Rather than doing my usual mini-review for The Canberra Times for this coming Monday, I’ve done a piece on digital TV. Primarily, what it now offers. In preparing for it, I’ve gathered and calculated the basic technical specs for the various digital TV stations, at least as they’re broadcast in Canberra. So here they are, as of March 2010. I recorded not less than three hours of each station split across at least three sessions on separate days. Whether or not they are the same as used elsewhere in Australia I don’t know, although it seems likely for ABC and SBS.
| Station | Ch | Audio format |
Audio bitrate (kbps) |
Video resolution |
Average video bitrate (Mbps) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ABC1 | 2 | MPEG 2.0 | 256 | 720 x 576i | 5.40 |
| ABC2 | 22 | MPEG 2.0 | 256 | 720 x 576i | 3.05 |
| ABC3 | 23 | MPEG 2.0 | 256 | 720 x 576i | 2.50 |
| ABC HDTV | 20 | DD 2.0 | 448 | 1280 x 720p | 9.04 |
| SBS ONE | 3 | MPEG 2.0 | 192 | 720 x 576i | 4.01 |
| SBS TWO | 32 | MPEG 2.0 | 192 | 720 x 576 | 3.85 |
| SBS HD | 30 | MPEG 2.0 | 192 | 1280 x 720p | 9.37 |
| SC10 Canberra | 5 | MPEG 2.0 | 256 | 720 x 576i | 5.92 |
| One HD Canberra | 50 | DD 2.0 | 448 | 1440 x 1080i | 14.31 |
| PRIME Canberra | 6 | MPEG 2.0 | 256 | 720 x 576i | 4.93 |
| 7TWO on PRIME | 62 | MPEG 2.0 | 256 | 720 x 576i | 4.99 |
| PRIME HD | 60 | DD 2.0 | 256 | 1440 x 1080i | 10.25 |
| WIN Canberra | 8 | MPEG 2.0 | 384 | 720 x 576i | 4.92 |
| GO! Canberra | 88 | MPEG 2.0 | 384 | 720 x 576i | 4.11 |
| WIN HD Canberra | 80 | DD 2.0 | 448 | 1440 x 1080i | 9.88 |
The standouts: One HD gives a very high bitrate for HDTV, while ABC is extremely low.
Interesting points: all the HD stations use Dolby Digital except for SBS HD. All the 1080i stations use the lower resolution 1,440 pixel across version.
Update (Friday 26 March 2010): As requested in comments, I’ve added ABC3 which I overlooked. This involved two recordings on two days amounting to over 300 minutes. The two recordings were quite close to each other.
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