Astra 2D bitrates and capacity

Apogee

A few posters have noted the drop in quality and bitrates for BBC HD recently, so I had a quick look to see what sort of spare capacity it opens up e.g. potential for C4HD to move to 2D.

BBCHD currently running at 9.7Mbps with 8.6Mbps unused, along with the 2 variations on BBC1 at 4.1Mbps each.


C4HD running at 11.4Mbps. So if just 1 of the BBCs were moved elsewhere, you'd have more than enough space ( 8.6 + 4.1 = 12.7Mbps) on 2D.


If you look at the bottom of both pics, you can see the difference in capacity of a DVB-S vs. DVB-S2 transponders (33Mbps vs 43Mbps). If the BBC TP was switched to DVB-S2, and both BBC1s moved elsewhere, you'd have room for BBCHD, C4HD and ITVHD when it starts up 24/7.

Apogee

A quick comparison of the regional BBCs - BBC London is one of the worst. Each of the TPs some spare capacity, with a bit of tweaking, could take another channel.

BBC London


BBC Wales:


BBC W Mids:

Apogee

One little oddity, ITV2+1 seems to be whacked out at a very hig rate.


For comparison with UPC, the HD channels on cable, including BBCHD, appear to be re-encoded:


NatGeo/ESPN on cable:


NatGeo/ESPN on sat:

pa990

Those screens shots mean nothing to my poor brain.

Can you tell me what BBC's and which ITV regions give the best picture

Ed_

I have seen on here that ITV1 Westcountry is the best ITV region on satellite.

pa990

Thanks.. Post Code for anyone using a freesat box and wanting ITV westcountry on 103 is

EX2 2JN

Now.. is someone could tell me which BBC1 & 2 have the best quality

pa990

Bump.

Which BBC variants have the best bit rates ?

celticfc

pa990 wrote: »

Which BBC variants have the best bit rates ?

They're all roughly the same.

If you have a Homax Foxsat HDR, BBC 1 London and BBC 2 England are recomended (for a different reason though) as they share a TP with many others such as BBC 3, BBC 4, Five so when you are recording 2 or 3 channels at the same time, you can still watch a few others without any problems providing they're all just using 2 TP's. I have found this very handy feature of the humax sometimes.

ITV1 west country is expected to revert to the lower bit-rate of it's siblings soon enough. I've read that it's only high due to it being used for analogue terrestrial uplinking purposes temporarily.

Rick_

Yes, ITV West Country was used to feed an analogue transmitter but as it has now switched off it is only a matter of time before it goes back to being a horrible blurred blocky mess like the other ITV channels.

Channel 4 recently increased the resolution of their channels (at long last) so they look a bit better on satellite. Interesting note about the BBC HD situation. If one of the BBC regions moves (which there should be space for it to do so) then Channel 4 HD could move across. But, originally it was thought that this space was left for ITV HD to move. It appears that the BBC are going to be using the space saved for something else but haven't said what. So it doesn't look like we are going to get a proper ITV HD or Channel 4 HD for a while yet...