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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
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*
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"I would prefer to have two channels of good content instead of a single channel..."
But they have HUNDREDS of channels, and probably only enough decent content for a fraction of those channels. This looks like the MHz wars all over again.
Cable guy 1:"We have a ZILLION channels!"
Cable guy 2:"Oh, yeah, we a GAZILLION channels!!!!"
Consumer (flipping through a bazillion channels): "Shit. Nothing good on tv tonight."
Given that standard definition TV was supposed to be phased out long before now, it's pretty clear that the broadcasters can't be arsed to come up with their own standards. That, ladies and germs, is how we end up with government mandates to get our circuses at eye-popping resolution.
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.
The FCC did not have a crystal ball that would allow them to see into the future. The original proposals for HDTV were analog systems. There was no workable proposal for an all-digital system until about a decade after the formation of the ATSC. It took additional years to turn it into what we know know as ATSC. This was all bleeding-edge technology, right out of various research labs. MPEG-4 wouldn't be finalized until more than a decade after the FCC selected ATSC as the standard for HDTV in the USA. The FCC went with the best technology that was available at that time. Standards always become obsolete over time, but they are necessary. It's only recently that ATSC receivers have matured to the point that they have reasonable performance with impaired signals and prices that are acceptable to a mass market.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
MPEG-4 is hardly the outstanding standard as you claim it to be. Certainly there have been some slightly improved compression standards, but it came at a cost too.... and some pretty tough lossy compression that doesn't always work as well.
To me, the killer problem with MPEG-4 is the licensing issues where trying to implement anything using that standard (including distributing content!) is covered under so many patents and licensing loopholes that you need a full-time legal team just to make sure you haven't screwed up. For this reason alone, I would strongly discourage anybody from using MPEG-4 except for something of an application that either explicitly requires the standard (by customer specification where you've talked them out of it and they refuse to budge) or for some internal application that can take advantage of the standards.
I would urge any open source project even thinking about MPEG-4 to treat the spec document like some sort of radioactive material and to stay completely away from it at all cost! It isn't worth your time to even investigate. MPEG-1 has at least had almost all of the patents expire due to its age, and MPEG-2 is getting up there in age that it won't be the end of the world either.
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.
Nah, it has nothing to do with that. It is all about getting people to chuck their dvd's in the bin and buy the same content, yet again, in another format. Unfortunately, at the moment, most people are watching DVD's on their Hi definition TV and noting that the picture quality of Hi definition broadcasts is very often no better and often even worse quality than their DVDs.
So the publishing companies are really pissed, they were seriously expecting everyone to chuck their DVDs in the bin and buy the new higher priced hi definition content (most of which would be no better than the dvds it is meant to replace), all they had to do was jam enough B$ advertising into the gullible publics minds and they would mindlessly go forth and buy, buy, buy ;D.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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!
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.
I think the difference in perspective can depend a bit on your viewing conditions.
There is no question that a 15Mbps broadcast is going to be higher quality than a 14Mbps broadcast. The only question is whether you can see the difference.
If you have a 40" LCD screen on the other side of your living room you're not going to tell the difference that having an SD weather subchannel makes. On the other hand, if you have a 72" plasma just far enough away from your face that you can catch both sides of the TV in your peripheral vision, you might actually be able to appreciate the extra quality.
Subchannels should certainly be encouraged - it gives consumers more for their sacrifice of RF spectrum (which does belong to the people). However, I don't see some guidelines as being unreasonable - perhaps a requirement that the primary channel maintain at least a certain amount of bandwidth. Also - perhaps networks could be permitted more than one station allocation if there is more than one unused allocation in the region (and if they all become used then after a year or two networks would be forced to give up their extra allocations to free up space again - the idea is to keep room for competition but at least use the frequency space that we have).
I think the market will also help - to the degree that consumers watch off-air programming. I can't believe that people actually use QAM to watch local stations (except where distance prevents decent reception) - the off-air station is free and multiples better in quality...
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.
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.