"Uncompressed" HD TV?

[fibbingbear]

I saw an ad on T.V. for some fiber optic stuff (think it was Verizon FiOS). Claims it can deliver "uncompressed" HD TV to your living room for ~$115 a month.

Sounds absolutely bogus to me. Surely they must be using some compression on their side, even if it's not noticeable?

Is this a case of false advertising, or is it possible these days? I'm not up to snuff with all the cable deployments :p

[rebkell]

I saw an ad on T.V. for some fiber optic stuff (think it was Verizon FiOS). Claims it can deliver "uncompressed" HD TV to your living room for ~$115 a month.

Sounds absolutely bogus to me. Surely they must be using some compression on their side, even if it's not noticeable?

Is this a case of false advertising, or is it possible these days? I'm not up to snuff with all the cable deployments :p

I'm sure they can deliver the local network stuffed straight from the station, I don't really know about the HBO's, Showtimes, Starz feeds, but the local nets usually top out around 19 MBits/s, so I'm sure they carry those uncompressed, even my Comcast does that for the locals.

[Blue_MiSfit]

What they really mean is "un-recompressed". At best.

The video is compressed, make no mistake. Maybe they don't run it through a crappy hardware realtime MPEG-2 encoder at insufficient bitrate :)

Still, who knows how good their sources really are...

~MiSfit

[fibbingbear]

I'm sure they can deliver the local network stuffed straight from the station, I don't really know about the HBO's, Showtimes, Starz feeds, but the local nets usually top out around 19 MBits/s, so I'm sure they carry those uncompressed, even my Comcast does that for the locals.

19 MBits/s is about 9 gigabytes an hour. Don't see how they can deliver uncompressed video at that rate, especially if it's HD. :p

[facialz]

Indeed. Let's assume 25 fps framerate, 4:2:0 color (12 bits per pixel), then the bit rate of uncompressed HD video is

1920 * 1080 * 12 * 25 = 622 080 000 bps ~ 622 mbps

Every HD video under that 622 mbps *is* compressed.

[fibbingbear]

Indeed. Let's assume 25 fps framerate, 4:2:0 color (12 bits per pixel), then the bit rate of uncompressed HD video is

1920 * 1080 * 12 * 25 = 622 080 000 bps ~ 622 mbps

Every HD video under that 622 mbps *is* compressed.

Just a minor quibble, Facialz. Technically, they could do some lossless compression (like huffyuv), transmit it, and then decompress it when displaying. Even though it's technically "compressed" I don't think that'd be false advertising.

Even assuming a 3:1 compression ratio though, it'd still be ~200mbps for HD.