Verizon FiOS TV → Re: [HD] Maybe this means more HD will follow...

okay where did you get that all channels on Cox are going MPEG4? Most of the boxes on Cox are MPEG2 only.

»www.tvpredictions.com/co ··· 1911.htm

All future additions will be MPEG-4, and one of their employees posted that if the channel is in the digital tier (Cox still has analog), that it will be moved to MPEG-4 later this year if the HD version is carried by Cox, depending on the market.

Doubt this is going to happen due to all of the MPEG2 boxes out in the field still. They are making new adds in MPEG4 for most channels that are added from now on and MPEG4 is limited to the plus package. There is no way that Cox is going to move the entire digital tier HD channels to MPEG4 unless there is a very small amount of HD digital basic tier channels carried.

The only thing cox has been moving to MPEG4 is the plus package. I highly doubt they are going to be taking away HD channels from the passport boxes.

maybe I am getting cynical but what if when Verizon does the MPEG4 conversion they move almost their entire set of national HD MPEG2 channels to 3 to a QAM and free up even more space then most people are expecting?

I didn't think that some of the MPEG2 would fit more than 2/QAM without compression. And so far, Verizon has not done any compression of channels.

They've already done this because there aren't many MPEG-2 channels distributed at bitrates higher than 3-to-a-QAM (~13 Mbps).

Very few channels have a bitrate higher than 13 Mbps on Verizon anymore. AXS.tv and HDNet Movies are the only two natively distributed MPEG-2 @ 13+ Mbps ones I can think of.

Verizon re-encodes some of the MPEG-4 distributed channels to 17 Mbps MPEG-2 though. It's been a while since I've checked but EPIX and ESPN were two examples of this. Pretty wasteful. Will be nice when they can just pass these on through because I doubt the ESPN and EPIX MPEG-4 satellite distribution feeds have bitrates as high as Verizon is re-encoding them to as MPEG-2.