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Satellites
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jun 2000
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OK, so this maybe has nothing to do with Macs. Fine, nothing at all. But it's something that's been bothering me, and I need to know the answer. And my first source of smart people (cough, laugh) is right here. So here is my question:
My satellie (StarChoice) is "digital". Digital sound and picture I assume. And on the front of the receiver, there's the little MPEG-2 logo. Now, how "digital" is the signal. Is there a string of ones and zeros coming to me from space? Digital video, is that uncompressed? It's 3.8MB/s or something, right? Well how small can they crank TV down to using MPEG-2? Is that the same format as DVD movies are in? Say they compress it to 0.5MB/s, that is super super fast. I thought my DSL was fast, but I could never get 500KB/s (or 512 technically). So my stupid TV can receive extremely fast, yet my computer suffers with a *slow* connection. Am I totally wrong here, or does this make sense?
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Senior User
Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: Planet Earth
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Originally posted by bradoesch:
My satellie (StarChoice) is "digital". Digital sound and picture I assume. And on the front of the receiver, there's the little MPEG-2 logo. Now, how "digital" is the signal. Is there a string of ones and zeros coming to me from space? Digital video, is that uncompressed? It's 3.8MB/s or something, right? Well how small can they crank TV down to using MPEG-2? Is that the same format as DVD movies are in? Say they compress it to 0.5MB/s, that is super super fast. I thought my DSL was fast, but I could never get 500KB/s (or 512 technically). So my stupid TV can receive extremely fast, yet my computer suffers with a *slow* connection. Am I totally wrong here, or does this make sense?
Yes, the satellite transmission comes in as a MPEG stream. But each channel is compressed differently. The amount of bandwidth in that stream is limited too. So when they have to add a channel they have to make adjustments on the other channels to fit one in (ever notice that some have better video quality than others).
Why does your satellite come in better? That becasue there is a a bird transmitting the same thing to everyone. The cable/DSL providers have to deal with switching equiment and the whole network in general.
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---I'm on a low Microsoft diet.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jun 2000
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OK, that makes sense. So the satellite sends out one signal to everyone, with all of the channels together. And the receiver must split them into channels and display what you want.
So there must be some special video circuitry inside there to decode the signal, is there not? I wonder who makes it. It would be so great if there was an embedded PPC chip in there or something.
------------------
Why 1984, won't be
like "1984"
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