We already caught Panasonic
gloating about its H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC-related Emmy earlier this year, but now the full list of award winners are getting their moment in the spotlight.
TV Technology is reporting that a number of entities, outfits and agencies responsible for fostering growth in the high-def arena are set to accept Emmy awards on the eve of CES 2009. Some of the big winners are the Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service, Advanced Television Systems Committee, the Advanced Television Test Center and the Advanced Television Evaluation Laboratory, all of which helped in "devising the standardization of the
ATSC Digital System." Also of note, the
Metropolitan Opera was gifted with an award for its achievement in HD "cinema-casting," and awards are headed to Toshiba, Sony, Panasonic, Hitachi, Philips, Molex, Japan Aviation Electronics and Intel (among others) for their work on HDMI. Glasses up to the victors!
posted Dec 29th 2008 6:11AM
ATSC is good, but I really wish they had been just a little more forward looking and picked one of the MPEG4 codecs instead of MPEG2. There is a fairly substantial quality difference between, say, OTA CBS HD in my region, and Dish Network's feed of Cinemax. Both are 1080i, and I doubt Dish Network is allocating more bandwidth to Cinemax than CBS/ATSC's maximum of 20Mbps (in fact, I know they're not, a single episode of NCIS tends to take up 8-10G when archived, whereas a two hour movie from Cinemax generally takes up 4-6G.)
I suspect part of it is that some of the major enhancements that were done to MPEG 4 Part 2 and H.264 (MPEG 4 Part 10) were to do with reducing macroblocking, which tends to be the easiest to see type of artifacting. Part 2 was seen as a failure in some quarters because the anti-macroblocking algorithms it offered were somewhat CPU intensive, but the point is they were there and fairly effective.
It's certainly a good system though. I'm glad it's finally being taken seriously by the broadcasters too.
Sinclair Broadcasting group demonstrated that COFTM-based DVB-T was superior to ATSC as a terrestrial standard. Was this ATSC award rigged?
http://www.sbgi.net/news_releases/2000/07_26_2000.pdf
That was back in 2000 and the FCC apparently didn't agree. Sinclair always seems to have their own agenda. I guess we may know for sure if ATSC is good enough in about a month and a half.