip loops, tight bends, kinked cable, too many splices, improperly applied fittings, etc. will all contribute to screwing up the signal and affect the integrity of the digital stream. Cable guys who do cable modem, especially old timers, know this.

Rain fade will become a very real problem for a lot of people and a lot of people looking through the fringes of trees will see degradation. MPEG-4 just doesn't play well with bit errors and if we then add parity and whatnot, we just take up with overhead all of our savings.

Charlie pushes this and he will prove out the very reasons the cable operators are going slow on MPEG-4 despite their public interest. Privately, engineering is no more ready to adopt this than they were to push pre-DOCSIS high speed data over messy RG-59 dominated systems, remove noise filters with noisy IW all over, etc. Sometimes they get pushed by corporate, but the screwing around with customer service levels grows too big to ignore and engineering gets their time to correct things properly.

This would be like ignoring the engineers, and reality of installation quality, and forging ahead to a place where DTV and cable eat a number of their customers. SBC especially should faint at the notion of this, never mind shareholders.

They need to spend less time jamming more content in that no one is watching and is forced to get in their bundle that they don't want, and more time putting in content that more people crave.

 

[dlsnyder]

My personal theory...

I recall Dish's "Philadelphia experiment" where they put the "second tier" channels on 129. Only certain receivers could be used to receive that programming and for those who wanted those channels they would add a new larger dish and swap out receivers as necessary. Unless I am mistaken a similar situation is currently in place for Superdish customers - older receivers like the 1000 and 2000 are not compatible and must be replaced. Newer ones like the 2800, 3900, and 4900 are only compatible with a DP adapter. Dish may adopt a similar strategy here. In order to get all 210 DMAs uplinked they will release a new line of receivers that are capable of decoding MPEG-4. Only those in DMAs where it is required will need them at first but they will be available to all subs over time. Eventually all programming will be switched over to MPEG-4 but not for many years.

 

[drjake]

I may be wrong on this, but I remeber hearing at a Team Summit meeting that at least some of the DishPro receivers had chipsets capable of hardware MPEG4 decoding. Note that there are plenty of software MPEG4 and MPEG2 decoders. However, if the processor that uses the software is not fast enough, the decoding does not work well.