The Technology of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4

Digital video broadcasting is an evidence of the fact that science has done everything possible and is continuously and consistently striving to make our lives even better. Today, we not want to have machines that support us to make our lives comfortable but we also want to keep the quality of entertainment in our lives at an impeccable level. Today we want to access every television channel of various parts of the world. Thus, having the best quality level of entertainment has become need in our lives, from a once-upon-a-time want. This has happened because we now can have multiplex or a bundle of various TV channels to be broadcast due to digital video broadcasting. The service uses a single radio frequency to broadcast the television channels and services. Digital video broadcasting has enabled various service providers to increase their capacity to make more entertaining programs for a wide variety of audiences around the world.

This digital broadcasting works by compressing various audio and video data for transmission, which is done by using compressing standards like, MPEG-2. This works efficiently to bundle the data for easy transmission. But a newer technology is also in use, in different regions of the world, which is MPEG-4. It is obviously newer and more advanced, hence works better than MPEG-4 even with half the bit rate as that of MPEG-2. MPEG-4 uses AAC for audio and AVC for video as standard protocols to compress the data. It has been predicted that there are going to be further advancements in the technology and MPEG-4 will get further evolved into being more sophisticated technology, so as to help digital video broadcasting to reach higher levels of performance in future.

Several statistical multiplexing tools are employed to produce high quality video output. One such method is constant bit rate encoding, which is allocating a particular bandwidth of frequency to TV channels. Each bandwidth is unique for each channel. However, this encoding does not perform well at times of high demand, thus the video quality suffers. Although, the video data has a lot of redundancy and does not require much capacity in the bandwidth to get transferred, even then encoding makes the quality get deteriorated.

To get rid of the problems faced in constant bit rate encoding, technology has invented variable bit rate coding which does not let the picture quality suffer, even in high demand. In variable bit rate encoding, each channel is given a particular capacity of bandwidth to operate within, but if the need arises, the capacity can be increased so that the quality of the picture does not get deteriorated. In this regard, look ahead and feedback are two approaches which are employed to gauge the results.

MPEG-4 along with variable bit rate encoding can work wonders for digital video broadcasting. These multiplexing tools have enabled entertainment media to touch its current height of performance. However, with the advent of newer technology, the need to improve and invent more sophisticated statistical tools; gets all the more dire.

Author Bio: The author is an experienced writer for consumer electronic product reviews and shares the Autoboxen site. Where you can find out more about consumer electronics like Mercedes Lautsprecher and Auto and what it can do for you.

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: Digital,video,tools,broadcasting,dvd,Mpeg-4,Mpeg-2,powernetshop.at

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