<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Depends. It is trivial to do software encoding of menus into an atsc stream to<br>
provide menus and such,</blockquote><div><br>How do you figure? Menus may be less computationally intensive to encode than other full motion video - but they still need to be full motion video. <br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
most of the ATSC stream would be fed<br>
directly (with no software decode/reencoding needed)</blockquote><div><br>What gets recorded to your harddrive when you record OTA DTV in Myth is not an entire ATSC stream, it is just an MPEG-2 transport stream. It lacks various meta data that a TV would require in order to tune the signal. <br>
<br>Multiplexing a previously recorded MPEG-2 transport stream into an ATSC stream would certainly be less computationally intensive than encoding video into a compliant MPEG-2 stream, but the later problem can at least be accomplished today with existing free software tools. <br>
</div><div><br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>
And so far the "cheap" set top box (that does actual HD w/enet) is $200-$300 and<br>
you need one for *EACH* television, and if you have a number of TV's that gets<br>
to be more expensive than the other solution.</blockquote><div><br>This is true, but it would be much more difficult to provide multiple streams from a single backend if you were feeding ATSC streams. Without the ability to have independent frontends, such a system would be of limited appeal. Also, consider that very few TVs have multiple ATSC tuners, so you would need to work around the problem of still allowing those TVs to watch off ait TV. <br>
<br></div>-chris<br></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Chris Ribe<br>TV/IT Engineer<br>WCJB-TV/DT Gainesville, FL<br>(352) 416 0648<br><a href="mailto:cribe@wcjb.com">cribe@wcjb.com</a>