Technical details of HDTV

The pixel aspect ratio of native HD signals is 1.0, or 1 pixel length = 1 pixel width. New HD compression and recording formats such as HDV use rectangular pixels for more efficient compression and to open HDTV acquisition for the consumer market.

Within television studios and other production and distribution facilities, the SMPTE 292M interconnect standard (a nominally 1.5 Gb/s, 75-ohm serial digital interface) is used to route uncompressed HDTV signals. The native bitrate of HDTV formats is highly excessive for over-the-air broadcast and consumer distribution media, hence the widespread use of compression in consumer applications. SMPTE 292M interconnects are generally unavailable in consumer equipment, partially due to the expense involved in supporting this format, and partially because consumer electronics manufacturers are required (typically by licensing agreements) to not provide unencrypted digital outputs on consumer video equipment, for fear that this would aggravate the issue of video piracy.