Will I be able to watch the BBC HD trial on my Skystar card?

[BGonaSTICK]

Will I be able to watch the BBC HD trial on my Skystar card?

This is a question that's been asked on a lot of forums, but the bottom line is only just starting to fall into place - so here's the latest word from the street.

The BBC have now started their HD trial using DVB-S1, and will move to DVB-S2 at 'some point in the future'. This is pretty well accepted now, as more than one independent source has confirmed this as coming directly from the BBC in 1:1 correspondence.

That 'some point in the future' will hopefully be after the World Cup, but that is NOT a ‘given’.

The Skystar 1 and 2 cards (including all variants thereof) will not handle DVB-S2, so based on what the BBC have stated above, this is therefore not a long-term solution for BBC HD reception.

The main reason then, that a whole heap of effort is going into keeping the Skystars afloat on the Hi-Def sea, is the hope of watching the World Cup. If you’re not a footy-fan, you may want to switch off now!

The BBC transmissions will be in MPEG-4 and not MPEG-2 (the originally intended mode of the Skystars) from day one.

Many people think that because the current decoding capabilities of the Skystar cards are limited to MPEG-2, that it's just not possible to push MPEG-4 encoded video into the front end of your card and get true Hi-Def out of the back of your computer.

They think that High Definition means MPEG-4 and that MPEG-4 decoding is in turn solely a function of the chipset.

The fact is that neither of those two statements is true. The first is known not to be true by many Skystar owners, who have been watching MPEG-2 HD test transmissions for some good while now.

High definition simply means a 'High Definition' picture - a high resolution. It's not synonymous with MPEG-4 or DVB-S2 per se. It would be misleading though, to suggest that the future will not see these two standards adopted across the board for HD. MPEG-4 has many compression advantages (especially when combined with DVB-S2). That means less bandwidth, and that in turn means either more channels per transponder, or less cost per channel for the broadcasters.

Let’s just cover a couple of precursors here. The original Skystar 1’s (or Nexus-S if you have a Hauppauge label on your hardware) had on-board MPEG-2 hardware decoding. This is clearly not going to get the job done for MPEG-4, so you will have to switch your card into Skystar 2 software emulation mode.

And there you have it. The newer Skystar 1 cards and all Skystar 2 cards decode the video in software - not on the card, but on your PC.

We now understand that DVB-S1 is the limiting factor of the Skystar, as indeed it is for all outgoing (and although I loathe the term… ‘Legacy’) hardware, but as long as there are DVB-S1 HD transmissions like the BBC trial, we’re in with a shout.

Although there is a distinct advantage to tackling the problem of MPEG-4 decoding by introducing custom on-board silicon (this is a much faster and more efficient way of processing the data), it’s not the only way as we’ve seen.

Let’s assume that as you’re reading this, you have a Skystar of some sort, or at least a passing interest in HD on DVB-S1 hardware.

If you're stuck with such hardware then it means using an MPEG-4 codec to break out of the on-chip (or existing MPEG-2 codec) restrictions. Fortunately, in the PC world we have ample opportunity to simply throw vast amounts of processing power at the problem.

Funnily enough, that’s precisely what it’s going to take.

Having a recent high-end video card is the first step, and this will have an influence over which codec you select. Different video card chipsets work better with different codecs, although the dust is surely likely to settle on this eternal problem too. It’s best to check the codec manufacturer’s websites for compatibility information with both video card chipsets, and broadcaster’s finalised video standards. Oh yes. This is the bottom line.

The second thing you’re going to need is a fast dual-core CPU on an equally fast motherboard. Either the Intel Pentium 840 Extreme Edition or the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ will provide plenty of horsepower. You can scale back your hardware specifications from there if you wish, but at some point the whole thing will cease to function in a satisfactory fashion.

Switching our focus back to the software, generally accepted as the best of the MPEG-4/AVC/H.264 group of codecs is CoreAVC Pro (http://coreavc.corecodec.org/index.html). You should note though, that there is a problem with this when used for the BBC transmissions (see below). Another popular contender is the Cyberlink H.264/AVC codec

Other combinations of viewers and codecs had seen success, such as the DVBViewer Professional software, coupled with the MPEG-4 codec available from the members download area of their website (H.264 kit). Others have used the Skyview program with the PowerDVD 7.0 Deluxe codecs (though this does not work with the old SS1’s).

There are others, and you can bet that all the decent video codec writers are very busy right now!

As I mentioned above though, there is a potential banana skin with all of this.

Sky, in their infinite wisdom, have applied the same ‘non-standard’ MBAFF interlacing protocol to the BBC HD signal when uplinking it as they have to their own HD transmissions. Although part of the MPEG-4 standards, MBAFF is not a commonly adopted component, and the various codec and firmware writers certainly didn’t see it coming! Many STB manufacturers are franticly trying to fix this problem too, with many customers jumping up and down at the prospect of having laid out hundreds of pounds to watch the WC in HD only to find that black screens look the same in both SD and HD!

The best advice we can give is to keep reading the various forums and manufacturer websites for the latest news. MPEG-4 is a multi-layered cake (you're not kidding!) and as we’ve said, some transmission configurations work better with one or other codec, chipset or video card driver. Everyone is in headless-chicken mode at the moment, and things are changing on a weekly basis, if not daily.

As all this technology is pretty new (as least as far as Joe Public, and hence real-world applications are concerned) it could be some time before stable configurations are known for each TV broadcaster. The BBC has been testing with 4:2:2 format too, a further complexity in the ever-important struggle between bandwidth efficiency and AV quality. They are however, apparently furious with Sky over the MBAFF farce, as they were simply not consulted.

Time is running short Ladies and Gentlemen. Let’s hope we can all find a way to watch and enjoy the football spectacle in superb HD quality.

The BBC HD Trial is broadcast on Astra 2D (28.2E) with the following parameters:

Frequency: 10847.00
Polarisation: Vertical
Video format: DVB-S - MPEG-4
Symbol Rate: 22000
FEC: 5/6

BGonaSTICK

[Jimdefruit]

A very nice and informative description Stick.

The big problem is trolling around trying to find the codecs. There are so many out there and I am sure that like me, others will find the file names are totally incomprehensible.

If we can it would be useful if a list of download sites and codec names could be assembled. I am sure a lot of us are beginning to experiment and are finding it difficult to find a working setup.

[BGonaSTICK]

Yes, I agree with your plea m8.

Please, anyone, feel free to use this thread to document any findings. The two working setups I know of at the moment are the DVBViewer/members H.264 kit combo, and the Skyview/PowerDVD7 Deluxe codec combo.

If anyone has anything else working, please post specifics here. Names, versions, setup info etc.

I've heard that the CoreAVC plugin will not be modified for MBAFF before the World Cup. The final non-beta version is due out soon, but will probably ship without this functionality.

I purposely didn't try to cover the codec side in too much detail in the above at the situation is just so fluid ATM.

[BGonaSTICK]

This may be of interest to ATI-based video card owners:

http://www.cyberlink.com/cinema/ati/.../enu/index.jsp

[BGonaSTICK]

Also, just found this:

http://www.vsofts.com/h264/codec-3_0.html

It appears from the spiel that the FREE VideoSoft AVC decoder is also supposed to support MBAFF but nobody seems to have had much luck getting it to work.

This is the codec included in Intervideo's WinDVD7.