Vista to support 1394b, aka FireWire 800 {Engadget HD}

May 13th 2006 11:24AM FireWire (IEEE 1394)'s AV/C protocol specifies that you push MPEG2 to TVs and other display devices. This means that you have to have an MPEG2 decoder there, which no other connector requires. This adds cost, and reduces flexibility (DBS is going MPEG4 as fast as they can in order to save/shave bandwidth and offer more HD, but if they had to use AV/C over FW, they'd have to transcode MPEG4 into MPEG2, rather than just decode).

I think it was just a cost issue.