[GTALUG] Rogers Analog lineup [was Re: best choices for tiny mlinux media centre in 2016?]

[Lennart Sorensen]

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