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Old 15th July 2019, 23:44   #28  |  Link
Blue_MiSfit
Derek Prestegard IRL
 
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Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 5,988
MPEG-2 is still absolutely mainstream, widely deployed, and utterly critical in professional workflows, mostly in broadcast. Just a few examples:

- OTA broadcast via ATSC is still MPEG-2.
- Many cable systems still use MPEG-2 for linear channels due to legacy settop boxes (often live transcoded from the "real" AVC used by the rest of the system). Lots of cable VOD is still MPEG-2 as well.
- Many legacy HD and SD linear channels are originated on satellite via MPEG-2
- DVDs are still very much a thing.

- Most linear TV channels play MPEG-2 files out of their video servers. IMX is common for SD, and XDCAM HD422 is common for HD.

That last one I know a ton about as I worked on the ingest / workflow side of broadcast for many years. Most channels have huge libraries of content in their "house format" which tends to be MPEG-2 based for simplicity and consistency with files ingested 10+ years ago. You change as little as possible when taking channels to air. Storage is definitely expensive, but the businesses tend to prefer spending the money on the old file formats since it mitigates risk elsewhere.

Thankfully nobody doing OTT streaming uses MPEG-2, because as we all know it's utterly outclassed by 2+ compression format generations and 20+years of development. Things move slow

Last edited by Blue_MiSfit; 15th July 2019 at 23:47.
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