[MPlayer-users] BBC HD

[Phil Rhodes]

> Is the BBC transmitting HD content at the moment.

Yes.

> How do you receive it?

It's a DVB-S signal originating from Astra 2D, the same satellite (and 
transponder) that carries Sky; therefore, it appears in the Sky programme 
guide. It's h.264 encoded at about 20mbps and is quite repetitive, really 
being just a tech demo at this stage. There is reportedly other free-to-air 
HD available; I don't know what, where from, or how.

I'm looking into ways to get it; I haven't yet done so. There are DVB-S PCI 
cards available for around £50. You might be better off looking for one 
that's forward compatible with the upcoming DVB-S2 standard, as a little 
reading reveals that everything is planned to move to that standard shortly. 
Those cards seem to be £85 to £120. From what I understand it is possible to 
go and buy a £50 dish and a card from Maplin and watch current BBC HD on it, 
given a computer capable of decoding and displaying the reasonably-demanding 
h.264 signal. If you do this you should also get all of standard-def 
Freeview and Sky, although of course most of the worthwhile Sky stuff is 
encrypted. I wonder if Freeview is any more reliable off the sat than it is 
off terrestrial...

There was or is a test around the Crystal Palace transmitter in London 
regarding HD transmission over DVB-T, although it was described as a closed 
test. If it's still running, and if you're near Crystal Palace, and if it is 
unencrypted, you might be able to patch together a system capable of 
receiving and displaying it. The BBC seem to be taking the position that HD 
is too much of a bandwidth hog for terrestrial transmision, although I can't 
say I'd argue with the idea of cutting the number of freeview channels by 
75%...

I have no idea what if any relevance mplayer has to this, other than that it 
is attractive because it has a very fast h.264 decoder, and it's capable of 
dumping raw streams to disk to allow you to losslessly record the off air 
signal. I don't know if - and I doubt, from reading around the subject - 
that it is capable of addressing DVB-S or DVB-S2 cards with HD content in 
the way we want. Presumably this will happen at some point although this 
sort of thing tends to take several years to become really usable on 
opensource projects.

So that's where we are. Any more info welcome.

Phil