The satisfication of ears wont take much. For the last 20 years, we’ve been happy with a stereo image of around 20khz bandwidth. Sure, you can add a few more channels to that. DVD-Audio is up there at the top of the audio definition tree offering 6 channels at 96khz with 24bit resolution. That takes 9Mbps compared to CD at 1.4mbps. Lets assume we can compress DVD-Audio resolutions by the same amount as CD resolutions (by about 1:10 ratio) and we have around 1mbps for all the audio you’ll ever need. In fact, i’d go as far as to say that with some of the newer psycoacoutic algorithms, you’ll be happy with 512kbps audio rate.
Eyes, however are a different matter. Can you imagine the bandwidth needed to cover all the data flowing into your eyes? Gigabits per second I guess. However, when did 180 degree cinema ever get popular and can you imagine the costs of making films at eye-resoution. Impossible that it would ever happen. So, we’re left with something thats around the HD resolution mark (1920×1028) I guess. Maybe a bit more for the future so lets add 25%. Using something like mpeg2, we can deliver broadcast quality HD in around, 25mbps. But thats not current technology, so lets chop it in half and say we can deliver HD in mpeg4 format in about 12Mbps. Seems reasonable.
So what do we have so far? 0.5mbps for ears and 12Mbps for eyes. Anything else required? No, I dont think so. Lets round it up – 13Mbps will be fine thank you.
Next thoughts – what about a bit of internet thrown in, some picture-in-picture, recording while watching and a second person – This changes the requirement somewhat. I’ll think about this in my next post.
