[mythtv-users] MythTV vs. Windows Media Center

[Ben Kamen]

On 2/14/2011 1:22 PM, Eric Sharkey wrote:
>
> 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.

Yep!

Like not enough trunk amps or bad EQ's that haven't been replaced since 1982... all sorts of reasons everywhere.

The big reason Comcast switched to all digital was so they could take all the SD channels and pack the freq space to bring in Xfinity
(and I'm sure other reasons).

Why should a dozen SD channels in analog take up 12 x 6MHz of bandwidth when we can stuff those channels into 1/2 or 1/3 or 1/4 the bandwidth and no one would know the difference on their crappy free converter box and not care?

  -Ben