Interesting to see how confusing it is over there in the US.
Here is Australia OTA is King, only 20%ish of people have Cable. Buying a Set Top Box is easy here, there at stacks of them of various brands and models in most Electrical Stores, along with LCDs and Plasmas with built-in tuners and HDMI DVD/DivX/XviD players. As with the talk about 8-VSB vs. DVB-T's implementation. Each TS Mux in Aus uses about 23Mbit/s and thats with a 7Mhz wide channel:)
The PAL TV System actually does a much better job at handling interlaced and progressive content than NTSC. This is because PAL is 25FPS. So when 24FPS films, HD Shows and such are transferred to PAL, the film is sped up by 3% to 25FPS. While it may sound like a bad thing, it means the full progressive image is preserved when transmitted over ANY PAL system, interlaced or progressive. This means that basicly all non-live footage seen on HD PAL 1080i Channels is actually 1080p. The same goes for 576i (which is much better than NTSC's 480i, but thats another story). So the push for 1080p is even more useless in PAL countries.
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Interesting to see how confusing it is over there in the US. Here is Australia OTA is King, only 20%ish of people have Cable. Buying a Set Top Box is easy here, there at stacks of them of various brands and models in most Electrical Stores, along with LCDs and Plasmas with built-in tuners and HDMI DVD/DivX/XviD players. As with the talk about 8-VSB vs. DVB-T's implementation. Each TS Mux in Aus uses about 23Mbit/s and thats with a 7Mhz wide channel :)
The PAL TV System actually does a much better job at handling interlaced and progressive content than NTSC. This is because PAL is 25FPS. So when 24FPS films, HD Shows and such are transferred to PAL, the film is sped up by 3% to 25FPS. While it may sound like a bad thing, it means the full progressive image is preserved when transmitted over ANY PAL system, interlaced or progressive. This means that basicly all non-live footage seen on HD PAL 1080i Channels is actually 1080p. The same goes for 576i (which is much better than NTSC's 480i, but thats another story). So the push for 1080p is even more useless in PAL countries.