I wasn't aiming this to those (of us) that don't have a -S2 receiver, but to the PBS stations that obviously don't have the conversion made yet to allow PBS to make the switch!
As for public TV viewers, Petrat said “they can clearly see and hear the significant technical quality improvements of MPEG-4. NGIS allowed us to create a state-of-the-art playout and distribution system, enabling stations to pass on superior quality images and sound to consumers.” Nunez said for viewers with largescreen HD sets, “the visual resolution may be dramatically improved and images will have less compression artifacts. The side-by-side comparisons of programs compressed in MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 are impressive. It doesn’t take a golden eye to see MPEG 4 delivers higher quality at lower bit rates.”
exactlyturning this into a religion, secular competition/debate is 100 % useless to this forum.
GOODBYE
GOODBYE
A cool article, but I found this paragraph to be absurd:
Just flat out lies here. I highly doubt they are talking about us here; they're talking about viewers of PBS affiliates.
PBS affiliates will be passing along the same bitrate-starved MPEG-2 crap over the air that they've been passing on for the last eight years. The end consumer should see little difference after the conversion. Not a single affiliate, not a single provider will be providing PBS in MPEG-4. The end consumer will always be getting a re-encoded MPEG-2 feed or a MPEG-4 -> MPEG-2 -> MPEG-4 feed (DirecTV/Dish re-encode local affiliates' MPEG-2 over-the-air broadcasts to bitrate starved MPEG-4, producing video that looks even worse than if it was just left alone in its already bad MPEG-2 form)
Using MPEG-2 has nothing to do with dumbing things down for noob viewers. It's required. "Halving" (720p actually has more pixels/second than 1080i) the resolution to 720p is actually not a bad idea if you can't allocate enough bits to do 1080i properly (for some definition of "properly").It's only those of us who participate in free-to-air satellite - and bypass the dumbed down, re-encoded affiliate feeds intended for noob viewers and get the MPEG-4 feeds straight from the source - who will see the improvements of the MPEG-4 conversion. Although the affiliates will have the better MPEG-4 source material to re-encode to MPEG-2, the fact that most of them bitrate starve their MPEG-2 re-encodes so much and many halve the resolution to 720p should mean that most of the improvements of that higher quality source feed will be lost.