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HDTV Over IP
gravelpup writes " NASA Watch has this article about a NASA demo of streaming an HDTV feed over a 20Mbps network from D.C. to California. Suddenly, watching NASA TV at home over a dinky DSL connection doesn't seem so cool anymore." For some reason this just makes streaming high quality video over the net seem even further away to me.
What's new besides the mutlicast aspect? Hasn't this already been done.
Just because there are exceptions doesn't mean the point is invalid. Companies try to maximize profits, not just make "enough".
I've seen something like this before -- a 36 Mbit DV stream sent over the Internet2 (IP network instead of Firewire) from Ohio to Pennsylvania. It was just a test, to see if it could be made to work. Latency was in the 150ms range. (Basically it was two FreeBSD machines with Firewire and tuned 100Base-T cards on both ends.)
At the time, my reaction was "What a waste of bandwidth!" but extremely high quality video streams at relatively low latency are critical for remote instrumentation/manipulation applications. Like moving a robot arm in space, or allowing scientists from all over the place to use one piece of very expensive equipment instead of moving them all to the same location. We also considered using something like that in an on-campus video editing facility for moving footage around from machine to machine. I can see the use for it in some situations.
But for broadcasting? I don't see the point of using all that spectrum just for a video.
"There is no night so forlorn, no mood so bleak, that it cannot be infused with pleasure by tender meat..." - R.W. Apple
When people say "HDTV," they can mean either the full-bandwidth uncompressed signal (on the order of 1.3 Gbps) or the broadcast-standard signal (MPEG-2 compressed to the order of 19.7 Mbit, or about 50-to-1, more or less).
Obviously this test didn't use uncompressed HDTV. Must have used MPEG-2.
When it comes to standard definition TV, the stuff you get over digital cable or DBS is typically between 4 and 6 Mbit. I think most people would consider 2 Mbit to be unacceptably noisy... but then again, I can ignore an awful lot of softness and artifacting from my TiVo, so maybe even 2 Mbit would be acceptable under the right circumstances.
Uncompressed standard-def TV, on the other hand, is carried over a 270 Mbit signal.
MPEG-2 compression seems to be totally acceptable up to 50-to-1, and marginally so up to about 100-to-1. DVCpro 25 (25 Mbit, or about 10-to-1) is widely considered to be crappy by broadcast standards, but looks a damn sight better than my TiVo on my home TV.
My rambling point (coffee, please) is that "HDTV" is a soft, fuzzy concept. Squeeze it down to 5 or 6 Mbit and it'll still be HDTV, with a thousand lines of resolution on-screen. But it might be so fuzzy or artifact-y that nobody would watch it.
...and you can have your PVR, and the NASA channel.
Hell no. Having a family member that worked in broadcasting for 20 years, I can tell you that the reason that no one's producing HDTV equipment is cost.
You think that the _consumer_ gear costs an arm and a leg? Just try upgrading the cameras, monitors, editing equipment, and mastering equipment. For each studio.
On the station side, you're going to need a new control room, bloody TRANSMITTER [horribly expensive pieces of equipment], and sometimes a tower to boot, addition to ugrading the news studios and remote trucks (mirowave and satellite links).
And all that for crappy programming that three people in the entire country own the equipment to see in the native resolution.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
I am using verizon DSL on the slowest plan, and I regularly get 2.5Mbps. The modem tops out at 7.1Mbps download though, the only reason I top out at 2.5Mbps is because of the next hop bandwidth. Think about it, RADSL goes over the same copper wires. The hardware at the two ends is the only difference, and the bandwidth they need to reserve for the next hop. My point is that with video on demand, the next hop is meaningless, if you store the video at the phone company.
Yes, it shares my voice line. But I still contend that at least half of the cost is coming from the next hop, whether it's voice or data. Direct point to point copper lines don't cost $20/month, no matter how you slice it. They probably cost the phone company about $5/month in recurring costs. I'd bet it's less than that, even.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Yes yes, this is all very cool, but there has to be consumer demand to fuel this. Considering how long it is taking HDTV to become the norm (if ever), and our propensity to easily eat up whatever bandwidth current technology delivers with inane shit, I would truely be surprised if TV starts coming across the 'net anytime soon (ie, 10 years). Somehow, the media providers would have to slip their foot inside the door to reserve bandwidth on a telco's network before it gets eaten up by consumers? I'm just thinking about the case where the consumers already have the link, and are used to having bandwidth X available .. it'd be a tough sell to start piggybacking HDTV on those connections, and tell your consumer base that their available bandwidth will now be X, to make way for multicast HDTV streams you may not even be interested in.
Actually, I'm more interested in 'friendly off the air' messages in explorer:
"I'm sorry, the TV show you are trying to watch is unavailable. Please hit 'reload', or try again later."
That'd be enough to drive me back to my remote 'n good 'ol cable.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Just think about it, a T1 is 1.5 Mbps, my cable modem max's out at 2.9 Mbps (not that I ever see that.) These bandwidth hungry applications are still a long way away, at least until the next Internet revolution when we all have fiber to the home...
Murdoch has shown a keen eye for avoiding wrong technologies. When the offical 'right' way to do DTH broadcast was D-Mac, he launched using PAL, and wiped the D-Mac off the table. Now when the 'right' way to do stuff if HDTV, he's sticking to MPEG2 PAL. It's the KISS principle in action. http://www.terramedia.co.uk/Themes/BSB.htm for an analysis of BSB v Sky
TV over IP is probably going to herald Video On Demand and you know what that means : pay as you go TV.
Maybe then though the bandwidth on the TV satellites can be utilised for IP traffic.
There are so many barriers to success though, that although it's a cool tech achievement widespread deployment will probably have to wait for a paradigm shift in the internet infrastructure. All those ISP's have got a lot of investment in their current hardware that the budgets probably project them for at least 5 years use.
My DSL provider (ntl:) is also a cable TV provider. The analogue TV & cable modem comes into my house on the same wire. 50 channels of TV & 1 x 512k data. I don't think that they are going to squeeze 20mbps of data through there too any time soon.
but let's look forward to fibre to the door and then we'll see things happen but probably not for quite a few years yet.
Our kids will probably get it but by then our eyes will be too dim to notice the difference between HDTV and analogue!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
All of this would be funny if people still had the disposable income they had two years ago. Now it just seems sad.
It's six times larger, the programs are six times better!! Hurray!!!1!
Everytime there is an HDTV story posted I read people WHINE about how bad HDTV is. Just stop it. The reason HD (or DTV for that matter) have not taken off is the MPAA (or rather who they rerosent.) HD content is sparse. Why? Studio's don't want to produce it. And it's not a matter of technology. It's not a matter of costing huge ammounts of money for the studio to make an HD copy. In fact many prime time programs are filmed, then converted to video during editing. Usually drama's, sci-fi, made for TV movies, etc.
Studio's hate HDTV. Why? Because it ruins a very important Video market. They now count on the fact that VCR's make low quality, grainy copies of on-air content. This means they can make tons of bank on [insert fav show here] box sets. Once you deal with a digital format they are sunk. People can now make a high quality recording for personal use. Hence no reason to buy an over priced box set from the local retailer.
While people can contend the studios and networks are free to do as they please, I would counter that the networks are allowed to use OUR airwaves for next to nothing. With out over the air content no one would buy a box set show. Like it or not, Timeshifting is legal and is considered a RIGHT we have gained in exchange for allowing networks to use the airwaves.
HD prices could have dropped like DVD prices by now if the studios didn't stand in the way. The mear fact that hardware vendors keep having to go to the design stage to add new copy protect and transports to please the studios is just crazy.
HD is $$$ and in it's intfancy because of the DMCA and studio money. It's doesn't matter if you're a Dem. or Rep., because neither party took a stand and did any thing to protect the consumer.
But for the rest of us, there's VDSL, the DSL on steroids (up to 52mbps on copper). There have been some trials in US and Canada, I have seen the equipment and the thing is amazing. No new wiring, no disruption, digital TV, high-speed internet, plus internet telephony.
Here are some slides that talk about it.
The only difference between the road analogy and real life is that for multicast, if you sent a truck out from your house (a data packet,) at every intersection, that truck would duplicate itself at every intersection. With regular IP, you would just send out all the trucks at once.
Of course, all of this is greatly simplified (as analogies tend to be ;o) but I think it gets the point across...
Ah, but it isn't broadcast. It only goes where it's wanted, and two connections on the same subnet use about as much bandwidth as one connection.
Yes, it may eat bandwidth, but only the same amount as downloading a big patch or video file. (not the same number of bytes, but we're talking bits-per-second here)
If it's pushing the limits of the IP infrastructure,
a. there's something wrong with the infrascructure-- let's light some dark fiber
b. it's unwatchable, and its effects will be limited.
You know, I used to think it was dumb to try and merge computers and TV sets. Now I don't own a TV-- I watch everything on my video capture card.
I'm not saying it's coming soon. But it's coming.
What a market.. if you could beat the cable providers to good VOD, you could take a lot of business from them. They don't deserve that business either - they've been working on digital cable for years, and it doesn't look any better than crappy NTSC, or give you video on demand. My box doesn't even have S-video or digital audio.
From all the news lately you would think that it was the Code Red I & II worm that were slowing down the Internet. But no, its those "rocket scientists" at NASA wanting to watch HDTV over IP sucking down all that precious bandwidth. Your tax dollars at work, letting geeks watch high definition pr0n from outer space. Jeeez!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
That's what, 3 DSL lines? $60 a month? As long as you put the TIVO (not literally) at the phone company what's stopping us from video on demand at $60/month? 95% of your DSL bandwidth limits happen after you get to the phone company, not before. Hell, I don't need HDTV quality. DVD quality is more like 6Mbps, or $20/month.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
... that NTSC over IP isn't all that far off. HDTV has 5 times the information of NTSC, ergo, NTSC over IP should only take up about 5Mb/sec.
-Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
And since open standards is my favorite issue, I support these efforts a lot (though I haven't the knowlegde to participate).
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
The eventual answer was that "If you can buy it, it is obsolete."
Technology envy strikes again
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
British Sky Broadcasting (Rupert Murdoch's European satellite broadcaster) recently bought the licence to broadcast digital TV over ADSL in the UK. The service will begin in the next couple of years.
/not/ HDTV -- it's MPEG2 encoded PAL.
Note that this is
I mean, look at all the industry controls and FUD built into HDTV. The format is less than ideal, and all the hardware required to play it is exorbitant.
This makes getting open source video formats in place even more important so that, in the very near future, we don't have to make a decision like the one we're making right now between OGG and MP3. One format is techincally superior and open, while the other is the 'industry standard'.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The Shuttle uses 32 kbps delta modulation for its air-to-ground voice communication links. See this page for some references. This allows the Shuttle to multiplex 2 voice channels (2 x 32 kbps) and 128 kbps of telemetry into a 192 kbps telemetry downlink. There are newer audio encoding techniques that provide better fidelity, but this stuff was designed in the 1970s. Delta modulation has the advantage of being resistant to degradation caused by bit errors and bit slips in the RF link. It is also is easy to encode and decode, allowing simple and reliable hardware to be used.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I didn't mean HDTV broadcasts.. as you said, the standard was finalized many years ago. It took way too long from the moment the engineers said, "it's done" until there were actual HDTV broadcasts and sets available. HDTV's are still overpriced.