Was HD Mac ever going to be possible if the launch had been early - mid 90's?
Zeropoint1
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Was the launch of HD ever practical in the UK and Europe with DMAC and D2MAC? I know there were problems with the manufacture of the chip sets and they were very expensive to produce. But if the entire European industry had gotten behind the project 'properly' and made the launch date a more realistic early - mid 90's (?) Would we have gone 1250 (1175) iirc HD much sooner?
Or did the industry know that digital compression was improving all the time and it was best to wait as MPEG1 was with us and no doubt MPEG2 with it's much more efficient system would at least have been in the ideas / planning stage if nothing else.
Or did the industry know that digital compression was improving all the time and it was best to wait as MPEG1 was with us and no doubt MPEG2 with it's much more efficient system would at least have been in the ideas / planning stage if nothing else.
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Later when they switched to square pixels they could just expand the horizontal res to 2048 which is nearly 3*720 but for 4:3 content using the centre 1440 pixels would work anyway.
I doubt it - no point doing it as analogue, FAR too expensive - it's only digital that has made it viable.
It 'could' have been done via satellite, but there's no where near the required bandwidth terrestrially - although I suppose they could have taken all four channels off and replaced them with a single HD channel
Lol just 1 channel that would have ended up being BBC 1! They would have had to provide all households with cheap analogue sat equipment and broadcast the main 4/5 channels on there in 625 pal for those that didn't have a HD tv in the 90s.
Obviously very impractical, but I still think HD, when it was brought in digitally in Europe, should have been 2048*1152, as that resolution would have worked being double height of 576 and 4:3 could have still fitted nicely in the 1440*1152 area of the whole 2048*1152.
But then we would have had 2 worldwide standards still! So not the best in that way.
Back in the 80s/90s the Japanese developed MUSE, that compressed a 20 MHz bandwidth HD signal down to 8 MHz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_sub-Nyquist_sampling_encoding
hdmac certainly worked but would have been a very clunky mistake given that compression was becoming available.
what basically happened is computer people didnt talk to tv people and compression was first applied to broadcast tv distribution quite late in the day.
the atsc gensys proposal was orignally a "non starter" but became the best option when mpeg compression was added on ......
Really ? Well I saw it in the 90s working on a visit to NHK in Japan
it was unreliable under normal terrestrial broadcast conditions. which is why the "commercial" version was satellite and cable only.
it was nhk showing off hi vision to everyone passing by (and their dogs) which prompted a western panic reaction and atsc and hdmac (eureka 147 or whatever it was called) ........
satellite muse shut down, of course, since it was made obsolete by mpeg .......