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Lack of Bandwidth Oversight Damages HDTV Quality
mattnyc99 writes "Over at Popular Mechanics, Glenn Derene has a great new column investigating the lawless lands of broadcast television, where the quality of the picture that ends up on your expensive hi-def set is determined by a bunch of fuzzy math. Quoting: 'In fact, there's no real regulation over high-definition picture quality at all — "none whatsoever," one industry consultant told me. And that's part of the reason why different HD stations often have wildly varying levels of picture quality that change from one moment to the next. Behind the scenes, content producers, broadcasters and cable and satellite providers are engaged in a constant tug-of-war over bandwidth and video quality, with no hard metrics to even define what looks acceptable. Even officials at HBO, where Generation Kill looks pretty fantastic on my TV, bemoaned the lack of a silver bullet ... for now.'"
You can pry my FIOS from my cold...dead fingers...
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Smells like a convenient excuse for the likes of Comcast and Verizon to use in an attempt to get the public on their side of the net neutrality debate.
"If you don't let us manage the network bandwidth, you'll be doomed to watching fuzzy video on your expensive HDTV!!!!"
Not exactly the same but my current gripe with my satellite provider (DirecTV) is that I bought one of their HD channel packages, and a number of the channels that are listed as HD channels never actually have any HD programs on them. They're all standard def. The Disney channel, for instance is listed as a high def channel, but I've never seen a single high-def program on it (I even surfed the channel guide through several days to see if anything ever did).
Total fraudulent BS...
I'd drop 'em like a hot potato tomorrow but the wife is addicted to the crap that comes on there...
*sigh*
The media corporations benefit most by what they dont show us at all. Many people wont complain regarding quality of current entertainment programming. Especially with sports, seeing how most are probably drinking anyways.
What about digital standard def TV?
It's also heavily compressed *and* its resolution is manipulated bringing a blurry picture to your living room.
Even a (good quality) CRT shows plenty of compression artifacts all over the place, *except* in those channels that are being promoted by the operators. (sigh)
This is nothing new - there were never any picture quality standards for standard definition television either. The concept of "broadcast quality" varies from country to country, from network to network, and from affiliate to affiliate.
In the early days of HDTV research, test viewers were shown three different televisions: a normal standard def (analog) picture; a standard def picture directly from the digital studio master, produced and delivered to normal high-end studio standards; and a high-definition picture (shot and edited in high definition). Everyone thought the analog standard def was the worst of the three - but most consumers thought there was little, or no, difference between the professional standard def and the HD pictures. So - in actual blind testing - how cleanly the picture was delivered was much more important than picture resolution.
You can't really regulate quality with something like TV. Frankly not everything needs to be in uncompressed 1080p. Not only is there a large range of shows recorded in 480i, but many shows still being recorded have no business wasting that kind of bandwith. I don't think cartoon network needs full bandwith just so it can show powerpuff girls in full 1080p
Is the author insinuating we need MORE government regulation? Yup, because THAT will solve everything. If only the engineers were as smart as the journalists and legislators, we wouldn't have these "problems".. :-P
http://www.bobbarr2008.com/
Secondary channels should be banned. The local NBC affiliate runs a weather channel on their .2 and it their image quality is very poor next to the local CBS affiliate (CBS bans secondary channels). And woe to me if I try to watch the .2-.5 channels on PBS. Even in SD they are block city.
I disagree Generation Kill looks good. I watched the first episode on HBOW, which is an H.264 channel on DirecTV. And it had significant blocking. The 2nd episode looked better, but still, I am spoiled by BluRay. It's worlds better, and no cable or satellite system which only allocates a few mbits is doing to ever match it. That includes U-Verse.
I'm watching "The Professionals" on BluRay right now, and the video bandwidth along is over 27mbits, even in scenes where almost nothing moves. On pans it goes over 30mbits. And this isn't even one of the best looking movies. And this 27mbits is with H.264 video (AVC). 8-10mbit H.264 (let along MPEG-2) doesn't stand a chance.
Broadcast companies (and cable systems) will keep removing bandwidth until their "HDTV" looks even worse than it already does. They advertise quantity (100 channels!), quality is rarely even mentioned.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Call it based on bitrate, such as "30 Mbit/s HD". Sure, you could cheat by choosing a crappy codec, but that wouldn't be as tempting as overcompressing to save on bandwidth. Oh and make sure it's the average bitrate of the crappiest link on the transmission chain.
The funny thing is that people still seem to like HDTV.... you know why? because it _IS_ better than the picture quality we had before.
I professionally install home theater systems, and most of our customers are very happy with the end result. I get what this article is going for (not that I read it, or anything), and I wish it could be better, but unfortunately the world of business never comes up with anything that is perfect... because to develop perfect tech would cost infinite money, which would significantly cut into profits.
take any technology standard and leave it to a bunch of linux geeks (myself included) to pick it apart and point out the flaws. sometimes I think our time could be better spent designing something better, rather than badmouthing that which already exists.
OTOH it is kind of fun to bitch, so I am torn...
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Blind testing of video, now that's a good one!
I hate to just post questions, but if anyone knows, I think we all deserve to know what everyone is trying to hide from us!! This bugs the hell out of me, and I hope I am not the only one :(
1. What is the standard, uncompromised compression rate for full HD video? eg. The rate of compression on a Blue Ray disc.
2. What is the standard compression rate for cable HD video? eg. What I can expect from Time Warner.
3. What does Apple and Netflix (if they have a service) think they can get away with? eg. What they'll stream to me when I buy/rent something from their movie service.
And finally,
4. What is the bit rate or internet throughput required to stream true uncompromised HD video? I ask this, because I am in doubt as to whether most cable and DSL connections are even fast enough.
My TV isn't HD, and even with regular resolution programming, the quality is hideous. All jpeg-ed out, I like to call it. If they can't deliver regular programming properly, it makes me wonder how we are to expect them to deliver quality HD. And since I already know they can't, it is disturbing how they can claim they can, and are. Because I thought there already was a name for sub-HD video: Enhanced Definition, or ED, or rather, High Definition Erectile Disfunction TV!
When there's over 20 different ATSC 'standards,' and 480i is considered a 'hi-def' format, you'd better learn what you're paying for and do some serious research before buying anything. It was easy to be ignorant and happy with NTSC, and, let's face it, how could anybody have found VHS acceptable? This is why, even though I work in the realm of professional film and video, and feed REAL HD (1920 x 1080) to 90' wide screens, I still haven't bought any HDTV, although the Aquos LCDs are almost acceptable. And there's no way in Hell I'm paying good money for lossy CODEC, massively compressed 'broadcast.' Give it a few more years, and some more planned obsolescence, only then will the real potential of digital video be realized. And I'll still take 70mm; vertical, or horizontal Imax, over all these other formats.
My wife works at the cable company and I continuly complain to her about the lack of HD channels and picture quility (although not too bad really on my XBR5). Accourding to her, most providers are in a bind because they either have to lease more lines or run new cable to get more bandwidth, which both are expensive. Plus, the demand for HD subscribers isn't has high as the media or TV manufactors make it out to be either. Yes it's growing, but not everyone has a set yet. Color TV yes, but not HD. Lets not forget the cost to provide those channels are expensive to boot! It's not as profitable for some HD providers as you think. Why do bigger cities always have the latest and greatest?...because of the population.
I could go on on about this, but really it comes down to cost and how much they want to pass on to the customer...So they cut corners...
Is it wrong? Yes..Are they working on it? Yes, companies just need to get passed the 1950's infrastructure were still using...ugh...
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
It's the channels not DirecTV that is doing that and some time the channels run HD lite / SD wide on them / sd upped to HD. Also some stuff mostly local stuff is in HD but does not have the HD ICON.
Some of the directv on demand is in SD, WIDE SCREEN and HD.
Go to scifi hd right now stargate atlantis is in HD.
When the carrier (cable or satellite) changes the program material provided to them in any way, they need to make their editorial changes clear to the viewer.
To the following message:
This program has been modified for content, time allocated and to fit your screen.
They need to add:
This program has been reduced in resolution to fit on our cheap cable system.
Have gnu, will travel.
Here's our HD feed from PBS, shrunk to internet resolution.
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=1960730
What a joke.
The FCC mandated that the HD video be encoded in Mpeg2 only; never planning ahead using Moore's law and allowing different formats, such as Mpeg4! Had they allowed Mpeg4, several HD channels could have been fit into the 19Mb/s channel bandwidth, along with other SD channels as well.
this is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
so I'm blundering into this discussion totally ignorant of what are probably very important facts, but when the buzz about high definition television broadcast started, and when it became apparent there would be multiple resolutions classed as 'high definition', I thought the natural battleground in the market would have been who can broadcast the highest resolution the cheapest. Instead, what we're probably seeing, is companies colluding on just how much to screw the customers out of. Just like every other industry in the world.
As a consumer, I'm not seeing a whole lot of reason to cough up for pay TV. It's just easier to download high definition video and watch it on my computer. And even at lower resolutions, the image quality on my small (compared to my TV) computer screen is higher anyway, thanks to the size of the pixels.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
... 'elephant-in-the-room' tag?
Hopefully, up.
Among our broadcast local new shows, it looks like ABC sends out the analog camera feed, CBS is prettier but 4:3. Only NBC is 16:9 and what people really look for in HD. Public TV's subchannels are a range unto themselves. So, yeah. Hell of a difference. Not to mention the remote cams, commercials, weather cams, archival footage, etc.
Instead of writing letters, our state fair is coming up. As the announcers are waiting to sign autographs for the kids, I'm going to make a point of passing by and saying, "When will your station follow NBC's lead in HD?"
"HD stations often have wildly varying levels of picture quality that change from one moment to the next"
Huh? You mean Stargate Atlantis is being broadcast on changing resolutions in midstream?
No, not exactly, I bet.
I've seen pleny of my best friend's 52" LCD, and HD can be very very nice. DiscoveryHD is probably the best on a consistent basis, and he uses DirecTV. But the problems are multiple and frustrating. Typical programming, for instance:
A 720i or 1080i program looks pretty good. Then it goes to commercial, which is probably 480i. Pillarboxing ensues. Icky, but at least the aspec ratio is accurate. I see a lot of this on ABC network programming - especially sports, when they do studio shots of the taking heads. Sometimes the local ad slot goes out in SD, and looks pretty crappy. But hey, some affiliates are actually incompetent, or are carrying ads that were not rescanned - you know, used car lots can be cheap advertisers.
Sometimes, you see something in HD that is fairly sharp, like a recent movie that is upconverted. Then you get a dark, still scene. The background degenerates into a flat matte. When the characters move, you see a few artifacts and blocking. Woopsie, somebody doesn't have enough TV for this. I've seen the same DVD scene on three TVs, and made note of the scene change. On the 52" Sony LCD Proj set, it blocked a bit, consistently. On the Sharp Aquos 37" LCD, no blocking. On the 13" SDTV, the DVD player fritzed out and blacked for about 5 frames I think. On my. Those terrible artifacts may not be the signal. Your set may have a hard time decoding and displaying some uniquely challenging data. This is not new - I have a CD of a symphony that has a passage that is rarely decoded cleanly by any player but the very best. Not the mostg expensive, but the best. And I have another that cannot be played back cleanly by my MiniDisc player/recorder - it has a clearly heard problem with the program material. This should be a rare occurence, even unique to 2 or 3 incidents in your entire collection. But it isn't that unique with HDTV. Sometimes the motion-control stuff or enhancements just don't do very well. I'm not complaining much though.
The "picture quality that change(s) from one moment to the next" complaint is probably more like the pictue quality is in fact changing, cause we have differing program sources. In NTSC, this was evident in the difference between a movie scan, direct-to-tape programming (many soaps are like this), and live (the Today Show, for instance). It didn;t matter much, just cause nothing really looked so much better or worse in NTSC. Of course, those old commercials on U-Matic sure looked awful, but then they got enhanced just as HD got started up. Ick.
My biggest complaint is 'digital TV'. Like digital cable. Pus. So compressed, the solarizaiton is off the scale. MPEG compression making the field in a soccer game into a flat green painting. Whip pans end up smaearing everything. The ball gets lost if it and the camera are moving wrong. Movies like the Batman series, that are dark, become shades of brown, indecipherable. I haven't see Fahrenheit 451, but I wonder how that looks. Some of the white scenes must be precious indeed.
Then there's the whole SD-stretching thing. I loathe this. When even Callista Flockhart looks a little pudgy, you know that stretching SD to fill the screen is really wrong. But most everyone configures their HDTV to do this. So it looks like crap, so what? I paid for that screen, and I'm gonna use all of it.
We are on the verge of seeing Televison move to the Internet. Your TV will have enough horsepower to decode most anything, and new codecs will be coming fast and furious. FIOS and YouTube melded into ipTV, and sold by the minute if they can figure out how. Or blended with ads that can't be skipped or ignored. Recording flag? Not necessary. A simple DRM scheme makes it impossible to divert the stream to a capture device. Unless, of course, an op
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
A local TV station had been broadcasting in "HD" for several years and promoted the hell out of it. Indeed, they sent out a widescreen picture, and my HDTV reported it as being "1080i".
However, the dirty little secret was that all of their cameras were 480p; they were upconverting it to 1080i right before they sent it out the door. Sure, when you watched network programming it was real HD, but all of the local newscasts were really standard-definition despite their claims to the contrary. An experienced HDTV viewer could easily see the difference, but most people had no idea.
This whole topic is too technical to the average HD watcher.
They only care that their knob is calibrated up to 11.
Yup, KQED HD from Sutro Tower in Frisco transmits
a bunch of MPEG-2 fast-motion squares alright, probably
de-rezzed due to the statmux of all of their (four or
five or six, I've lost count) licensed "sister channels".
Phuq that spit! I guess that's why I have Apple TV.
Bandwidth is not the same thing as picture quality. An uncompressed image requires more bandwidth than a losslessly-compressed image, even though (since the compression is lossless) the two are identical to the users. As others have noted, standard television had no fixed definition standard. Indeed, many 70s and 80s television productions in the UK mixed film and video in the same program, resulting in wildly-varying standards for sound and picture. (I suggest watching any Blake's 7 episode on YouTube that includes outdoor scenes. Even though that is massacring the image further, you can still tell which scenes were recorded on which medium.)
I -can- see some value in defining minimum standards - new programs recorded with the explicit intent of ending up on HDTV should be recorded at resolutions well in excess of 525 lines (US) or 625 lines (UK). Lossy compression (such as MPEG2) should not be used with a compression so great that artifacts reduce meaningful resolution to 525/625 or less. In the case of pre-HDTV material, that means that you should be on very nearly zero loss. (Ok, old 425 line pictures from the UK are obviously going to be less than that, but those pictures should be interpolated and - if necessary - hand-edited to look as if above the 625 line resolution. Hell, the BBC has not only hand-edited but then hand-colourized as well, so they clearly have the means and the manpower.)
Interpolation has to be done anyway, as the stupid fools didn't use a HDTV resolution that could be divided into any of the pre-existing resolutions (US, UK and Japan all used different resolutions). The sensible HDTV resolution would be the one that required the least interpolation by any - since existing material will dominate for a long time - that also met or exceeded what was desired in an HDTV format (since you want it relatively future-proof). Since, as a rule, you want a higher quality picture rather than a wider camera angle, you might even be better off by having the TV smart enough to merge/interpolate pixels as necessary, and transmit at whatever technology permits, defining resolution as minimum camera angle that can be differentiated by a display.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
QoS is the future. Net neutrality has to go or the net will suck forever.
Push for rules on how QoS is allowed to affect traffic, instead of pushing for neutrality.
But the Dr. Who episode that just finished isn't. Worse, instead of broadcasting it in fullscreen 480p (or an upconversion of that), they encode it with black bars on all sides. Do they not know how to zoom things?
Still better than the channels that stretch a 4:3 picture to 16:9, though. Especially if it was originally letterboxed. I'm looking at you, History Channel. Airing actual 4:3 content letterboxed is probably the best (IMO) way to handle it. Zooming the picture in a bit (but not to fill up a 16:9 screen) like the Discovery networks isn't bad either.
Their so-called HD channels are a farce and a joke, only about 10% of the HD channels are in true HD, the rest are fuzzy and are no better quality than what you would get on a standard set. It's a joke what they pass off as HD, and I can't wait until Verizon FIOS gets here to run their lying asses out of Oklahoma City.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
It's a lot cheaper to relay network HD feeds and do everything else in 480i than to upgrade all of the equipment and sets to HD. Even the makeup needs an upgrade for HD. For a station that was already behind the curve, it's a huge expense to bring everything up to date.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I have a comcast digital cable package, with 'on demand' in northern CA.
Here's the good part:
Sometimes, the on demand video works.
Here's the bad part:
Many times, the 'on demand' video just doesn't work. The error message says 'blah blah we are experiencing difficulties right now'. Lol
Sometimes, the 'on demand' video almost works. You start watching it, but it's like watching a station with bad analog reception. It stops, jerks, blacks out, pauses, and is completely unwatchable.
Some channels just don't work some of the time. In particular, the discovery channel and scifi channels appear to be digital, and will actually cut out with digital artifacts and pauses. It's actually no better then analog TV, with reception problems. It is often completely unwatchable, with pauses, cutouts, and bad artifacts. Other times, when you are watching it, you can obviously see the compression artifacts from the cheesy format they are using.
what qualifies as an HD broadcast? apparently they think it's just resolution.
I've seen comcast's HD channels. Blocky as hell for broadcast. I can stream it from the Internet in higher quality.
They're using their grammar skills there.
You mean the media providers are running a scam on their customers?
Who would have ever imagined?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Analog had 100%.
Digital has what? 80%? 60%?
High
Doofus
Television.
Look at this! Its digital!
I don't have HDTV.
I'm not going to get it anytime soon.
Its just a scam. Suckers are born every minute.
Television has proved this.
...urban reception of OTA Digital TV.
There's something called Multipath Interference that happens when a line-of-sight signal hits a bunch of obstacles. Like buildings. The signal degrades, and degrades, and degrades, and you wind up with not being able to lock on to some channels. You wind up with what I call the "Max Headroom effect" where the picture freezes with lots of blocky artifacting and the sound repeats like a stuck CD. Yet another reason why that show was so goddamn prophetic.
Anyway, not everyone can stick an uber-antenna or antenna farm on their roof. And indoor antennas fucking suck, even the legendary Silver Sensor which is better than most. So there will be a lot of angry people come February. And they won't just be the people who forgot to buy their sucky digital TV converter box and digital TV grade antenna.
This whole issue would have been better solved by forcing cable and satellite companies to sell a "lifeline package" to low-income people, and just saying "On February 17, 2009, broadcast TV is going bye-bye." But the electronics companies smelled money, and corporate welfare money at that, so they sold the FCC a bill of goods.
OTA Digital TV works in flat rural areas where people have money and land enough to put up mega-antennas, and there are no buildings to cause multipath for miles. Mongoloid Middle America will be set. Those of us in the cities, on the other hand...suck it up or get cable or satellite, bitches.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
And I'm sure they've got their heads so far up their butts, they'll be surprised when the masses shout back, "Cut the TV service, we'll take the internet package!"
They. Just. Don't. Get. It.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
That's assuming there is competition in the area...
From what I can read on the comments, it looks like half slashdot is into the movies industry!
He's not confusing anything, he replied to this post where the poster praised his own FIOS.
I love FIOS for my Internet, and it's HD looks great (my neighbor uses them for TV), but at least here in Pittsburgh they required that you use the Actiontec routers that they provide if you want to use them for TV. That's a non starter for me. I tried their router when they provisioned my Internet. It's utter crap. Until they let me use the hardware of my choice for routing I won't be using them for TV service.
Before the HD comes anywhere near your television a whole host of horrible things have happened to it. First of all your broadcaster probably uses file based playout nowadays, this means the HD D5 tape - or other resonably high end tape system - is encoded to a file which sits on a server ready for playout. No problem there you think, Well what if I was to say that the encoded video was MPEG2@~35Mbps?
Even a good HD source such as a CGI movie likes to gain a whole lot of noise and artifacts at this stage.
Then the actual playout system probably won't directly compatable with the ingest system so there will be a transcode stage before playout is possible. Ok, so this could be simply re-wrapping the files into a different flavour of container, but not always!
Finally low bit-rate HD signal is played out through a realtime H264 encoder (if your lucky if not MPEG2) and given 8-12 Mbps to play with. No wonder it all ends up looking terrible.
In the analogue days when a DigiBeta tape was quality checked, the operator could be reasonably sure what he saw was a good representation of what the viewer would see except - for the uk at least - without a PAL footprint. Now the QC is done on material which bears NO resemblance to what the viewer will see. I say QC the actual damn playout quality and see how much passes!
Dr. Who is only recorded in SD. They have no plans to start recording in HD as they say the amount of special effects they have in the show would be too expensive to do in HD. But it should still be widescreen.
Whether 4:3 stuff is pillarboxed or pan scanned when broadcast digitally should be up to the settings on the tv itself. The station should only have to make the decision with analog broadcasts, (and in my opinion should always pillarbox and never pan scan. And never ever stretch it) Trimming shit off the left and right might have (sort of) worked for playing movies on 4:3 tvs, but it just doesnt work to trim the top and bottom off a 4:3 picture to play on 16:9 tvs.
That's true! Exactly right! In fact, I think I'm going to set up a competing broadcast TV and cable network!.
Oh, wait. It turns out over-the-air bandwidth is incredibly expensive and there's none for sale at the moment. Still, I can set up a cable network. Oh, I can't get a permit to dig up all the roads in a municipality to lay cable?
TV distribution companies have a government-granted monopoly because some forms of last-mile bandwidth are scarce resources (broadcast transmissions) and some cause disruption to everyone if they are installed (cables). Satellite is an exception, but the cost of entry into this market is huge. It is in the public interest not to have streets dug up all the time, so the (typically local) government enforces this. It is then not in the public interest for the resulting monopoly to be unregulated.
There is one alternative, which is communal ownership of the last-mile pipes. When you build a house, you buy the cable from your house to the nearest exchange, and a share in this exchange. You pay a cooperative to operate it, and they sell bandwidth to TV companies and so on. I don't know if anyone has implemented this in the real world, although there were plans to in Utah a few years back (they seemed to have stalled when I visited though).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
We all know this... and your options are 'Government Control' or 'stfu untill the companys decide to cut their profits' people whine without direction... if you're going to whine, at least have an end goal in it
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
In order to fit all the hd channels cable companies have been compressing the crap out of the hd channels, sometimes lowering the resolution and killing bandwidth to the channels. Heck on cablevision some of the hd channels or so starved for bandwidth they are blocky most of the time.
Well, good on you, then. Enjoy.
When you say "I watch a game at a place with HDTV" do you mean something like a bar? Those places were probably the first in their area to offer HDTV, so their connection is probably satellite. I think satellite has the most incentive to compress the "HD" signal to hell, though cable isn't far behind.
I have a 32-inch HDTV plus Comcast cable and the image is dramatically better than standard definition, especially with good feeds like sports on major networks or movies on HBO HD. Lower tier channels like TBS HD and History HD don't look so great.
The other advantage of HD is being able to watch all the 16:9 programming without letterboxing or cropping.
It's time for the market-droids and consumer-groups to come up with some definitions. Here's my dictionary for 2009:
"HD" and "SD" and their various flavors continue to mean what it meant in 2008 - a theoretical number of pixels but nothing about signal quality beyond that.
"Full Digital Signal" means enough bandwidth that allocating more to the channel would not improve the customer experience no matter how good their equipment was, assuming the equipment met a certain industry standard. "Full Digital Signal" for SD would be much less bandwidth than "Full Digital Signal" for HD.
"Limited Digital Signal" means something between Full and Minimum.
"Minimum Digital Signal" means enough bandwidth that anyone with a high-end digital tuner and a high-end NTSC television to watch it on won't see any difference if you allocate more to the channel.
Anything less than Minimum Digital Signal would indicate a technical problem and would be remediated as soon as possible.
To allow for future enhancements, "Full/Limited/Minimum Digital Signal plus XYZ" is where XYZ is an extension to the standard introduced after the terms Full, Limited, and Minimum Digital Signal were defined. Think "NTSC plus Closed Captioning."
The beauty is that as cable companies drop their analog tiers, they can shift most channels to "Minimum Digital Signal" and reserve bandwidth for movie channels, specific shows on other channels, etc. and carve out room for additional services. The difference between now and this future world is full disclosure of how good the signal really is.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Dear Herodotus, yes!
A year ago History Channel started broadcasting letterboxed shows on their standard definition channel. I took that as a good sign that they were now producing them in HD. But after my Comcast system started carrying History HD last month, many of those letterboxed 4:3 shows are *stretched* to fill the my 16:9 screen. Egad, standard definition, stretch, and black bars. Could they do any worse?
The only hope is that the HD conversion was a little rushed and they'll settle on a more sensible setup soon.
Do you and I have some strange visual sense that makes stretched images look crappy while everybody else thinks they're fine?
The second time I got Comcast HD the technician set it up, put on some "Comcast HD is Wonderful!" commercial that he said I had to leave running for 15 minutes, and left. When I turned to channels that I know Comcast broadcasts in HD (like primetime NBC) it was clear to me that they were just 480p video stretched to fill the screen.
Tech support fixed the problem in ten minutes. For some reason the converter box was set to output in 480p. But shouldn't the CABLE COMPANY TECHNICIAN notice something like that himself? How many of my neighbors will be stuck watching stretched 480d for the next ten years because they're not as technologically savvy as I am?
yes - this is the correct answer and only answer I've been able to come to. SPs of all types only provide a drop to the exchange and their equipment at the exchange. The exchange owns everything from there to the houses. This allows for all sorts of interesting things to happen, like combined cabling for multitude of services, and swapping between providers. It would also end the monopolies overnight, because there no longer would be Verizon/ATT/TW/Comcast owned exchanges for phone/optical/coax cabling.
It does, of course, impact the bottom line for all those mega-corps, by removing their monopoly hold.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
For 1080p, anything below around 5Mbit looks terrible.
At what frame rate? A 1080p/24 signal (e.g. movie) would seem to need a lower data rate than a 1080p/60 signal (e.g. live sports or video game).
Actually, 'broadcast quality' is well-defined. It means a certain amount of analogue signal bandwidth in the unmodulated source [...] Broadcast quality refers to the source quality, which is typically higher than the amount of bandwidth available for transmission
NTSC uses a 4.2 MHz channel, of which the top 1.2 MHz is chroma (color). (The specs say that luma and chroma MAY overlap, but this results in fringing and dot crawl in the signal.) So a source that maxes the bandwidth of NTSC would have to have 3.0 MHz of luma (Y) and 0.6 MHz of each chroma component (Cb and Cr). By Nyquist's theorem, this corresponds to about 312 luma pixels and 62 chroma pixels across the 52 microsecond active period of each scanline. But as I understand it, "broadcast quality" also refers to some amount of dynamic range at transmission time, right?
Must be my inner Luddite showing,but i'm down to three or five antenna channels and see no reason to continue to play the farce. I get enough content from my internet, and find books far more valuable.
What does "time allocated" mean?
I've read about three processes of shortening a movie to fill a TV time slot:
They may be used together or separately. Over the course of a feature film played in a 120 or 150 minute time slot, this can add up to enough extra ad slots to more than pay for the process.
In Lebanon, Ohio the local government controls the cable TV wires - they are NOT owned by time warner, IIRC. So a competing cable TV system was setup, and consumers benefited.
I have a $60 STB that performs much better than earlier generation boxes that were much more expensive. The only problem is that it down-converts everything to SD.
By U.S. law, an entry-level ATSC set-top box has to convert everything to SDTV, or else the box isn't eligible for the $40 coupons. From the coupon site's FAQ: "The intent of the program is to allow consumers to continue to view TV over-the-air on the same TV they used prior to the transition, not to enable upgrades in technology." So the final rule states that coupon-eligible converters MUST provide RF and composite outputs and MAY provide S-video outputs.
The Federal government is spending lots of (our) money helping TV corps switch to HD. Including free digital adapters for analog TVs, and lots of TV advertising to promote it. And of course the spectrum monopolies that HD is broadcast on, and the cable/satellite franchises that suit the TV corps just fine.
Maybe that's all in the public interest. But our government should have used those subsidies to bargain for requiring stricter definitions of "HD" and other criteria on which consumers have to decide how to consume. Instead, TV corps get all the subsidies they want, and, as usual, no accountability.
Perhaps the TV corps' power in creating officials' public image, and keeping quiet inconvenient stories about official conduct, is what government officials get in return for the giveaways.
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make install -not war
If they'd just use that little built-in feature that allows multi-casting, they wouldn't need to care about cable bandwidth.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I mentioned HBO and BluRay discs.
HBO isn't ad-supported. Their content IS the product, not me.
Try to keep up.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Toy Story 2's pixel resolution per frame is halved compared to Toy Story 1, for a grand total of 1/4 of the pixels. It was an effort to reduce required rendering time. How many complaints were received about the lower pixel resolution of Toy Story 2? Zero.
poor city person gets the bum end of the stick once out his whole life.
transrating, and if done properly, its used "statistically". each service has a priority. sometimes service needs less bitrate (VBR) so others get more of it.
it is an efficient use of bandwidth and if you don't like it stop asking for millions of services..
MPEG2 as a whole is a pretty good spec and is versitile enough to handle many future extentions - the Mpeg2 Systems specification (transport stream) can and is used as is to deliever H.264 content. No change what so ever. Mpeg 4 Pt 10 did not exist - sorry that they did not require a crystal ball as well as MPEG2, but such is life. However MPEG2 was able to accomidate it when it came along.
So, thanks the Powers that "they" had the foresight to adopt a scalable standard like MPEG2.
I like MPEG2. I just finished reading the spec (13818-1 and -2:2000 - yes my head is STILL spinning weeks later as anyone who has actually read them will know what I mean) - and I tell you that MPEG2 is a work of art.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I have a lot more respect for the BBC after checking out their high definition service. As high definition is just kicking off in the UK they have had the opportunity to use the very latest h264 standards. They show programmes in 1080p at around 16Mb/s which looks great on a decent tv.
Looking at providers in the US it seems they're stuck with outdated mpeg2 standards which really doesn't do anything for the picture at low bitrates.
The only trouble is that hardly anything is filmed in HD in the UK. NOTE TO BBC: I want to see Jeremy Clarkson being eaten by dogs in full 1080p glory!
If I want to watch a high-def network program that is available over-the-air, I find that the quality of the OTA HD broadcast is almost always superior to the same program transmitted in HD (at an extra monthly charge) by our local cable monopoly. They deliver more channels, but they are in "highish-def", compressed to maximize the number of channels that they can support. (Thank you, Mr. Roberts.) So if you have a modern HDTV with a built-in tuner, go out and buy an inexpensive HD antenna (rabbit ears with at least a 45db gain), and watch over-the-air when you can.
Cable = slowing down torrents
Cable = watering down HD.
Cable = boring channels. Very generic. All censored.
Cable = All Ads & infomercials.
Cable = monopoly with gov backing.
Cable = politically correct shows.(BET and Mexicano channels)
Add new one.
Cable = watering down HD.
Always remember that shit into shit equals shit out of shit. AND,speaking os satellite, The industry needs me and fellow pirates, to keep the price at an affordable rate for all you yappers that complain about PQ.
The poor fellow was charged with being a pornographer. His lawyer claimed there wasn't a proper legal definition of what was pornographic, and what wasn't. The judge agreed, but added that "I know it when I see it."
Getting defensive about your choice of a/v cable is sad.
I suppose it's useless for me to tell you that you're wrong about linux boxes, hdmi, and drm. But, fwiw, you're wrong about linux boxes, hdmi, and drm.
I don't think your parents had a dumb idea when they decided to have children. But, honestly, it depresses the hell out of me that you are wasting the perfectly good dna (probably) that they gave you on screwing with people like jedidiah because you're insecure about your a/v cables.
I don't understand why these Station engineers always have so much trouble with their HD channels.
- Is the original material 4:3? Present it pillarboxed in 720p or 1080i mode.
- Is the original material 16:9? Present it full-screen in 720p or 1080i.
Easy as pie.
The only people that might have problems are those with old "analog" sets, but they shouldn't be watching HD channels anyway. They should be watching the old analog or SD channels.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
There's no collusion here. What you're witnessing is the product of our gov't school system (i.e. citizens that don't understand technology). The average Joe or Jane Smith can not understand the concepts of 720p or 1080i or even 10 megabit/s versus 5 megabit/s. (Most of them don't even know what a kilowatt-hour is supposed to be, and that concept has existed nearly a century. They can't read their own electricity bills! much less understand HDTV.)
Here's what the average person understands:
- Wow! CBS only broadcasts 1 channel while ION broadcasts 5 channels! I'm going to watch Ion!
-or-
- Wow! Dish has 1000 channels while Comcast only has 200. I'm going with Dish!
They understand simplicity, not technical jargon. The companies are catering to what these people can grasp. More == better even if the quality goes down. Lowest Common Denominator marketing, not collusion.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.