[BC] HD Radio Article

[Goran Tomas]

--- At 26.2.2006 17:33, Davis, Steve - SVP wrote: ---
>No, iBiquity sets no constraints on the quality of stations' Internet
>feeds.  However Internet feed quality can be variable and depending on
>traffic etc. you might experience drops or buffering latency.  Perhaps
>the author of the article experienced this.

I belive the problem is actually in the fact that these feeds use 
Windows Media codec. Windows Media has been found by both users and 
independent research inferior to Real, AAC and aacPlus. This is the 
result of an EBU (European Broadcast Union) research on low-bitrate 
streaming codec quality: 
http://www.codingtechnologies.com/products/assets/ebu_test_48kbps_2.gif

Whole report: http://www.ebu.ch/CMSimages/en/tec_doc_t3296_tcm6-10497.pdf

These HD/HD2 streams that have been put up should really be encoded 
using aacPlus streams. Not only is aacPlus similar to HDC codec used 
in HD Radio, but it appears to be even better.

Either that or bitrate should be much higher. But higher bitrate 
excludes those listeners without broadband Internet access and 
substantially increases costs to those who provide streams (data 
traffic is increased and they need more total bandwidth as well).


Regards,
Goran Tomas