What will MPEG-2 do for video coding?
As I said, there is a considerable loss of quality in going from CCIR-601 to SIF resolution. For entertainment video, it’s simply not acceptable. You want to use more bits and code all or almost all the CCIR-601 data. From subjective testing at the Japan meeting in November 1991, it seems that 4 MBits/s can give very good quality compared to the original CCIR-601 material. The objective of MPEG-2 is to define a bit stream optimized for these resolutions and bit-rates.