4K over satellite

I thought you might all be interested in this:

http://www.techhive.com/article/204...eneck-getting-content-to-the-home-at-ifa.html

Eutelsat was demonstrating its 4xHD 4K service and Astra had an HEVC channel setup. The DVB Forum folks said they are moving towards getting HEVC into DVB-S2 rather than defining a new transmission standard. I guess something like DVB-S2 v2.

I also discovered something I didn't know: DVB-S2 has an optional hierarchical modulation method that allows backwards compatibility with DVB-S receivers. I presume this is something that is not widely used, because I don't recall ever seeing a mention of it.

The Eutelsat 4xDVB-S2 system was using 72Mbps in total. I seem to remember Eutelsat has some wideband transponders so I guess it was using one of those.

The Astra service was running over an 18Mbps stream. The actual stream was constant bit rate but it consisted of a content that was pre-encoded with a variable bit rate that averages 8Mbps. They filled the space with blank data to make the CBR signal to ease the real-time decoding, which was being done by a pre-production decoder chip for future set-top boxes.

An Astra rep told me he expects two 4K channels per conventional transponder.