DTT trial in Ireland and DVB-T TV tuner cards

nuttz

I came across this article about the digital TV trial underway here.

It mentions that you should make sure your DVB-T tuner/box is MPEG-4 compatible as it is likely to be used here, unlike in the UK where the standard used is MPEG-2.

My question is this, does this mean that most of the DVB-T tuners here on komplett will not work with this trial as nearly all mention supporting MPEG-2 and not MPEG-4?

8T8

I think that is correct bit I'm not totally certain.

For instance with an STB [set top box] or TV you would be stuck if the box did not support MPEG-4 as it would require dedicated chips but with a computer it should fall back to CPU software decoding of MPEG-4 in the event the broadcast is not MPEG-2 so it cannot take advantage of any hardware assisted decoding or so that's the impression I had of how it worked.

Some of the BBC HDTV London trials were picked up, using regular computer DVB-T tuners but the service was being broadcast in H.264 so you needed a very good software H.264 decoder like CoreAVC to decode the broadcast.

However I'd imagine it is unlikely they will will quickly adopt MPEG-4 from the article it sounds like the test broadcasts will be in MPEG-2 mostly. The UK's Freeview system is also broadcast in MPEG-2 and a lot of the TV's with built in DVB-T tuners only decode MPEG-2.

Using MPEG-4 AVC [H.264] would freeze out a lot of TV's with built in DVB-T tuners and probably bump the cost of STB boxes that would plug into TV's. Any DVB-T service that uses MPEG-4 AVC may be limited to a HDTV service as a result but that's just me guessing.

So you should be able to pick it up if you are within range and buy a copy of CoreAVC Pro just in case : )

[CoreAVC is just a H.264 decoder so you will still require a viewing software like DVB Viewer in the event the software that comes with the card does not support directshow & hence not support plug-in codecs like CoreAVC.]

irlrobins

Moving to HTPC/Media Centre