ABSTRACT
One of the difficult questions still to be answered regarding broadcast advanced television is the nature of the relationship between high definition television (HDTV) and standard definition television (SDTV). This relationship has many aspects including technical, regulatory, production, and consumer acceptance matters. Any examination of the possibilities for handling SDTV and HDTV signals must include the cost of decoders as one of its elements. Advanced Television (ATV) decoders are MPEG-2 decoders, and their costs comprise, in roughly decreasing magnitude order, picture storage memory, channel buffer memory, the Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform, the Inverse Quantizer, motion vector processing, a run length processor, a variable length decoder, some post processing, a syntax parser, a memory controller, and a digital-to-analog converter. The relative costs of the components for HDTV and SDTV decoders can be determined by summing the costs of the individual functions. Another important factor in the cost of the devices in a decoder is the speeds at which they must operate.
