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Digital television broadcasting
This chapter briefly summarizes digital television broadcasting. Most digital broadcast systems that have been standardized are based upon MPEG-2 compression, described in MPEG-2 video compression on page 513. Some cable and satellite systems use H.264.
HDTV transmission systems were conceived to deliver images of about twice the vertical and twice the horizontal resolution of SDTV – that is, about 2 megapixels – in a 6 MHz analog channel. MPEG-2 can compress 2 megapixel images at 30 frames per second to about 20 Mb/s. Modern digital modulation schemes suitable for terrestrial RF transmission have a payload of about 3.5 bits per hertz of channel bandwidth. Combining these numbers, you can see that one HDTV digital ...
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