Snell & Wilcox has announced that Albuquerque, NM, -based KNME-TV is the first PBS station to use the company's MEMPHIS HD encoder to enable 24-hour HD broadcasting alongside a new datacasting service. The Snell & Wilcox MEMPHIS system allows KNME-TV to re-encode the 18MB/s HD feed from PBS to a 15.5MB/s signal. This bit rate reduction frees the bandwidth necessary for delivering both HD broadcasts and IP datacasting services over a 19.39MB/s ATSC bit stream.
KNME-TV has installed the MEMPHIS system in its TV studios at the University of New Mexico. The station transmits HD signals to a 120mi radius around Albuquerque, as well as to southern Colorado and Taos, NM. With the ability to re-encode HD signals at a high quality level and lower bit rate, KNME-TV has been able to launch commercial datacasting services such as delivery of DVD-quality movies to members of a subscription service. The Snell & Wilcox MEMPHIS is also used for ingest, DVD authoring, satellite uplink and long-haul transmission to other studios on fiber.
MEMPHIS is an SD/HD MPEG-2 encoder that combines PREFIX compression preprocessing and Ph.C motion estimation technology. MEMPHIS accepts inputs in both SD/HD 1080/720 formats; uncompressed PCM, MP1L2, Dolby E and AC-3 audio; and encoding material at any MPEG-2 profile.
More information is available at www.knmetv.org.and www.snellwilcox.com.