SES Americom (not letting one bad satellite get them down) has apparently found an even dozen takers for it's IP-PRIME HD-4 services, designed to add inexpensively MPEG-4 compressed HDTV to MPEG-2 IPTV providers. Not all of them were named, but Chibardun Telephone Cooperative in Wisconsin, Home Town Cable in Florida and Manti Telephone in Utah are among those soon to bask in the beauty of 32 HD including ESPN, Disney, Discovery, CNN, Fox News, MTV and others. So, if you get your TV from your phone company and haven't been getting HD yet, give them a call and see if a new set-top box in your future.

Shortly after getting word that Palm Springs, California residents can now look forward to getting their locals via DirecTV (if only in MPEG4 SD, for now), it seems that the satellite provider is urging all West Coast residents to make the switch to MPEG4. According to a note received by DBSTalk's Chris Blount, "customers with HD DNS channels will start to see crawls," which will purportedly encourage them to contact DirecTV in order to arrange for a 5 LNB dish and an MPEG4 HD receiver. Furthermore, we're also told that the new lineup will consist of CBSWHD on channel 391, NBCWHD on 393, ABCWHD on 397 and FOXWHD on 399. For whatever it's worth, the message will supposedly only reach those "in the Western half of the US" for now, but who knows when said alert will make its way east.

[Thanks, Earl]

Moto's VP was just saying that MPEG4 would take over cable too, and so it begins with its first MPEG4 STB. This new lineup of cable set-top boxes will have all the bells and whistles including; MPEG2, MPEG4, OCAP, CableCARD, MoCA and most interestingly Dolby Digital Plus -- you know the new codec commonly used on HD DVDs. We can see where this is headed already, first we'll see these new boxes in the wild and before you know it new channels will require the latest hardware -- sound familiar? It should, it's how the satellite providers did it. In the long run this will help cable bring us more HD, but considering cable co's are footing the bill for all these boxes, we'd suspect the MPEG4 rollout will take much much longer than it did for either DirecTV or Dish.

[Via Mediaexperiences2go.com]

Anytime it's possible to reduce the about of bandwidth required without reducing the picture quality, we're for it. MPEG4 is finally rolling along and getting picked up where it works, and one of the places it works is with cable channels like HBO and Starz. This is even more true when they're delivered with MPEG4 by the provider, 'cause as great as MPEG4 is, if the signal started out as MPEG2, then it can only get worse in the conversion process. So with some help from Motorola MPEG4 encoders, Starz is joining HBO in distributing their feeds as MPEG4 and saving providers bandwidth in the process.

After we finished covering the DirecTV press conference, we had a chance to catch up with Rômulo Pontual the Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of DirecTV and ask him some questions about HD Lite and DirecTV's HD locals distribution methods. We were very surprised that he would answer our questions considering the current pending lawsuit against DirecTV for HD Lite.

Have you ever heard of the term HD Lite?
Yeah.

What do you think of that term?
I don't know what it means.

Broadcom has announced a single-chip solution for DOCSIS cable modems that will combine the usual data and video with high-definition decoding for MPEG-4 AVC, VC1, and MPEG-2 formats. The chip also supports Dolby Digital , MP3, and AAC audio. It is intended for manufacturers to use in building cable modems that have a single integrated chipset with both the video and data decoding built in.

This should open the door for both built-in PVR functionality, as well as allowing for possible IPTV use. The modem could download content directly from the internet using the data services and then decode any of the new compression formats used in Blu-ray and HD DVD.
Manufacturers are quickly moving to embrace these newer codecs for compressing video over cable and the internet (and satellite), and it's good to see it becoming commoditized to the point where it's being built into a single chip. Will we see the cable companies get into FiOS-like content delivery soon?

Even though HD DVD burners are still off in the distance, you can make a DVD that will play back 720p or 1080i content on your HD-A1 or HD-XA1 with your existing DVD-Rs. The guys over at AVSForum have been working on this since the the Toshiba HD-A1 player launched, and they've pretty much got it down to a science. Particularly given the lack of content available so far on the format, many people have .ts files, HDV content, or mariposaHD episodes  they'd love to play back from a single shiny platter. They've boiled the process down to a few steps that anyone familiar with DVD burning should be able to follow.

Basic Steps for Creating HD DVDs:

1. Capture a high definition MPEG2 video to your computer.
2. Convert the video file from .ts, .tp or .m2t transport stream format to program stream format using Womble MPEG2VCR.
3. Create an HD DVD folder on your computer using Ulead Movie Factory 5.
4. Burn the HD DVD disc using Nero Burning ROM.

For more details and list of necessary software check out the thread, currently this walkthrough is PC-only, although WiFiSpy also notes he is working on a Mac version so that shouldn't be too far off. With a guide like this, all you need is a DVD-R, a sharpie and a Qosmio laptop to recreate the Sony Blu-ray incident. Or you can take that old rip of The Fifth Element you've got laying around and see if you can do a better job at a lower bitrate. The possibilities are endless.


[Thanks for the tip WiFiSpy!]