scott wrote:

> DVDs have a bandwidth of around 10 Mbit/s, but they use an old 
> compression technology.

MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 are old, no argument about that. ;-)

> Using modern codecs on faster processors you 
> can get higher quality than DVD through 2-5 Mbit/s bandwidth.

You would hope so. It's just that I have yet to see such a thing. Every 
codec I have ever tried has produced horrid results, with the exception 
of MPEG-1 at really high bitrate, or whatever my DVD authoring software 
is using (presumably MPEG-2, no idea what settings).

> A friend 
> of mine watches NFL football over the net, in HD quality, at 2mbit/s.  
> The quality is awesome (I plugged my laptop into the TV), way better 
> than any normal TV feed or DVD. I was quite surprised how the quality 
> was that good at such a low bitrate - but it was using almost 100% of 
> one of my CPUs continuously!

Now, see, actually *getting* 2 Mbit/sec of real data over the Internet 
seems like an impressive feat on its own...

(My Internet connection is supposed to deliver 8 Mbit/sec, but you never 
actually get anything approaching that. Plus you're probably talking 
about the bitrate of the codec; there's all the framing overhead and so 
forth on top of that to consider - although presumably if it's streaming 
it'll be UDP, not TCP...)

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