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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."
He was yapping on and on about why we should switch to Comcast Digital Voice, and we can save over $100 if we bundle pack our services (we have Internet and cable from Comcast right now).
:)
:)
But my dad said we were thinking about canceling our Comcast cable and getting FiOS, then the Comcast guy, noticing our spiffy new HDTV, starting going on and on about how we would have like 50 new "HD" channels by the end of the year, all at MUCH better quality.
Yea right! What a LIE that Comcast guy was saying! I told him we will think about getting Comcast phone service when BitTorrent works on our Internet like
First post w00t
To be more precise, they're putting the screws to the consumer. Lower quality than Over The Air (OTA), all for a premium price.
No thanks. I'll stick with my Yagi antenna which pulls in 15 stations (many with subchannels) from 30 miles away. (Though I'm quite tempted to try a Gray-Hoverman Antenna as detailed here on Slashdot, just to see if it's better. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/14/2021223 )
Well, now we know why Comcast worked out a deal for bit torrent distribution of content on their network.
The world called out for a hero and all it got was me...
I have FIOS for Internet but I've kept Comcrap for my TV for one simple reason: Verizon requires you to use their crappy Actiontec router if you want to use FIOS TV.
I use Eye TV to record over-the-air HD, and it's quite obvious to me the quality is much higher than Comcast's HD. That said, I can't get as may OTA HD channels as I can on Comcast. And the quality of, say, Sci Fi Channel HD shows beats the standard def Sci Fi Channel.
Still, it would be nice as a consumer to know what I'm really getting. Maybe Comcast (and anyone else) should be required to label their channels as "compressed HDTV".
what won't they compress
We have Comcast, but not their HD service (although it's available - I just don't own an HDTV). Thanks to a recently enacted state law, AT&T will be coming in with U-Verse as its main competitor. So what does Comcast do?
Play 30 second commercials with dancing 7-foot tall VRAD cabinets. I guess they're supposed to be huge and in everyone's front yard. Obviously.
Why bother to have better services when you can just slander your competition?
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
In conclusion by not upgrading to an HDTV, and using my bunny ears, I am getting the same quality as Comcast's digital offering. Sweet :)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
"Just move closer"
Anyone who has worked in the cable TV industry saw this coming a mile away. It's not like Comcast and pretty much EVERY OTHER "digital cable" providers wasn't already doing this.
Here's the thing: Coax cable networks, even hybrid fiber/coax cable networks, just don't have the bandwidth to handle very many HD channels without compressing the hell out of them. They just don't. It's not going to improve. 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. Basically, they need to run fiber to every home. Which they aren't going to do.
This is why I laugh at people who buy HDTVs and expect some kind of massive improvement. In most of the country, the infrastructure just isn't there to give people very many full-res HD channels over cable. Digital satellite has many of the same issues. There just isn't enough bandwidth.
What about OTA, you say? Yeah, OTA broadcasts only have to be *digital*, not HD.
I have them for Internet at the moment: at one time, I had them for TV and phone service as well. And yes, it was reasonably-priced at the outset, and the services worked well enough. Then the monthly bill started edging ever upward 'til after a couple years I was paying more than double. The phones alone (two lines) went over ninety dollars a month. Then picture quality began to degrade (due to compression artifacts as well as line quality issues and they couldn't/wouldn't fix the latter) so I dumped the phone and cable TV. Now I just have a cable modem, and use AT&T's Callvantage for my phones (yes yes, I know it's SBC but it works well, it's inexpensive and they haven't raised the rates.) As for cable TV ... well, so far I found that I can live quite well without it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You know, considering that comcast is my 3rd biggest bill (behind, rent and insurance), you would think they could upgrade their network after all these years of collecting billions of dollars off people like me. Instead they just keep pocketing the cash, and turning out crappier products and hindering any competitions.
I don't have the wherewithall to prove it, but I am pretty sure that they are throttling netflix watch-it-now services. When netflix first released that service my downloads were speedy and ran great. Now that netflix is starting to offer some real titles comcast is throttling them, I'm sure of it. Case in point, I've been very sick this week and in bed a lot. I've turned to netflix for entertainment. I can watch my first episode with no problem, 2nd, a few minutes of buffer but no big deal. Now that I have been using it for a day or two it can take 20 minutes to start a show with several buffer sessions in the middle.
Contrast this with the fact that I can take my laptop to school on a SLOWER connection and get uninterrupted downloads. Their legalized monopoly they have is complete bullshit. If somebody offered another service in my area you can bet I would be there tomorrow. I despise writing that check every month to those fuckers. I hope they get what's coming to them in the form of a class action law suit to the tune of billions.
they should figure out how to stop spam instead of downgrading program signals for spam bandwidth.
Only thing keeping me with Comcast Internet is that it's the only thing available here. (Temple University campus within eyesight of the new Comcast Tower in Philadelphia). It's kinda sad that Comcast has the philly area by the balls. They have a duopoly with Verizon on Internet around here and I don't see Verizon laying down any fiberoptic lines in this ghetto ass neighborhood.
rtfa, if you don't notice a difference you gotta be blind....
With my Comcast service there are a few really gorgeous channels: the local TV affiliates and HBO. Everything else can get downright gross. But no FIOS for my neighborhood...yet!
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've seen DVDs that looked better than their so called "high" definition signals. There may be 1920x1080 pixels, but there is so little data behind them, they never lock into place except when the scene stays completely static. God help you if you want to watch an action movie, since every time something moves the whole screen turns into a blocky mess. So now they are talking about making it even worse? Awesome, can't wait.
Free Hans!
Except people do notice. In TFA, there are screen shots of both, and in the compressed images, you can see the artifacts. It's better than NTSC, but it's noticeably worse than uncompressed. That's why it's a big deal.
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.
YOU get the dancing 7-foot cabinets?
Lucky!
We just get the turtles in the lawn, turtle dinner parties, turtle this, turtle that.
Oh, and the fake new reports, and the guy squirting silver stuff on his shoes to run faster and jump higher.
But it all amounts to "slander your competition" except perhaps the vats of silver stuff.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
We dropped Comcast's internet and cable TV the moment FiOS came into the neighborhood....it came at a good time because their internet was blacking out on us all the time. It would just flutter for anywhere between a few seconds to a few minutes to a few hours and it was a real hassle playing games online and suddenly losing connection out of nowhere...And we ALWAYS had problems with artifacting with their cable. the picture always started getting these little green boxes everywhere during a program. Comcast had a pretty extensive On Demand list, and FiOS kind of lacks that, but there's more ups than downs.
I'm in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada), and I have recently started receiving HD OTA from CBC (good ol' state media), from a Hoverman built by myself and a friend from materials he happened to have lying around in his basement. It's a 17.89 Mbps MPEG-2 signal, and it looks waaaay better than Rogers' HD digital cable offerings.
Last year, Rogers wasn't so bad, but this year I've noticed a huge difference in one thing: hockey. Local Senators games look much worse than they used to. Granted, some people don't seem to notice, but when you can't read the numbers on the players' sleeves, and the sticks are almost compressed out of existence when held diagonally, it kind of jumps out at me.
Being a Canadian, hockey is very important to me. Luckily, come playoff time (in a couple of weeks) CBC has exclusive rights to all the games. Goodbye, Rogers!
Actually, I just did a side-by-side of The Nature of Things OTA vs. QAM (nice panning shot of the Rockies from a plane, would need a damn good bitrate to make it look good), and the OTA was obviously superior, especially during the pan. They simply can't keep up with OTA's bitrate.
Now, if only I got more than one channel OTA...
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.
Except people do notice.
Do they? Not if someone had to compare screen caps to prove it.
in the compressed images, you can see the artifacts.
Artifacts in screen captures don't necessarily mean noticeable artifacts in moving video. Screen captures in NTSC look like crap, far far worse than you "really" see when watching TV, thanks to the persistence of vision.
This point, by the way, was also in TFA.
Lots of people saying, "if only FIOS was in my area".
As a former Comcast customer, what can I tell you but keep checking.
When FIOS reached my block, I called Verizon the next day. The install went smoothly and all the contacts I've had with Verizon have been great.
I'm done with those thieves at Comcast.
Internet is unbelievable, I shelled out extra money for higher speed. Downloading a distro used to be an overnight undertaking. Now it's more like 20 minutes.
I got a bunch of new phone features I don't need and the TV signal quality is great.
Best part is I'm paying a little less than I used to pay Comcast for TV and internet but
I'm getting TV, Internet, phone and long distance with the price locked in for 2 years.
I'm still waiting for my free 19inch LCD TV from Verizon, but to make up for the delay they sent me a $20 gift certificate.
I got one message that was over a meg - nothing but links to porn sites. A thousand of those would eat up a fair amount of bandwidth.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Is FiOS or Comcast more expensive? And by how much?
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
Does anyone know how Comcast is progressing with its Switched Digital Video trials? From what I understand if SDV ever got off of the ground there would be little to no need to recompress HD video due to the bandwidth savings.
For every analog channel they drop, they gain back 2 decent or 3 crappy HD channels. Or maybe they could do 2 half-way decent HD and 1 SD channel. And, yes, there is a requirement to provide analog until 2012. But they can meet that requirement by supplying a converter box that outputs analog (at no additional cost for basic customers). The question is, is the cost of providing that converter box greater than the benefit of the extra channels?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I have two concerns with U-Verse as it is 1. You can only have 1 HD stream at a time right now. Bandwidth limitation. 2. No TiVo
...is why Comcast actually still has anyone subscribing
i can't really see much of a difference between the two from a laptop's monitor screen distance away from my eyes and the difference would not be that much if any at all at the typical distance for viewing a a hdtv.
Can anyone tell me what sort of hardware one needs to watch FiOS TV? If you need an equivalent of a cablebox, do the ones provided by Verizon at least have something of the equivalent of Firewire output? Or is it pretty much just component, s-vid, composite, and HDMI?
The article mentions that Comcast doesn't compress local stations, but I just dropped my Comcast service in Washington, DC and was surprised at how much nicer the OTA broadcasts look on my 1080 HDTV. If it's not compression, then there was something wrong with the converter box or component video connection.
For reference, my cable bill was $112 a month for one HD and one standard converter box, extended basic channels, and HBO. I'm using simple rabbit ears now, but I'm looking for a better antenna since all the clutter in the city causes reception to drop out in very annoying ways.
Your problem is not the signal, its that you are watching the Sens, try watching a better team ;) (I guess that would have been better if you were a Kings or, like me, a Lightening fan)
I watched my first game in HD today and it was amazing. I could actually recognize players faces, sadly, NBC only shows games on Sunday, and I dont get Vs (The US station with the rights to NHL broadcast) in HD.
Please fix the headline by dropping "Puts the" and "To" from the sentence.
Thank you.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Oh, but the best are the new musical commercials about the "Big Old Expensive" phone company. These confuse the hell out of me. Because when I think of being saved from high prices and huge unsavory corporations, Comcast is the company for me....shyeah right.
Grumble grumble stupid Comcast grumble come on Verizon want FiOS...
So, people are paying for HD content, but Comcast compresses the video degrading the quality. So now the HD content that people are paying for is no longer HD quality. So now the quality is nolonger HD, but there is more room for "HD" channels.
I smell a very big lawsuit coming on.
This is like paying for 92 octane gasoline, but having it cut with diesel when you put in in your tank, so as to make the station's reserves of gasoline last longer.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
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!
*calls you on his new Comcast voice telephone service*
Do you still get the turtles?
When the installer came for this new house, I mentioned that I was only getting digital for the purposes of HDTV, and that otherwise I liked analog better. It was rather entertaining listening to him explain that digital only needs ONE bandwidth, while analog needs FOUR bandwidths.
None of this is nearly as annoying as their execrable channel guide, which dedicates a third of the screne to some random bullshit preview and a third to advertising. And often takes ~10 seconds to flip to the next screen. And if you want to search by name... my god. To get to the middle of the alphabet, it's ~20 key presses (they make you go through the numerals if you try to go backwards). It's one of the worst interfaces I've ever seen-- and I have seen some shit.
But never mind all that; I've seen MythTV in action and I will soon be cured.
They refuse to put in the network within Boston because they're fighting with the state over getting a broad cable provider license. So unless you live in the burbs, you can't get FIOS in Boston and they (the city and Verizon) continue to let Comcast rape the rest of us with this sort of crap compression. It's enough to make a guy want to buy DirectTV...
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
It seems odd to me that they are using MPEG-2 for encoding their HD channels, I imagine it is due to the equipment deployed on customer premises, but they've had years and years to sort this out and get prepared.
If they used H.264 for the encoding they would get twice the channels at the same quality in the same bandwidth. This goes for both the HD channels and the SD digital channels.
In addition, why are they keeping the analogue signals intact? Surely it's better to give out digital SD decoders to the analogue customers (yes, including RF output for grannies with 1960s TVs) and then remove all the analogue channels to free up masses of bandwidth?
The longer they keep on installing hardware that only does MPEG-2, the longer it will take to migrate away from that in the future. It is in their best interests to move to H.264 capable hardware now, so that 5 years down the line they can actually improve their service in the face of competition. However it is the "profits now" attitude that means that in 10 years time Comcast will probably lose all their customers to satellite alternatives sending 20mbps+ 1080p signals.
...and prohibit providers from calling it "HD" unless it meets all of those standards--not just pixel count.
Let the marketplace decide, but make sure that consumers know what they are actually buying.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
- i'm in a fringe area - a godforsaken cracker-infested peninsula, and i get 20 great HDTV channels using a $30 omni (DB2 design) at eight-foot elevation indoors pointed to the east (there's nothing to the west except groupers and big pink shrimp)....
A few years ago in 2001 when a huge slew of digital channels debuted in Canada, I noticed Starchoice were doing this even then, before HD. I remember in particular Fox Sports had a ton of compression artifacts, whereas more popular channels had none. In fact the artifacts were so bad they rendered any sports damn near unwatchable due to the quick camera movement.
I don't even have TV anymore. Dumped it back last year, which means in the last five years, I've had no cable for three of them. Do I miss it? Nope.
How many slashdotters in an area served by both have FiOS? Have cable?
Don't forget the no fee no compression route. I have a roof top antenna. Your choice, compressed to fit more channels, or poorer selection uncompressed for free.
The truth shall set you free!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have a basic 1080P 32" HDTV, and noticed the so-called HD channels had some measure of artifacting to them, to the naked eye. The refreshed every 1/4 to 1/2 second compared to the areas where there were more frequent movements. It gets pretty blotchy too, at times I'd swear that they were playing FMV on a 32 bit game CD.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
but it is important to note that most people tend to have biases towards hardware based on one or two bad experiences.
..." ..." ..." ..."
:)
So are you saying companies should be forgiven when they give you crap that dies when it shouldn't die in the first place?
I agree, one bad experience is too small to be considered statistically significant. However... googling for "actiontec routers suck" (without the quote) gives us these results:
"Fix For Mysteriously Rebooting FiOS Actiontec Routers - Verizon
"RE: Need to replace dead Actiontec router... options
"Help! Verizon FIOS and Actiontec router keeping me from MetaFilter
"Verizon sued over GPL code in FiOS routers - Engadget"
"ACTIONTEC M1424WR Router Problem - [H]ard|Forum"
"SmallNetBuilder - Small Network Help - Actiontec MI424WR Review
"Verizon: FiOS Router Constantly Rebooting? Here's The Fix"
Just FYI, Google returned around 700 hits. And for "Actiontec router problem" (without quotes), I got 13,600 hits. Significant enough for ya?
Finally, that GPL violation Issue tells me that Verizon isn't an example of honesty... I'd stay away.
erm.... if he didn't notice it in the first place, then why would he have gone through the bother of screen-capturing it?
I realize that yes, once in video, you might not notice it -as much- as when you can compare two still frames. However, I'm willing to bet that if the guy put up full captures, you would not only easily be able to tell the difference between the two videos, even if viewed separately (rather than, say, side-by-side, or one right after the other in a loop)... but that if you -only- showed the lower bitrate version(s) to people, they would be quick to say "what's up with all the blockies?", especially on that music channel as that's even worse than youtube quality when youtube quality isn't done right.. and that's saying something.
But I can't prove it - I don't live in the U.S., I can't capture video from both those sources, etc.
On a side-note, as you mention NTSC - some NTSC S-VHS copies of movies are still better quality than their DVD counterparts precisely because of overzealous compression (typically due to the releasing company's desire to fill the DVD with a dozen other languages, their respective subtitles, original trailers, making ofs, interviews, etc. etc. so that space for the actual movie is reduced significantly from a DVD filled with -just- the movie). Yes, the colors are better on the DVD, and you get the DVD goodness of chapter selection/etc. but those MPEG blocks will ruin it anytime. You don't even have to look hard - any scene with reasonably high frequency video (spatially and temporally; think fields of wheat or grass, leaves of trees, sea/ocean shots) will painfully point them out for you.
One of the sillier moments in those ads is where they have the "Big Old Expensive" phone company people singing about how they are sure that the TV service they provide is going to be fantastic even though they (as phone people) know next to nothing about television service.
Okay, fair enough. But they're making the argument about the phone company not knowing enough about TV to provide good TV service... in the middle of an ad where the cable television company is saying that they can provide great telephone service. Did no one spot the obvious logical flaw in their attack?!
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
I've had DirecTV for about six years (since Paul Allen's Charter purchased my local franchise and started making me crazy). When DirecTV launched HDTV I was all over it, getting a few custom channels (ESPN, ESPN2, HDNet, etc.). Since I'm 50 miles from Boston, which is my natural market, I had the opportunity to "petition" the networks to get the New York feeds. CBS and Fox said fine (Fox owns DirecTV), ABC and NBC stations out of Hartford and Springfield were a$$holes and denied me.
All of the original stations and the CBS/Fox stations are MPEG-2; all the new ones, including local Boston stations and my beloved Red Sox on NESN, are MPEG-4. You can easily tell the difference, especially with DVR recordings. The MPEG-2 channels are fluid and smooth, while the MPEG-4 channels are pixelated and choppy. It's really just a matter of bits.
The proof is when I watch a game (any sport). I typically start an hour or so after the game starts, then by the time I skip all commercials and fast-forward through dead spots, I usually finish around the time the game ends. If I fast forward at 2x on an MPEG-4 channel, it's very smooth. If I fast forward an MPEG-4 channel, it jumps like crazy. It used to be worse, actually; when NESN started you could actually see the artifacts of a batter's swing. Either NESN or the DVR fixed that after a while.
Anyway, I guess my point is that there's no such thing as a free lunch, and there's no such thing as lossless compression. Be careful what you wish for.
I'm looking over the wall, and they're looking at me!
This is why I hate HD. With old analog TV it is technically impossible to do this compressed signal crap. Haven't you noticed now that since the TV stations have gone to digital broadcasts, you get all kinds of weird problems with signals (pixaltion and chunk-outs) and you get nasty pixel-ish compression artifacts. When you had analog this was unheard. Also with the original CRT televisions the phosphors were round which made for a nice smooth picture - not the chunkly looking edges you get with square pixels and limited colour levels.
With digital there are all kinds of horrible things the broadcasters can do to the signals - compression is just one of them.
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...
maybe he took screen captures to _demonstrate_ it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
We even get turtles standing on the backs of other turtles. When the camera pans back, you can see that it's turtles all the way down!
John
I get my HDTV content over the air, as God intended.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
There IS a video comparison in TFA. Your right, it isn't as bad as the captures make it out to be. But its still very noticeably. Sudden movements, fast brightness changes and other stuff all cause the video to block up a bit.
I'm interested in FIOS for internet, although I find their television service overpriced, even compared to cable and satellite. Unfortunately, despite constant advertising bombardment I cant get it around here. Even in Manhattan the service is only available in new buildings and no one has any idea when everyone else will have access to it.
The highest quality HD I've seen to date has come via over-the-air signals; the good old antenna. My father set it up last year but continued to subscribe to cable. Earlier this year they raised rates, yet again, he got pissed and canceled. He occasionally wishes he still had a few of those channels he had with cable, but otherwise he doesn't miss it at all. More recently, he's been considering free-to-air satellite to augment what he gets now.
As for the reception, it's all digital so it's flawless. Even standard-definition is superior to cable, but HD is on a whole other level. It's a pity this doesn't get more attention. Some people actually believe over-the-air broadcasting is ending with the switch to digital; even at least one high-profile blog has perpetuated this notion.
If people wanted to screw the cable companies they'd just dump them. But people have a hard time letting go of all the programming they get. After a week, however, most wouldn't miss it. The majority of television programming is drivel anyway and most shows nowadays wind up on DVD or online further reducing the need for cable, satellite or anything else.
Of course if everyone left then these providers really wouldn't have the money to set up a proper network. But then, this is one of the very few times where I'm inclined to think that like the highway system a high speed communications network might be their responsibility. At least until I'd learn they're spending 5 times more than they should, taking 3 times longer than projected and making a mess of it.
"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..
The reviewer may have a point, but I can't take anybody seriously who talks about image quality, then converts the sample images from PNG to JPEG.
The last thing you want to do when talking about compression artifacts is run the samples through something like JPEG compression, which introduces edge artifacts of its own and makes existing sharp edges worse.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It happens. Companies sometimes decide to compete on price, and undercut the better-quality product, in hopes enough people won't know or at least care enough about the quality difference.
What are you talking about? The full resolution (FIOS) captures are there for side-by-side comparison, and they look GREAT.
Also, downscaling doesn't have to produce blurring. Better scalers are much smarter than that. Even with a stupid one, a simple sharping filter afterwards would reduce the blur, though it then brings out other artifacts.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Get yourself a very good antenna, and a preamp, and for less than the cost of 2 months of Comcast, you'll have PERFECT quality HDTV, with no future fees, and no price increases.
http://slashdot.org/~evilviper/journal/184757
Yes, you get LESS channels, but cable TV is hardly worth watching anymore, anyhow. Why get the "non-stop repeats of Law & Order" channel, when you can get the "We make Law & Order" channel for free, and record as many episodes as you might ever want to want again, onto your DVR? On the rare occasion of a good cable TV show, you can get the DVD set (or perhaps Blu-ray in the near future) of the full season for the cost of one month of comcast.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I notice the difference every time I watch HD content from the broadcast networks at the house of a friend of mine who has comcast. We have the same television but lost looks like ass at his place where it is crisp and beautiful on my digital broadcast.
Same thing with watching supposedly HD movies on his on demand. You dont need side by side screencaps to see the 30-40 pixel square artifacts popping up in motion sequences.
you just need eyes.
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
Oh yeah, up here in western Canada, Shaw (which uses cable) makes fun of Telus (ADSL) by having talking snails that talk about how they prefer everything to be slow, so that's whey they use DSL, etc... Yeah, snails. Give me a break. How much more contrived can you possibly get? Condescending, for that matter - as though we can't understand something more interesting or subtle, so we need some 3d-animated slow snails to talk slowly and in a low pitch so we can understand the biased message Shaw is trying to get across...
:P
And of course this is all addition to the fact that ADSL service here is actually great and you have dedicated bandwidth that doesn't lessen when your neighbours are also online. People in highly dense areas here get unbelievably shitty speeds. Frankly, the only ISP that has a reputation of slowness here is Shaw. How ironic..
Great name for a band.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
Well, I'd be more curious about how do they compress it.
Following the link in the summary seemed to suggest that they get some streams which are already highly compressed, and add their own compression on top. Which is kinda easy to believe, since I don't think they're getting a huge uncompressed stream from anyone.
In that case, here's the fun part: no matter with what they re-encode it, it will just add more artifacts on top of the existing ones.
Once you get a lossy compressed stream, you can't get back an 100% accurate original stream from it to start anew with. If it were possible to get the exact original image, it would be called "lossless" instead.
So let's say one pixel was originally, say, royal blue and ended up prussian blue instead, after the lossy compression. That's it. The original shade is gone for ever. If you re-encode that stream to another codec, you now start from prussian blue and mangle it some more from there. There is no way for the second encoding to know what the original colours were, only what they look like after decoding the original lossy compression.
IOW, if they received a highly-compressed MPEG-2 stream and re-encode it to H.264, the image isn't going to get any better. They'll just degrade it a little more.
So IMHO the right thing to do is to just freakin' leave it alone, if they get it in an already compressed format.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Time Warner Cable in New York, has been doing this for ages. They compress the hell out of all the Fox-owned channels. Funny that, can't imagine why they'd do that! Any films that are on Fox that have lots of red or smokey scenes degrade into large unwatchable blocks of color. Always makes me wonder how much The Discovery Channel pays for what is quite obviously a large swatch of bandwidth.
My UID is prime!
If they are so expensive, and everything about them sucks, DROP THEIR SERVICE. You won't wither away and die if you can't watch TV!
Comcast recently bought out my cable company. I'm dropping them ASAP. I deal with slower DSL that I know I can run Bittorrent over reliably, and now I'll switch from cable to OTA for TV.
I will have nothing to do with Comcast, and I'll be able to survive just fine without them.
I understand that some people only have Comcast in their area for internet or cable TV. Hey, if that's all you have, then I guess you have to deal with them. It might not hurt to look around for wireless internet providers, or see if there are any OTA digital stations in your area, though.
I know a lot of [better] H'wood directors get very upset at the reformatting of their movies created 16:9 trimmed down to 4:3.
I have fiber, but not because of crappy Verizon. My city deployed it. And their IP TV is MUCH clearer and better looking then that garbage Comcast was overcompressing the hell out of. Even my wife noticed the difference, EVERY channel is clear and crisp. Comcast only did that for pretty much the HBO and other higher tier channels. This is all with just SD TV as well. DVD quality video from my provider.
Oh, you meant my choice of ABC, CBS, NBC, and sometimes FOX? I'll take over-compressed SciFi HD over analog SciFi non-HD any day of the week.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
I see this resulting from:
(1) Consumers are using the number of channels offered as a benchmark when comparing satellite with cable. Well at least the marketing at DirectTV and DishNetwork started the "We have more channels" mantra, and the cable systems have to try to keep their customers.
(2) Television studios are packaging more of their channels to the cable/satellite distributors to force them to carry some of their less popular or new channel offerings.
(3) The old FCC rule that assigns "Must Carry" on local OTA broadcast stations, so cable must allocate channel space for them. Where I'm at, it unbelievable the number of religious broadcasters...
I think Comcast would prefer not having so many channels. They have QOS issues and they have an interest in keeping the cable bill under the pain threshold of its subscriber base. With fewer channels, Comcast could make more money at the current billing level... What you didn't think the price would go down did you??
Personally I wish the FCC would force "a la carte" pricing and allow each channel to compete for consumers. Maybe then we would see a lot less of these "filler" channels that have been created with almost no viewership.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
In my neighborhood, we have two cable providers (Comcast and Millenium Digital Media) and Verizon FiOS. Until recently, I had cable, but decided to switch to Verizon FiOS. Main reason I switched was good timing on Verizons part. We were having some service disruptions with our cable provider and some headaches dealing with customer service. Seemed like we had to wait on the phone for 30 minutes just to talk with somebody. At the same time Verizon had just installed fiber in our neighborhood. It was quite an operation they had, their must of been a crew of about 50 guys with shovels, and I believe they had our ~1/4 mile street, (~0.4 km for you metric people) done in a day. Anyhow, after Verizon installed the fiber they went on a blitz to get as many people in the neighborhood signed up as possible with free installation and some package discounts. So we decided to make the switch.
Verizon FiOS has worked well for me so far. The biggest issue I have with FiOS is that you need a cable box at every television set and my Hauppauge PCI cards don't receive any cable channels anymore (unless I want to donate a box to them too). A really cool feature would be a box that would decode some set of digital signals and broadcast them in analog over the internal cable system, while allowing the user to select the set and assign the analog channel.
U-verse is transcoding from 20Mbps MPEG2 to 6Mbps MPEG4 (give or take), with predictably horrific results. To add insult to injury you can only tune 1 HDTV channel at a time for your entire house! AT&T went with a cheapskate FTTN (Fiber To The Node) network, which uses some variant of DSL to provide a 27Mbps copper pipe from the fiber node down the block to your home that's shared between TV, Internet and VoIP. The Motorola IPTV settop boxes run WinCE.
Uverse HD Quality
U-verse Internet is less bad than Comcast (10M/1.5M for $55/mo), though with higher latency due to the ~20ms hit caused by their DSL scheme. I kept that and dropped U-verse TV.
My choice? Great! I want SciFi HD and Speed HD please!
That's what Comcast is counting on. You will pay for SD disguised as HD for 2-6 channels for $80/month for the package. These aren't in basic cable are they? For many people it's 80+ channels of crap with only 2-6 that they pay for. I dropped cable when it went over 12.95/month. I'm still waiting for a-la-carte so I can get just Discovery without subsidizing all the ESPN crap that runs up the price for those who have no interest in armchair sports.
Have you noticed that ESPN has lobbied very hard to get their line-up in the basic package and charge for it? ESPN is the same as buying a non-Apple computer. You pay for Windows even though you think it's too expensive and raises the cost of a new computer.
http://media.www.lsureveille.com/media/storage/paper868/news/2004/01/20/News/Espn-Costs.Endanger.Service-2048194.shtml
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040223-591332,00.html
In a nutshell, basic cable is mostly for the sports network just like a new PC is mostly an IE and MS Office platform. If I could cut that cost, basic may be a consideration again.
I just checked the schedule. Dirty Jobs and How it is made are both available online. I work nights. Online the shows are all on demand. On cable, they are on only at scheduled times. Re-run's are the pits. Online another missed episode are easly found. HD is no longer in HD. HD is incompatible with most TiVo boxes. Why spend the money.
The truth shall set you free!
They'd better be careful about that analogy. Somebody's liable to do a commercial about the tortoise and the hare. Portray Comcast as the hare, download caps and Bittorrent filtering as the hare falling asleep while the tortoise wins the race.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
down-rez is different from re-compressing. DirecTV was doing HD Lite at a lower res. Comcast is compressing the channels too much.
However, the cable market is far from competitive and is best described as regionalized monopolies with competition from substitutes (sat/phone). Faced with the reduced competition, modest [informative] regulation may be the best response.
Come to think of it, if depending on what they would end up charging for Battlestar and all of the F1 things (practice, quails, and the race), $40 might be getting off light.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
When digital terrestrial launched in 98, it was absolutely stunning on a decent TV, as it was in 2000 when I obtained a set-top box. Pin-sharp and nary an MPEG artifact to be seen for much of the time. In football matches, when the camera panned, you could still see the grass relatively clearly although it did get slightly fuzzier.
That was in the days when they only had 4 or 5 channels per "multiplex".
Then came the cost-saving, extra channels were crammed in and the bitrates went down. The main channels (BBC One, BBC Two, ITV1) are still broadcast at a decent bitrate but even they now show MPEG artifacts more often than they did 8 years ago, and no - I'm referring to old-fashioned Trinitron displays, so it's not a switch from CRT to LCD that's caused it. It's also using the same old box, absolutely nothing has changed in the equipment I'm using since then.
If you watch football on some of the lesser channels now the grass just turns to a green mush when the camera pans, all detail is lost in a load of MPEG blocks. Even the DOGs (channel logos) in the corner are pixellated if you look at them on some channels!
The Great British public generally hasn't noticed, though, which is why it's continued apace. It's very disappointing if it's happening to HDTV though, as it negates the whole point of HDTV in the first place!
It's worth pointing out that Telus has been running (successful) commercials featuring animals for a very long time. Brightly coloured parrots, monkeys, fish, whatever. It doesn't really matter... what matters is that the Telus commercials have been using animals to plug their products for years. That puts the Shaw commercials into a slightly different light, no? They aren't talking down to you, they're satirizing the Telus ads.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
*checks*
:) Plus... I can fix the blind spot by adding a pair of rabbit ears... >.> You can make a better antenna for $20 worth of parts than you can buy, if you're willing to put up with something that may not be as pretty. :)
:)
Uh... do I know you? I just finished building my own antenna over the weekend, too.... Just in time to catch the Edmonton/Calgary game on Saturday.... I'm also in Ottawa, btw. I was switching from a cheap indoor antenna that I'd picked up at Radio Shack to the one I rolled on my own. I've got a blind spot under OTA channel 9, so I lost Global (channel 6) and CBC's analogue (channel 4), but I gained Omni 2 (channel 14), PBS Watertown (channel 18), TV Ontario (channel 24), A Channel (channel 43), and Omni 1 (channel 60). I also get better reception on CFCF (channel 11), CJOH (channel 13), and CityTV (channel 65). So I'd consider it a fair trade.
Incidentally... it could be because I'm in the west end of Ottawa, in Stittsville, but I'm only getting two HD channels at the moment. CBC Ottawa and Radio-Canada Ottawa.
I'd agree. The Nature of Things broadcast, which was on Sunday at 7pm, was *way* better on the OTA broadcast. I did a side-by-side comparison of that, and the hockey game, against my Starchoice, using an LG 42" 1080p HDTV (LG 42LB5D), and the (subjective) difference was significant. And I can remember amazing at how much clearer the picture and sound were when I switched to Starchoice from Rogers....
FWIW, CTV, Global, CityTV, and both Omni channels have requests in with the CRTC to start broadcasting in HD in Ottawa. They'll probably go live within the next few months.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
"Powered by Fiber Optics" is a phrase used in current Comcast ads here. A perfect example of "Let's just make irrelevant claims that make us sound good.. they won't see through it." marketing.
My mother-in-law has Comcast digital. The menu is confusing, her rates keep going up without any increase or improvement in service and she still experiences outages like we had in 1995.
Plain and simple to me. If you can get FiOS, get it. If you can't get FiOS, get one of the satellite services (I recommend DirecTV). Anything but Comcast.
It's no surprise to me that Comcast is choosing quantity over quality; after all they can charge more if they give more, right? It is surprising to me that with as much negative publicity that they are getting right now that they would blatantly choose to take further negative actions towards their customers. They need to be building as much goodwill as possible. They're pushing their customers out the door.
I love the horrifically bad puns, personally. "Hold on to your loot" /gigglesnort
They did with the old $370 analog plan. Now they're doing it with the $1200 HDTV plan. Customers still flock to them. It's not like U can just leave Calif* and find a job somewhere else.
Both myself and my brother constantly had problems with our Actiontecs, both at our homes and at work. The routers would have to be restarted roughly once each week. We've switched all our DSL modems to old Ciscos we bought on EBay. In the last three years we've had to reset the ones at work a few times because they stopped accepting incoming TCP connections, but we've never had to reset our ones at home.
When my brother and I had constant problems with five different Actiontec routers, that's an issue. It's hard for me to believe that we were just 'unlucky'. Those problems ceased completely for all four DSL lines when we switched to Cisco DSL routers.
Well designed and manufactured DSL routers will rarely fail. My Cisco 974 has been running without fail for three years at home. My Actiontec (and the initial replacement) had failed roughly once per week. Microsoft software has trained us that technology will fail and you need to reboot. If you accept this level of quality in your equipment then they will keep producing the same level. Maybe rebooting your router isn't a big deal for you, all you have to do is unplug it and plug it back in after all. Would you accept a car that you had to take into the shop once a week though? You shouldn't have to.
Monopoly.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I couple years ago I tried watching a basketball playoff game on a friend's HDTV. The lines on the court all looked like jagged lines, like spastic lightning bolts zapping up and down as the camera panned the court. To say it was distracting is a huge understatement. Also the crowd in the background was motionless except for once a second when the keyframe updated and everybody in the stadium was in a new position or pose for another second.
Some of TWCs analog channels also update once a second, but it's out of sync with the interlacing so text and still lines bounce up and down, up and down, one line, once a second.
I would complain, but for two years the TWC commercials playing on TWC had the sound so high it clipped to the point of being completely unintelligible, so I figured it was pointless.
You think so? I don't... the animals in the Telus ads aren't used to slander the competition - instead they're used in a positive context, making the product more appealing (or whatever). I mean, it's kind of pointless, but it gets peoples' interest, and it's not done in a negative/spiteful context. To me, it just shows the company's perspective, and makes me think "Oh, so that's how they go about doing business, they just talk shit about the competition?"... I think that does more to make Shaw look bad than anyone else. Maybe I'm just idealistic but I think a company should be boasting about their own great features and advantages, and not just slandering/insulting the competition.
Satire. Noun. A literary technique of writing or art which principally ridicules its subject often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change. Humour is often used to aid this.
Whether you personally agree with their message is beside the point. I don't buy products from companies that use negative advertising either. But they're still satirizing the competition, and making light of the fact that the Telus ads haven't really changed in years.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.