Playing with 480i

This shouldn't be that big of a deal for me to start playing with 480i at this point, since standard definition television is about as basic as it gets when you're talking about digital television. On the surface, it doesn't seem like it's much different than the old NTSC format we just converted from but in reality, since 480i exists in the ATSC digital standards, even NTSC would have to be converted to 480i digital. In any case, at some point I'd rather be doing Mater Dei Television as a VoD (video on demand) channel through a server as opposed to what we have now. That way, you can watch through a set top box from your easy chair instead of in front of your computer.

Can you already watch MDTV on your regular TV? Yes, but...

The problem is that we've only got X amount of bandwidth available, and while the programs are already encoded for optimal performance at minimal bandwidth and are viewable on a TV if you're hooked up to a media center computer, they'd still look much better at higher resolution and bandwidth. Thus, we start playing with 480i. It's by no means perfect, but perhaps as things progress, we'll get up to high definition 1080i yet!

Stay Tuned!