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.
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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.