I was wondering whether there is a consensus regarding the picture quality for the LA or NY locals from people who previously had viewed the MPEG-2 transmissions and are now viewing the MPEG-4 version.
It depends highly on the local station, some are better than others for mpeg 4 pq. However, even with the better ones, the pq is a bit better than mpeg 2 at this point, but you are prone to more technical issues particular with the audio, hopefully they will fix this soon.
Ideally if they are passing the MPEG4 stations at full resolution, they should look better then the HDLite stations being broadcast over MPEG2. I don't know if anyone has been able to confirm the resolution of the MPEG4 locals yet.
I can confirm the Boston ones do look superior for the most part to the mpeg 2 distants, but again there have been technical issues beyond the video that isn't as common with mpeg 2.
I do quite a bit of video conferencing with work. The MPEG4 (H.264) picture quality is better than the MPEG2 videos. It offers better compression and a sharper picture in my assessment.
I both seem equally succeptable to any buffering issues and take about the same amount of time to recover.
I know there is more technology to the SAT transmission than the MPEG4 CODEC; however, I wanted to pass along my experience with MPEG4 over an MPLS enabled IP network.