DTH (Direct to Home) television service, also known as direct broadcast satellite service, allows us to view any channel that we want to watch with high quality picture quality. Gone are the days when we have to depend upon our cable operators services. In our country, Tata sky and Dish TV both have first started their DTH services using MPEG-2 technology. Later on, Airtel digital TV and other service providers have come with their DTH operations along with the new MPEG-4 technology. These DTH operators usually claim that they are offering best video and audio quality as they are using the more efficient MPEG-4 technology. But do you really think whether MPEG4 is really better than MPEG4? Or it is only marketing techniques for alluring the customers. Lets have a look at its differences and know is it really better than MPEG2 as it said to be.
MPEG-2 standard finally developed and introduced in the year 1999 for compressing audio/video in order to store portable digital media and for using in the broadcast applications of digital TV. Basically, a video consists of 25 frames per second and each frame is like a single still image. For compressing a raw video stream, this standard divides it into offset and reference frames. After MPEG-2 launch, its successor MPEG-4 technology was started in 1999 having a wider mandate as compared to MPEG-2. This technology supports better motion estimation, streaming media applications, interactive media applications and digital rights management (DRM). Besides, it is more suitable for a large range of applications for e.g. DVD storage, Digital TV broadcasting, videos streaming over Internet, video telephony and video conferencing and much.
Simply put, MPEG-4 standard is the best as compare to MPEG-2 when we talk about audio/video compression. Nevertheless, the degree of superiority may depend on the factors like bit rate using for compression & specific algorithm used for compressing videos. Apart from this, we can also get same quality picture as MPEG4 from MPEG2 standard. But it requires more bandwidth for delivering that quality. In fact, MPEG4 standard gives more benefits over MPEG-2 technology as they deliver excellent picture quality and more channels in a single transponder i.e. less bandwidth. So these are the some differences between MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standards.