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Comcast Puts the Screws To HDTV
Todd Spangler writes "Comcast, like every video distributor, compresses its digital video signals. But to fit in more HDTV channels, Comcast is squeezing some signals more than others. The cable operator claims it is using improved compression techniques, so that most subscribers won't see any drop-off in picture quality. But A/V buff Ken Fowler claims the differences between some of Comcast's more highly compressed channels and Verizon's FiOS TV are indeed noticeable. He's posted his comparative test results on AVSForum.com — and the results are not pretty."
Yea cause the amount bandwidth taken up by a thousand spam e-mails isn't equivalent to 10 frames of 1080p. :P
The problem is, of course, that they are trying to transmit all of their hundreds of channels to your TV simultaneously, and let the decoder pick out the interesting bits. If they only sent the one that you were watching, there wouldn't be a problem.
Of course, then they'd have to discard their outmoded business model. So that won't happen. They'll just be marginalised and discarded in favour of internet distribution. It's the same thing that's happening to newspapers and bookstores - still around, but becoming less relevant every year.
Cue their attempts to get laws passed to ban the new competition...
But what I find the most frightening is looking at the pictures in the article I quoted, and then realising that "These images were rescaled to half-resolution". Imagine how coarse they must look at twice the size if a downscaling doesn't produce anything more smooth than that.
I'm starting to rediscover my love for that ~15 year old 14" CRT thing I have in my room.
I wonder why bother with 1080 sets if they're doing this. The difference in quality seems quite dramatic. I would guess that while you have a choice between 720 and 1080, it's hardly worth extra $$ for the 1080. Just curious if this would seem true to others.
HDTV only defines the resolution AFAIK. At least I've never seen any minimum for HDTV bit rates to still be considered HDTV. Just because it's 1080p it shouldn't be considered HD if it's 2Mbps. HDTV specs should define a bit rate that has to be required to have HD. I don't see how Comcast can call what was shown in the link as HD with all that macro blocking.
The ONLY thing they can do is either drastically reduce the number of digital and HD channels they offer their subscribers, or bite the bullet and start massively upgrading their network.
They could also cut back the number of analog channels they're supporting. Each one frees up a digital QAM channel, which can house two 19 Mbit MPEG-2 HD channels, which matches OTA quality. Unfortunately, the all-digital mandate for 2009 only applies to OTA, and not to cable systems, most of whom will continue to support analog for a long time.
Epic Fail.
What? Consumers aren't allowed to criticize a service they pay for when they notice other competing services provide better quality? What world do you live in? Nowhere did I say it was *easy*, I said it was possible, given money and desire to provide BETTER service than your competitors.
And for your information, I have provided city-wide Internet, TV and phone service before. No, not millions, but Comcast doesn't operate at that level either, if you had any clue as to how they actually operate. Most of their services operate sub-regionally, in loosely grouped clusters of service areas. They are moving in the direction of combining their service zones, which according to anyone familiar with basic economic theory would understand should decrease their cost of service, meaning more money in their coffers which should enable them to perform service upgrades mentioned by myself and others.
Fair enough but it is important to note that most people tend to have biases towards hardware based on one or two bad experiences.
This is true, and it may be that if I got another Actiontec it would work just fine; however I use my network for a lot of various things and I prefer to choose the router that I use.
Why not ? Because Sweden is not in North America.
I honestly don't know much about Sweden (despite a few visits), but I think it is safe to assume your telecommunications providers are nowhere near as enormous, corrupt and heavy-handed as American ones. There is no competition at all in North America, everyone just gouges like mad, and when an independent tries to push out better services and/or lower prices, they get sued into oblivion or often times bought out and destroyed.
If there were some form of harsh punishment for such blatant abuse of the capitalist system, maybe things would be better for everyone here, but the people drafting the rules are on the receiving end of significant lobbying from the telecoms, so it won't happen anytime soon.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
They could achieve really good compression by throwing away the colors and using 256 shades of gray instead, throwing away a portion of the image along the left and right sides for a 4:3 aspect ratio, and hmmm... maybe use 486 scanlines total in the picture. That should result in a great picture while using the least possible bandwidth.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
This only works when municipal governments set policy and the corporations follow instead of corporations influencing municipal policy with *ahem* campaign contributions.
Just goes to show how quality "commercial quality" is.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I haven't followed up on this, but it was a couple of years now that I read a very involved discussion about Direct TV doing the exact same thing. The big issue there was that not only was the HD signal down-rezzed, but in times of huge HD traffic -- such as the football package they were pushing at the time -- they would turn off less popular channels (such as TNT HD). Apparently, the root of the issue was that they didn't have enough satellites to supply the proper amount of bandwidth. They had another satellite launch scheduled for early last year. That was supposed to solve the problem, but I haven't gotten around to seeing if it was actually true.
Are we surprised that Comcast is down-rezzing HD video? Were we surprised to discover they're throttling BitTorrent? Not if you've ever had to use their service. You take what they give you, and if it fails catastrophically, then you might be able to find someone to get the service restored -- but complaining that the performance of a thing isn't what it's supposed to be? You'd be lucky if you found someone that had any idea what you were even talking about...
MOD PARENT UP!
:-/
This stupid dickering over population density and whatall manages to totally miss the point. In the U.S. there IS NO FREE MARKET for telco. Not even close. In which case, inertia is the biggest culprit, which explains why a very significant minority of the populous STILL can't get anything better (bandwidth/latency-wise) than freakin' dialup. The 'last-mile' problem exists for the same reason. When there is one telephone company and one cable company in town (in some cases they are one and the same), there is absolutely NO reason why that company would roll out last-mile fiber. The CEOs of those companies would be flogged by the shareholders for even suggesting what would be perceived as an unnecessary and costly venture. It is a chicken-and-egg scenario for a lot of companies. For the majority of internet users, anything beyond bare-bones 1024/256 DSL is really not necessary. People would likely find a use for it if it existed, but don't demand the upgrade in infrastructure because it is a white elephant ATM.
For example, I live 18 miles from the nearest town, and get 1024/256 DSL by pure accident because I live on a well-traveled highway. Us lucky folks get to watch streaming video without hiccups. Our modem-bound neighbors a mile to the north have no such luxury.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
The statement was still a lie. He may be repeating the official company lie, but he was stating as fact something that was untrue, and somewhere along the line someone intentionally made that untrue statement and trained other people to repeat the lie. Actually, if the person was just repeating a trained lie, then not only should you believe nothing the individual says, but you should also assume anyone else in his position will be telling you lies.
Just because the person you are speaking to is dumb as a box of rocks, don't assume that they are not just the mouthpiece for someone smarter that is intentionally trying to deceive you.
"Popular brands have more people and thus more failures, as long as they're not disproportionate there's really no news there"
/wallet?
popular brands have more failures? Gee, maybe you should tell that to Honda/Acura and Toyota/Lexus. They must have missed that memo.. they didn't know that they are supposed to be putting out more crappy broken products/cars instead of the ones they make. You know the ones that get best value and reliability and such ratings every year by consumer reports every year because they dont have broken hardware. Why are mac's becoming more popular? because among other things they "just work".
theory sounds like bs to me... the brand should get more popular because of a LACK of failures and problems.
my only remaining question, is why is said "popular" thing still popular if its such a piece of junk... sounds like people are getting to lazy to vote with their feet
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
I would like to state the following:
Any time an individual searches the Internet hoping to find negativity on any topic, no matter how innocent, they will not be disappointed in that effort.
To wit:
Linux sucks. Windows sucks. Dell sucks. HP sucks. Driving sucks. Mercedes-Benz sucks. Kia sucks. Harley Davidson sucks. Furries suck. Google sucks. Indoor plumbing sucks.
I'd go on, but Adolf's Third Law states that I don't have to.
Kid-proof tablet..
Perhaps he meant to say "did not exist". The American digital TV standard was finalized long before H.264 was even being worked on (back in the 1990s). And H.264 still isn't as mature a technology as MPEG-2; the MPEG-2 ecosystem is quite rich. Yes, you can do broadcasting in H.264, but digital video compression has basically meant MPEG-2 for more than a decade now.
Switching from MPEG-2 to H.264 for ATSC is completely impractical at this point. However, I believe the ATSC is studying the issue, and there have been proposals for H.264 over 16VSB for mobile TV applications and such. As long as MPEG-2 goes over the main channel, there's no technical reason why ATSC can't carry an H.264 signal in a side channel. That's probably how any transition would work; broadcasters will likely be required to send an MPEG-2 signal, to avoid obsoleting existing equipment. However, then you have to consider whether you're really gaining anything by doing that, since you still have a fixed amount of bandwidth to work with. Perhaps you could use multiple channels, one carrying MPEG-2 and another H.264, in areas where spectrum is available.
It's all well and good to say Norway is switching over to H.264, but Norway is a relatively small country, population-wise, with high per capita income. Upgrading the infrastructure is relatively simple, compared to a larger country like the United States, especially considering it's mainly the less affluent users who use OTA vs. cable or satellite. I'd note that the US isn't alone in this, either; DVB uses MPEG-2 extensively as well. Switching to H.264 is a transition which is currently in progress, and not just in TV. Computers still have trouble decoding H.264 purely in software, meaning we're in a similar situation to back when MPEG-2 decoder chips were pretty much mandatory for decent quality video playback.
This stupid dickering over population density and whatall manages to totally miss the point. In the U.S. there IS NO FREE MARKET for telco. Not even close. In which case, inertia is the biggest culprit, which explains why a very significant minority of the populous STILL can't get anything better (bandwidth/latency-wise) than freakin' dialup.
I would argue that free market isn't the only solution. In fact, pretty much any system other than the one we have now would be better for ISP's in the USA.
For instance, free market might solve some of the problems, except that the established companies already own the cable. A startup can't put in cable without negotiating with the town and without a huge startup capital investment. In this situation, a socialized internet provider would work, too, like water. Buy your internet from the government, which runs a nominally third party entity that handles the technology but that has service requirements and price caps.
Honestly, the fact that right now we have a government-granted monopoly, and that it's essentially unregulated, is what's causing the problems.
~X
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