Originally Posted by tellytart1:
“This isn't possible. The two encoding methods are completely different, so you wouldn't gain any advantage at all in co-timing the SD and HD feeds as received at home. All you'd be adding is another piece of kit in the transmission chain that could fail.”
So MPEG2 and MPEG4 encode at different speeds, fine.
But then chances are the SD chain also includes another piece of kit to slow it down; the downconverter from incoming HD feed from the ground, so originally ITV HD was going straight from South Africa, encode to Mpeg4 then out, while ITV1 was HD, downconvert, encode and then out.
Did anyone check the difference between ITV1 and ITV HD after HD channel came back with what was supposed to be upconverted SD because that could have had a huge delay of down conversion and up conversion.
"Human error" could also be a description for a person not programming the bumper playout machine correctly (removing the regular booking). Machine error is usually down to human error in operating it, so the reason given by ITV doesn't really say much, just that they don't need to spend money on upgrading their systems just their staff.