Slashdot Mirror
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 )
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your bill.
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.
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
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.
...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!
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.
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...
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..
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.