Posted: 23rd Mar, 2005 By: MarkJ
TV Channel 5 has launched a pay-as-you-go broadband video download service for the car show Fifth Gear. It offers a selection of free car review videos, with others for different cars costing £1.50:
The free clips run at a resolution of 768 by 432 pixels, and are encoded with a bit rate of 1363kbps (1.3Mbps) (NOTE: Connections slower than 1.3Mbps can still download the files).
You will need Windows Media Player 10 to play the files which are encoded in the WMV format. The free clips we have downloaded do look to be good quality, while not DVD quality they approach it.
Three minutes of video footage equates to around a 25MB download. The advantage of downloading high bit rate material is that once downloaded you can play it locally and avoid any frame drops due to Internet congestion.More @
ADSLGuide.