Snell & Wilcox announced that KNME-TV, Albuquerque, NM, has purchased its Memphis HD encoder to enable 24-hour HD broadcasting alongside a new datacasting service.
S&W said the Memphis system allowed KNME to re-encode the 18 MB/s HD feed from PBS to a 15.5 MB/s signal without compromising image quality. This bit-rate reduction, in turn, frees up the bandwidth necessary for delivering both HD broadcasts and IP datacasting services over a 19.39 MB/s ATSC bit stream.
The station said the pre-processing capability of the Memphis encoder was so good that the resulting images were actually better than the incoming feed, with less noise and improved colorimetry.
KNME-TV, the first Albuquerque station to broadcast HD signals, has installed the Memphis system in its TV studios at the University of New Mexico. The station transmits HD signals to a 120-mile radius around Albuquerque, as well as to southern Colorado and Taos, NM.
Memphis is an SD and HD MPEG-2 encoder that combines S&W's Prefix compression preprocessing and Ph.C motion estimation technology.
For more information, visit www.snellwilcox.com/.
