[mythtv-users] MythTV vs. Windows Media Center

Eric Sharkey eric at lisaneric.org
Mon Feb 14 19:22:33 UTC 2011


On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 11:36 AM, jedi <jedi at mishnet.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 11:22:49AM -0500, Eric Sharkey wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 11:12 AM, jedi <jedi at mishnet.org> wrote:
>> >    One thing to keep in mind is that digital allows for cable companies
>> > to recompress the signal themselves. So what you get from a cable company
>> > may already be degraded.
>>
>> As opposed to analog, which only allowed the cable companies to
>> degrade the signal with noise, ghost images, cross-talk from other
>> channels...
>
>    That sounds more like being subject to the limitations of physics
> rather than transcoding content down to a lower bitrate or even a lower
> resolution.

This is a distinction without a difference.  Your initial statement
implied "what you get from a cable company may already be degraded" is
a consequence of something that "digital allows", and that isn't true.

Cable companies recompress digital signals because they haven't
provisioned enough bandwidth to deliver the full signal.  Likewise,
analog artifacts are introduced by similarly stingy resource
allocation.

Eric


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