HDTV Satellite Streams

I was just messing around with some satellite streams and wondering how good these HD channels are over FTA satellite. Well they are good - and pretty huge compared to ordinary streams - roughly 4 times the size. And they need some good hardware just to render the frames.

The BBC HD stream is at 28.2E (basically the main SKY satellite) at transponder 10847.00 V (link). The stream runs at approx 20mbits/sec (about 2.5 megabytes a sec). I got it via a basic Twinhan PCI DVB-S card (contrary to opinion that you need a dedicated DVB-S2 card) through DVB Dream software - it wouldn't play it, but it would dump it to disk. It's at 1440x1080 resolution which I've stretched to 16:9 widescreen here to 1900x1080. Compare it to a standard stream capture (720x576) here and I think you'll agree it's pretty impressive. Here they are in comparison.