Advances for MPEG-2 Encoding for Transmission

Presented by: Michael Guthrie, Sales Director - Harmonic

Just a few years ago MPEG4 AVC or H.264 was all the news. Talk was that MPEG2 had reached its limits and that further improvements in picture quality and reduced bit rates would only be available by utilizing this new standard.  Lo and behold five or six years later MPEG2 has improved just as fast as in the years leading up to the new standard, and has exceeded all expectations in this regard.  Advanced MPEG2 implementations are in fact now widely deployed in the real world at bit rates that were being touted for MPEG4 AVC.  MPEG4 AVC has likewise progressed at a high rate and real world implementations are operating at half of the initial expected rates.  What are the technologies behind this progress?  How is it that TV stations are routinely transmitting 2 HD signals with a transmission standard that some argued initially was insufficient for one?  This presentation will explore some of the underlying techniques that have enabled this unexpected progress and give some real world examples of its use.