[mythtv-users] Current Verizon FIOS experiences

[Andre Newman]

On 16 Dec 2009, at 14:34, Johnny wrote:

>>> In my market (Philadelphia), the only channels in the clear are networks (ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX), PBS, and a couple of other OTA ones.
>> 
>> That would be a good start, is that the same as available through OTA ATSC?
> 
> Yes the cable (I assume FIOS too) operators in the US are generally
> required to leave the OTA ATSC channels in the clear. They are
> considered to be part of the national emergency system and are thus

I'd read a few things recently that made me suspicious that situation was changing? I have some vague recollection about some recent court case where the whole unencrypted firewire and clear QAM situation had been overruled! Hopefully I've remembered it wrong but that was part of my reason for asking for recent direct experience.
> 
> to everybody. I would add that the OTA ATSC will generally be of
> higher quality than what you get from cable.
 Not when the signal is poor.


> They usually recompress
> it to a lower bitrate. I believe FIOS does less of this so it may not
> be an issue.

Surely they would just re-multiplex the transport streams, encoders are expensive!

Having said that I was recently fault finding an SDTV satellite feed to the US (German Football) already standards converted from the uncompressed HD feed, fed at the requested rate for final broadcast, Germans are good at doing these things properly. We chased around for ages trying to help the US engineer identify a patterning problem on the feed, "caused" by some equipment upgrades in Germany, eventually it became obvious that the feed came through a composite line and was re-compressed for transmission! The engineer was seeing NTSC dot crawl but didn't know what that was!!! If they can do things like that when the originator has made special effort to do everything "right" re-compressing ATSC transmissions is entirely possible.

> But for the channels he can tune it may be worth looking

I think that's looking like Plan A, thanks.

Andre