How good is HDTV compared to BluRay?

[lightshadow]

Hi,

Does anyone know good the quality is of HDTV compared to BlyRay 720p? Is e.g. the bitrate lower on HDTV?

Also, what video codec is used on HDTV?

Is HDTV DRM protected?

:thanks:

[Dark Shikari]

HDTV normally uses H.264 or MPEG-2. It is CBR and generally far lower bitrate than Blu-ray (6-10mbit for H.264, 12-18 for MPEG-2). Quality ranges from "barely watchable" to "awful."

Note this does not apply to all providers. Some, like FIOS, are better than others, like Comcast. Outside of the US, the quality tends to be a lot better as well.

[lightshadow]

Thanks for the details. I guess I'll just stick with Blu Ray for now ;)

[SeeMoreDigital]

From what I understand, Europes DVB-S2 video streams max-out at High@L4.0....

[Mug Funky]

i think australia's bitrates are in the 12-18mbps range, CBR MPEG-2.

some shows look better than others (last night's "underbelly" was not noticably blocky, and still retained a lot of the grain from the original). other shows look terrible. i guess it depends on whether a show is encoded offline then shown from a server, or whether they just patch into a HDCAM deck and stream live from that. the stations probably all handle that differently.

blu-ray mops the floor with it, quality-wise. no contest. and x264 seems to do better still.

[2Bdecided]

There's a 16Mbps CBR MPEG-4 AVC channel available in the UK on satellite (BBC HD), and several other channels have VBR ranges that sometimes hit 20Mbps (typical average is 13Mbps).

See here:
http://www.linowsat.co.uk/0282/all/0282.shtml

search for "HDTV" and click on the link for graphs of bitrates over the past 10 days(!).

Cheers,
David.