I’ve admitted on the show and here that I don’t have that really in depth knowledge when it comes to different signals, codecs, containers, etc.,etc.,etc. Luckily for us though, there is someone out there who does.
We’ve talked about him on the Entertainment 2.0 podcast, as well as quoted his articles here and now, the Master of Media Center, Ben Drawbaugh of EngadgetHD, has posted a complete primer on everything you need to know about OTA and Cable HD signals.
From Ben’s article:
Typical for the tech industry that the term broadband isn’t exactly used correctly, but it’s probably more fair to say that word just change meanings as the technologies evolves. Originally, broadband just meant more than one frequency was used to send a signal over the same medium — as apposed to baseband which only uses one frequency. The easiest example to understand is FM Radio. There is one station at 97.1 with a completely different station on 97.9. Television stations work the same way, but the frequencies are mapped to channel numbers to make things simple — so for example, channel 8 in the US is at 180.31MHz and since each channel is 6MHz, channel 9 is at 186.31MHz. Each of these channels is like real estate — they aren’t making any more of it — and broadcasters get a license from the FCC to use it with some non-monetary strings attached.
There is a ton of great info in the article. Even if it isn’t something you feel your really need to know, more knowledge is never a bad thing. Hopefully Ben and the other writers at EngadgetHD will be able to keep these types of articles coming for a long time.
