Scott Greczkowski said:
No that is NOT the case... yet... they are working ona few seperate technologies which they can not talk about yet as they are still in devlopment, these decvices include compression couplers which could be something like a switch however in it can decode the MPEG4 signal and convert it to a 8PSK signal which is usuable by 8psk equiped receivers.
As I said they have no solid plans for what they are going to do, this is all is a state of flux at the moment.
Again your receiver that works today will work tommorow will work next year.
8PSK and MPEG-4 are very different things. 8PSK is a satellite data transmission format. It does not indicate what data it is transmitting, it is just responsible for getting the bits from the satellite to the receiver. The data could be EPG, MPEG-2 encoded video, an audio track, whatever they want to send.
MPEG-4 is a way to compress a video stream into bits that are transmitted. MPEG-4 does not care how it is transmitted, it could go OTA, via BPSK, QPSK, 8PSK, 16QAM, ethernet, etc.
The 921 is perfectly capable of receiving and storing a bit stream from the satellites in BPSK/QPSK/8PSK/16QAM. The issue is if the bit stream happens to contain a video stream encoded in MPEG-4, will the 921 be able to display it. It will be able to receive and record it since it is just bits like all the other satellite information. Note that the 921 does not do HD PIP, so it only needs to be able to decode and display a single MPEG-4 stream at one time (while in the background up to 2 possible streams are being recorded from the satellite tuners or OTA tuner).
Someone that has very detailed knowledge of the inner workings of the 921 would have to investigate and report on this. It is not something that is likely to be announce anytime soon. It could be possible that some ASIC inside the box could be used for hardware assist and allow the 921 to keep up with displaying an MPEG-4 video stream. It is also possible that Dish could release a PCI card that could be put in the 921 to do the hardware assist on the display, perhaps even enhancing it enough to be able to show PIP HD (probably unlikely). Or is it possible that Dish could decide that there is no pratical solution (i.e. sending in all the 921s for retrofit is to hard) and comes up with some sort of replacement deal.
I believe from reading broadcom's chipset specs that the 921 uses it should be able to take any satellite signal up to 30 mbaud 3/4 16 QAM or about 83 mbit/sec (note enough for 4 uncompressed HD channels per transponder MPEG-2, note that this is not DBS transponders since they are limited bandwidth but more likely the 39MHZ Ka transponders on AMC-15).
The 921 (and 811/6000 plus all the other Dish boxes using the same chipset) are well able to take a lot more bandwidth from the satellites. The MPEG-4 issue is a different animal, it is what to do with the bits once they have received them.