Recent Comments:
Ask Engadget HD: Should the FCC kill DTV for better technology? {Engadget HD}
Nov 15th 2009 11:50AM 99% of TV watching is done using TVs that are stationary, not because of technical limitations (mobile TVs cost $25 by the end of NTSC's reign), but because most people who watch TV want to sit down and watch it, not be passively aware of it in a moving vehicle. Further, the technology is being developed, there's no reason to believe that mobile usage of regular ATSC will continue to be a problem in the long term, and in the short term ATSC M/H is a perfectly reasonable solution.
You want to kill DTV because of that and because you think it'll add to the spectrum available for mobile Internet? How does that make sense?
And here's the thing: there's currently a spectrum *glut* when it comes to mobile Internet spectrum. A large number of companies are sitting on swathes of spectrum they've aquired but been unable to fund the necessary roll-out of infrastructure. The notion there's a spectrum shortage is a myth - there's plenty, most of the spectrum above 3GHz is virtually unused, and much of the spectrum over 2GHz has been *specifically allocated* to wireless and mobile Internet companies who haven't bothered to roll anything out.
So, no, I don't think the FCC should kill ATSC. It's imperfect, I'd have liked to see more spectrum efficiency, the ability for stations to transmit improved codecs, and mandates on MPEG-2 usage that allowed some of the more arbitrary restrictions be ignorable (stations currently don't use GOPs bigger than, say, 15, because many chipsets can't handle bigger GOPs.) But as it is, it's pretty high quality, light-years ahead of what it replaced, it's open, unencrypted, and deserves to do well.
YouTube begins streaming 1080p insecurities next week (update: 1080p video!) {Engadget HD}
Nov 15th 2009 10:21AM If YouTube moves from Flash it'll be to an open standard. They're doing a lot of research into that area and working with the HTML 5 people, but thus far nothing's jumping out at them.
With Silverlight not being anything like as cross platform as Flash (Flash at least supports the three major operating system platforms, plus numerous mobile platforms) Silverlight is likely very low on Google's list of things to support. And bear in mind that while recent demos might be impressive, Flash too has undergone significant revisions and will continue to do so - there's no reason to suppose that Silverlight will always be "better", if indeed it is right now, than Flash.
What we really want are open standards for web video. Then we don't have to worry about plugins, and the browser manufacturers can work on optimizing playback rather than us having to wait on one or two proprietary vendors to invent the next big thing.
Netflix streaming purportedly hitting Nintendo's Wii next {Engadget HD}
Oct 29th 2009 7:49AM I'm pretty sure this is old news and was reported a month or two ago - the screenshot looks rather familiar.
In any case, the "It's not HD!" crowd needs to calm down a little. I'm pretty sure most X-Box 360 users who have the feature do not stream in HD anyway (simple bandwidth issues put paid to that), and it's also worth noting that Nintendo has an HD version of the Wii waiting in the wings, the question isn't "Will they release it soon?" but "How soon, will it be in 12 months or 24?" With sales still through the roof, Nintendo has no incentive to release the HD version early, but time will tell.
I'm still waiting for the elusive "All you can eat buffered downloads" service though, so I can have something of moderate quality that doesn't require an Internet connection that isn't available to me. We watched a movie (Transporter 3) on Amazon VOD recently, which is Flash (H.264 + AAC) based, and the damned thing looked worse than a DVD despite a 3Mbps connection. I suspect Amazon assumes logic along the lines of "Anyone who wants SD needs to be sent data at 1Mbps, regardless of connection speed, Anyone who wants HD needs to be sent data at 4Mbps, regardless of connection speed", but the results really don't work. I hope Adobe can iron out the kinks, or else Microsoft can be a little more forthcoming with Silverlight and stop relying on their fanbois to port it to Ubuntu (which they can't do because Microsoft's DRM remains proprietary.)
Samsung develops first chip for US mobile digital TV transmission, provides no release date {Engadget HD}
Oct 19th 2009 7:54PM This is the mobile version of ATSC, not MediaFLO. The latter is the subscription service, and that's not running on spectrum given away for free.
US Mobile DTV standard finally approved {Engadget HD}
Oct 18th 2009 6:41PM If you think DAB is bad (and I'm prepared to believe you that it is), you haven't seen HD Radio. It's essentially only usable if you're listening to the primary channel, largely because when the digital side cuts out the redundant analog part kicks in. Because there's an analog component HD Radio multiplexes with more than two subchannels sound like crap, and while there's a "robust" version that's supposedly less susceptible to interference, it's so low bandwidth that it's useless unless analog has been turned off by the station completely.
What was needed was for the FCC to allocate spectrum for digital and hand it over, but the FCC wasn't willing to do that, wasn't willing to acknowledge digital wasn't going to happen, and went for the third route, picking a proprietary system that just doesn't work.
DAB, incidentally, was designed during the nineties (hence it's based upon MPEG 1 Audio), and Digital Radio Mondiale is a recent development. Either way, DAB would have been a better solution, even plain old DAB (but, as you say, DAB+ was also an option by then) than HD Radio. If DAB really was unacceptable, then the FCC should have set going the same kind of open process that got us ATSC - indeed, ATSC could have been the basis of an open standard for radio by itself.
Hitachi exhibits 10-inch glasses-free 3D display {Engadget HD}
Oct 17th 2009 7:57PM John - yes, I'm quite sure if someone invents the perfect set of glasses, there'll be no reason to bitch about them.
But, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has invented a set of glasses that's comfortable, impossible to lose, and that doesn't impair peripheral vision (and, to be honest, the glasses I have worn have also required I hold my head at a particular angle to watch the TV, or else adjust the glasses with each move of the head.)
So until these mythical perfect glasses are invented, we're going to continue to bitch about wearing them in order to see something remotely viewable because some idiot film maker sees gimmicks as necessary to get around their lack of talent. (And yeah James Cameron, I have to assume you've run out of talent given you're resorting to these things. What happened to you man, what happened?)
US Mobile DTV standard finally approved {Engadget HD}
Oct 17th 2009 7:53AM It's not like HD Radio and DAB, which is itself a weird situation.
There are actually three, not two, DTV standards. ATSC, DVB, and ISDB. All have fairly substantial adoption. ATSC was developed at the same time as the two other standards and has no substantial advantages or disadvantages over the others except in that the industry hasn't demanded certain services as quickly as they have for the others.
HD Radio on the other hand is some proprietary virtual snake-oil that was developed to fool the FCC into thinking they can have their cake and eat it if they'd just hand a now demonstrably dishonest company a monopoly on the technology to use. In fairness, HD Radio also provides a migration path for AM radio which, at the time, DAB didn't provide, but essentially the thing HD Radio pretends to do is provide a way to have both digital and analog on the same frequency, thus meaning the FCC doesn't have to clear spectrum for it. The downside is that it doesn't work properly, and anyone trying to take advantage of the "digital" channels soon finds that mobile use, especially in any semi-urban setting, is a joke, with the additional subchannels disappearing and re-appearing.
Ubiquity Wireless lied about their intentions with HD Radio, making a substantial part of the standard proprietary and undocumented, and if I were an FCC commissioner I'd be using it as an excuse to run far, far, away from the standard and get on board with DAB and its AM equivalent, Digital Radio Mondiale. But the FCC is the FCC, so there's no chance of that.
China Blue HD crosses over to the UK, third Opium War inevitable {Engadget HD}
Oct 14th 2009 7:28AM If it starts to show any progress outside of China and a few other countries with much poorer economies than those in Europe or the US, Warner et al will rapidly drop their support for the format.
In the meantime, expect to see the threat of lawsuits from the studios against businesses that import CBHD discs from overseas. As Levis prove over a decade ago, IP rights holders have some pretty twisted rights when it comes to controlling the imports of their own branded products.
The entire selling point of CBHD to the studios is as the ultimate form of region encoding, so they can sell content in China at a much lower (and thus affordable) price than in the US without the risk of Americans importing cheap Chinese discs. If CBHD takes off world wide, it isn't region encoding any more, it's just another rival.
Oh, and "HD DVD hold-outs" aren't going to buy CBHD unless they're just a BD/Sony hater. People who went for HD DVD went for it because of the advantages of that format. For all intents and purposes, CBHD is an entirely different format with none of the features that made HD DVD a sane system. Just because CBHD's spec was designed upon core technologies from HD DVD doesn't mean it's remotely similar.
A 1998 Forrester Research prediction about HDTVs wasn't even close {Engadget HD}
Oct 10th 2009 9:53AM I understand your point about the compression, but before I point out a major problem with it, it's worth pointing out that previously people on this site have been fairly critical about the fact most ATSC HD channels tend to have one or two additional SD channels on the same multiplex, despite the heavy compression used for the latter. That said, I think MPEG-2 is better than people give it credit for.
Anyway: Yes, you would, naturally, compress the "second" field by comparing it to the first, but this will only have an actual affect with I frames. There will be no compression gains at all using that strategy for B or P frames, as the difference between two spacially separated views is really not going to be that much different to the difference between two delta time views. With a typical ATSC GOP of 15 (one I frame every 15 B or P frames), and with a B/P frame typically being around 10-33% of that of an I frame, it's fair to suggest 3D will add around 62-88% to the bandwidth requirements over 2D. It might be slightly less for scenes with massive amounts of movement, but not a great deal less.
And yes, while this is pretty much impossible to implement over ATSC without cutting resolution and/or general image quality (or switching to H.264. Goodbye all existing TVs...) because of the 20Mbps limit, it's still a problem for Satellite and Cable operators, who are already facing issues trying to squeeze in normal HD channels into infrastructure originally intended for a few hundred SD channels. There's not a cable or satellite operator in the country that believes they have "too much" bandwidth.
In reality, whatever the transport method, we're looking at a reduction in quality whenever 3D is used.
I can kinda sorta see your point about sports benefiting, but I do feel that fans are going to find that operators will be making a choice (and a choice for them) about whether to have 3D or high definition. I suspect fans themselves will end up preferring HD.
A 1998 Forrester Research prediction about HDTVs wasn't even close {Engadget HD}
Oct 10th 2009 7:01AM 3D will always be a niche product. It didn't take off in the 1950s, it didn't take off in the 1980s, and it's not going to take off now. Unlike sound and colour, 3D is a gimmick. It can be a nice gimmick, but it takes an astonishingly good director to actually do anything with 3D that enhances anything but the worst stories. It's also expensive and awkward to implement which is why most of the movies that have come out recently in 3D (I said MOST) are computer generated.
i must admit I'm fairly baffled by EHD's love affair with the technology. HD = High Definition. What do you think's the first to go when the bandwidth is needed for the other field?
