Image Quality Issues
Judging from IBC2005, however, H.264 encoders still leave a little to be desired. The key areas that need improvement are image quality, encoding data speed and device size.

Concerning image quality, one engineer working in broadcasting equipment in Japan commented, "Much of the imagery shown at IBC2005 looks great at first glance, but really isn't satisfactory when you examine it with professional criteria. Hidden block noise shows up, for example, if you look at sports imagery with fast motion." In fact, coarse imagery could be seen in a number of products at IBC2005.

For encoding data speed, Tandberg Television Ltd of the UK offered a demonstration multiplexing six HDTV channels into a 45Mbps bandwidth. Channel bandwidth was varied flexibly between 4Mbps and 20Mbps as needed to handle rapid motion or other characteristics. Most of the items on exhibition, however, ran only about 10Mbps, and developing manufacturers said their target was to maintain current image quality while halving the data rate to about 5Mbps.

http://neasia.nikkeibp.com/neasia/002786