HBO HD to Be Mpeg-4 and No Degradation by Carrier.

[Bebop]

http://telecompetitor.com/node/184

Let's hope all HD providers will mandate minimum bitrate.

[kjnorman]

I'm impressed.  8Mbps MPeg4 encoded at the source may look pretty good.  This may be the final thing that gets me to lose one of my Tivo boxes and go get a Directv DVR instead....

This may be bad news for u-verse in the area as I read they will not be able to offer 2 HD streams until 2008 now.  Perhaps AT&T will just have to bite the bullet a do fiber to the home.  Yeah in 2015....:bang:

[tencom]

Maybe you people who would love to see fiber to the home pay the cost of bringing the fiber to your premises, and you better have deep pockets, to gain about 10 megabits in bandwidth.  After all most subscribers won't need all that data capacity. Let the ones who need all that capacity pay the infrastructure costs  because I would prefer to keep rates as low as possible. You can continue to expect rate increases. Mostly because programmers such as ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC, are demanding more compensation for their video products.

[TPK]

I'm impressed.  8Mbps MPeg4 encoded at the source may look pretty good.  This may be the final thing that gets me to lose one of my Tivo boxes and go get a Directv DVD instead....

This may be bad news for u-verse in the area as I read they will not be able to offer 2 HD streams until 2008 now.  Perhaps AT&T will just have to bite the bullet a do fiber to the home.  Yeah in 2015....:bang:

I don't see why this is a bad thing for U-verse...  I think its a good thing...  8 Mbps is well within the current bandwidth video allocation for U-verse....

The main problem with U-verse right now is they have to take a mpeg-2 stream (I assume this is what they get via satellite from HBO and all other networks), then they have to re-encode it to Mpeg-4..

Mpeg-2 is a lossy format, and Mpeg-4 is also a lossy format...  To take a Mpeg-2 stream (which is already compressed as far as it can go without the majority of viewers notcing the quality loss), un-compress it, then take the resulting video and re-encode it to Mpeg-4 greatly lowers the quality of the video...

This is sort of like taking a jpeg image, saving it out to a bitmap, and then taking the bitmap and saving it out to a jpeg again...   Each time there is some quality loss when saving out to a jpeg, so I can guarantee that the final jpeg produced is going to have a lower quality than the original jpeg image...  If you keep doing this over and over again, you will end up with a blurry mess...

To use another analogy, its a lot like back in the analog days when you took a videotape and copied it, and then took the copy and made a copy from that...  Each time you make the copy you loose quality...

If the original image is first encoded to mpeg-4, then there shouldn't be this "second generational" digital loss when u-verse delivers the mpeg-4 stream to the home...  Hopefully U-verse will simply take the mpeg-4 stream and push that through as-is to the boxes (in fact, according to the article, they will be mandated not to attempt to compress the stream further)...

In fact it will now be the cable operators that will be made to deliver lower quality video, as they will be forced to re-encode the mpeg-4 back to mpeg-2...  So with the scenario, for HBO at least, TWC will actually have a lower quality video than U-verse (until TWC upgrades the boxes to decode mpeg-4 streams)...

However, now I gotta wonder how networks like HBO source their video to begin with...

How are the digital masters stored??  Are they stored in Mpeg-2 on a HD or a tape somwhere?, or are they stored in some sort of lossless video format which they can re-encode on the fly???

When their studios make a movie or film a series, what kind of digital storage do they use and how is the video stored??  Don't the HD video cameras output mepg-2???  Aren't all studio-grade mixing and editing equipment all based on mpeg-2???  Or does the industry use some sort of losless format to capture and master and edit and store their video???  I would hope that video is all mastered in some sort of losless format at the studios, but I don't know if this is the case or not...

Because if they plan to deliver mpeg-4, and everything is stored in mpeg-2, then I guess we aren't going to avoid the generational loss after-all, as HBO will have to re-encode the video from mpeg-2 to mpeg-4 and then deliver it to the cable/sat operators..

I guess perhaps that HBO will invest in better mpeg-4 encoders than u-verse did?? (I hope)...

I wish I knew more about how the industry actually works, so I can know what I am talking about without making all these assumptions all the time...