[mythtv-users] [OT] - VUDU - On-Demand 1080p movies

[Robert McNamara]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Brad Templeton
<brad+myth at templetons.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 10:51:35AM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> This just in on a list I subscribe to:
>>
>> [QUOTE]
>>
>> VUDU, Inc., a leading provider of digital on-demand entertainment
>> products and services, today announced it has achieved another
>> industry milestone by becoming the first on-demand service to offer
>> high definition  movies for download to own on its popular 1080p
>> Internet Movie Player. HD movies are available for purchase today to
>> all Vudu owners.
>>
>> [QUOTE]
>>
>> I wonder what that would do to my Comcast bandwidth budget? ;-)
>
>
> Note that when providing movies, 1080p is no particular technical
> challenge.   Movies are shot at 24fps, and doing them at 60 fields/second
> interlaced is actually a terrible shame, though that is what is done
> on a the broadcast and many cable/satellite channels.
>
> I was quite pleased to learn that some of the cable channels,
> such as AMC-HD, provide their movies at 1080 p, 30fps.   This is
> good because it means a smaller file and no deinterlacing required
> to watch or transcode.
>

Well, it's actually 1080*i* at 60 fields per second/30 frames per
second.  Obviously no way for me to show that your local headend isn't
doing deinterlace themselves, but AMC HD, at least, broadcasts in
1080i.

> The comcast cable box spits out mp2 over the firewire.  Does anybody
> know if Comcast actually sends mp2 over thier QAM channels, or
> do they send mp4 and then have the cable-box up-transcode it to mp2
> to fit the spec (and then I re-transcode it down to mp4 again if I
> will not be watching it for a while, sigh

The entire system is in MPEG-2.

Robert