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Comment by anabis | Hacker News Reader

Most digital TV broadcasts use MPEG-2, don't they?

DVB-T2 can use a variety of codecs.

From 2022 some European countries (Germany, Italy, Czech Republic, Slovakia) will pass their broadcasting system to DVB-T2 with H.265. Since January 2017 new TVs must support HEVC decoding.

Sadly, no AV1...

Do wonder how many will be left hanging high and dry with that transition.

Hopefully they'll do something similar to what the US did during the analog->digital switch: provide external tuner hardware to people who can or won't upgrade their televisions either free or subsidized.

In the US transition to digital transmission, nobody was left high and dry. Perhaps mildly confused or inconvenienced by the need to get and setup a government subsidized converter box. Doubtful this would go any different for the above.

we will see how good DVB-T2 will be... I don't think it will get critical mass and it will end up being used for LTE/next gen. I mean it's mostly a paid service, at least in germany and it will not have any benefits over next gen mobile network. at some point it's easier to merge terrestial over IP, especially if you can have IPv6 only networks, which makes some stuff simpler (multicast + mcast routing).

Also LTE next can already do everything DVB-T2 is capable of, so I doubt that without any full free plans that DVB-T2 will gain traction.

There is also a standard for mobile television called MBMS which will probably kill of any dvb-t stuff in the long term.

Edit: since we talked about a codedc. most of these services currently use H.264 and I do not think that they will migrate to H.265. Guess as soon as mobile devices ship with hardware AV1, there will be Mobile TV with AV1.

And some other countries (e.g. Slovenia, Sweden, UK) use H.264 as well.

Yes, ATSC in North America generally uses MPEG-2 video, in an MPEG-2 transport stream (often with AC-3 as the audio codec).

There are provisions to use h.264 within that transport stream, but I'm not sure if any stations actually broadcast with that.

Some cable systems (Comcast has been migrating I believe) do use H.264, but I don’t know of any OTA usage. There is “Mobile DTV” AKA ATSC-M/H which uses H264 and is designed for mobile reception, but stations are rare and commercial adoption is nonexistent.

I posted a longer reply to someone else, but to clarify, when I say obsolete, I mean technically obsolete rather than commercially obsolete.

MPEG-2 TS as a container, something more modern for the video/audio codecs.

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