Re: France hits a Million OTA receivers

Bob Miller (robmx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote in alt.tv.tech.hdtv:
> > Uh, no, they aren't capable of HD. When you hook them up to another box
> > that costs $1,000, you can get choppy HD, though.
> >
> Many people already have PC's that they use for other purposes and the
> addition of a $50 USB stick for OTA reception is not a big expense.

Yeah, and all those people have those PCs right next to their TV, and
their TVs have VGA or DVI inputs, right? Wrong. 95% of people will need
a new PC

> Choppy HD? Not on the PC's I have tried them on.

Well, when you use a 640x480 display (and only use 640x360 for the 16:9),
it doesn't take much of a PC. But, to display at full 1920x1080 you need
a really fast processor *and* a video card with hardware MPEG-2 assistance.

> Media Center PC's will
> be the hub of most Home Theaters in the future IMO.

You heard it here first, folks. Media Center PCs are now doomed to
failure, because Bob has been proven wrong 100% of the time.

> Well they are using some kind of an MPEG4 receiver already in France.
>
> http://www.dvb.org/index.php?id=249
> "HDTV MPEG4 broadcast from the Eiffel Tower
> TPS broadcast a short HDTV movie coded in MPEG4 from its Eiffel Tower
> transmitter on September 14th, 2005.

Nowhere does this say anything about a commercially available receiver
having MPEG-4 decoding capability.

Thus, as I said, *no* STBs in sold to date in France have MPEG-4 decoding
capability.

> I don't know what MPEG2 has to do with anything. The only way to go with
> HD is MPEG4 IMO.

Once again, you heard it here first. DirecTV's MPEG-4 signals are now
doomed to failure, since Bob has been proven 100% wrong on all issues
related to HDTV.

Of course, MPEG-4 won't reduce bit requirements enough to make much
difference anyway, as real-time 1080i MPEG-4 encoders need over 12Mbps
for quality. Since MPEG-2 can accomplish the same thing with 16Mbps, it's
not enough of a savings to be worth anything real (like getting back whole
channels). But, it would be enough to allow the likes of Bob to use
the extra bandwidth for advertising, and maybe actually pay off some of
his creditors.

> > Why? Who needs SD when every receiver can decode HD?
> >
> Well it seems we do.

We, who?

> The converter boxes that are being proposed will
> NOT output HD only SD.

So? The quality is still better than an SD source signal.


> So the demodulation of HD is a waste of money.

Not if you care about picture quality. But, we know you don't, so it's
understandable what your position would be.

> It
> would be better to deliver SD to SD only converters as they are doing in
> OZ.

Yeah, then the US government can re-define "HD" like the Australian
government did, so that stations would be able to claim they are
transmitting HD and not have as many picture dropouts. In Australia,
anything more than 576i is considered "HD".

It's typical that Bob once again uses countries that are failing at OTA HD
delivery as examples of "how to do OTA HD correctly".

> So you are suggesting that the current 8-VSB 19.34 Mbps data rate and
> MPEG2 can handle fast action sports?

Me and millions of other happy fans would agree that this is so. The
only problem with HDTV and sports is the same problem that has been around
for years with sports...even 60 frames per second isn't enough to slow
down the action when people are moving at 30-40 feet per second, and balls
and pucks are moving at 100 to 300 feet per second. There's is nothing
that can be done about this sort of blurring of fast motion, but MPEG-2
handles it quite nicely, even though such blurring is one of the hardest
things to encode.

> Not what I have seen.

You obviously haven't seen any HD, but then we know you don't have an
HDTV or an ATSC tuner.

--
Jeff Rife | "...the flames began at a prophylactic recycling
| plant, near the edge of the forest..."
|
| -- "WarGames"
.

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