On Fri, Jan 08, 2016 at 10:02:54AM -0500, Alvin Starr wrote:
I was under the impression that the new encoding schemes that Rogers is using is not all that great.
I moved to an Antenna and OTT for my viewing needs something like 10 years ago so other than seeing the lack of quality my in-laws are getting I can't attest to the quality of Rogers.
I don't off hand remember what the Bell compression was but I believe that it was better than Rogers.
Not sure what they use. Bell uses MPEG4 for HD channels, but I think SD channels are still MPEG2 on satelite. Fibe would be MPEG4. Rogers still uses MPEG2 (pretty heavily compressed) for digital cable (which I guess is pretty much all cable they do now).
I was involved with a couple of startup OTT TV services a few years back and I was never all that happy about the trade off between bandwidth and quality. The standard broadcast TV stream at 1080i sucks back 20Mbits of network bandwidth.
Well apparently 256-QAM can do about 38Mbps in 6Mhz, which is better than ATSC does, so cable companies can put more subchannels into one 6MHz band than ATSC can, and by compressing extra over what the broadcaster did, they can make room for even more channels. It seems ATSC 3.0 some day in the future would be able to have similar bandwidth to 256-QAM, and would also switch from MPEG2 to H.265, saving more bandwidth, making room for 4k broadcasts. Would of course be incompatible with all existing tuners. -- Len Sorensen