Last night I was watching Sky Sport 1 over Telstra's Digital/Cable TV and there was an interruption to the signal from Sky's end that caused the Sky "Rain fade" decoder notice to appear, and when the signal resumed, the Sky decoder channel info OSD appeared over the coverage. As far as I can see, Telstra must have either an actual Sky decoder (or some device running that firmware) at their end and are sending the signal from that out over their Digital TV network.
I was under the impression from previous posts on this board that Telstra didn't recompress the MPEG-2 signal from Sky and just somehow transmitted it over their cable network without recompression. But that isn't consistent with what I saw, at least not on the Sky Sport 1 channel.
If there's decoder OSD graphics being overlaid on the video, then it can't be the raw MPEG-2 signal from the Optus satellite that Telstra customers are receiving since there's a device modifying the video in the stream.
Is my reasoning here correct? Is there any possible way you can overlay graphics on a MPEG-2 stream without decompressing it first, overlaying the graphics, and then recompressing it afterward? If not, then it's fair to assume the digital signal we (Telstra customers) receive isn't as clean as the one Sky subscribers get which is disappointing, given the overcompressed Sky source signal to begin with.
I'd be interested if anyone does know the setup Telstra uses to send out the Sky channels.
Cheers
digital