How many megabytes get transferred in 1 hr of SD or HD streaming?

[Aloke P]

Now that ISP's are threatening to meter their services (charge according to a tiered level of bytes transferred), I am curious about how many megabytes get downloaded when I watch 1 hr of SD or HD shows (at highest quality).

Any idea about the bandwidth used when streaming SD/HD to either

a) PC or
b) Samsung BD-P2500 BD player

Thanks.
AP

[Lester]

There was a good discussion on this board about that while ago; you might be able to find it. IIRC, it works on to about 1 gb per hour at 2.2 mbps download speed. At the time, 2.2 mbps was SD for the PC. Some of the streams, like for the Roku, have since been more compressed. i don't know about the Samsung or sliverlight, but, in general, the 1 gb per hour may be a useful guide (assuming I'm remembering that correctly).

[Adrian]

Standard def top speed is currently 1.5 Mbits/sec / 8 = 0.1875 Mbytes/sec * 3600 = 675 Mbytes/hour

[Lester]

I was hoping you would post, Adrian. I think my recollection was right. With 2.2 mbps, it was about 1 Gb per hour, and now with the compression to 1.5, it's 0.675 gb per hour. I think means, with the TW limit of 40 gb per month, you can watch 59 hours of streaming. But only if you did nothing else, which would not be likely.

Also HD on the Roku is 2.6 mbps. Just estimating, that might be about 1.3 GB per hour.

[Aloke P]

From what I hear, the UI of the Samsung is just like the Roku. So I'm guessing that streaming to BD players or TV's will be in the same range.

[Adrian]

Check out Neil Hunt's netflix blog entry from last year on encoding formats.
http://blog.netflix.com/2008/11/encoding-for-streaming.html

At present Roku/LG/Samsung/TiVo/Silverlight use 0.375, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.6, 3.8 Mbits/s. There is also an audio stream at 64Kbit or 128Kbit to add to this.

The old PC player and Xbox use 0.5, 1.0, 1.6, 2.2, 3.4, 4.0, 5.5 with a less efficient compression technology.

The last two on each are 720p High Def, the others are 480p.

You can divide by 8 and multiply by 3600 to get MB/hour from any of these numbers.

[beeswax]

This story is interesting:

Time Warner Cable on Thursday afternoon shelved its plan to impose excessive Internet fees against those who use the Web for more than email and basic surfing.

[Aloke P]

It is a temporary step while the industry "educates" the public. The effort to cap will return.