New UK VOD service.

A new digital download services was announced by the three big TV companies in the UK- BBC, ITV and C4. Believe me - this is going to be a great service. C4 have been winning many awards for their 4OD service as well as being popular with "da youf" market. See. I have not lost my ability to talk with the younger generation.

Some Technical Mumbo Jumbo for you!

So i was wondering why the playback from the IPOD was so good on the TV!

The video's/TV are recorded as MPEG4 with a H.264 codec which is great news as alot of the broadcasters use this . Both HD-DVD and Blue-Ray have H264 as a mandatory part of the player as well :)

Back to today though. So the content i have uses the H264 codec. Great news

Apple's 5th Generation iPod can play H.264 Baseline Profile up to Level 3 with support for bit rates up to 1.5 Mbit/s, image resolutions up to 640x480, and frame rates up to 30 frames per second. This device also plays MPEG-4 Part 2 Simple Profile video, up to 2.5 Mbit/s, 640x480 pixels, 30 frames per sec. Playback at full DVD resolution does not require any firmware modification to the iPod.

So content, storage device and output are all good. Now to the TV. I have a Sony 32" WEGA CRT. DVB compliant and also PAL format. So what's taking the signal and converting it to play to the TV? Something smart is going on.

Err, this requires more research or answers from a reader.