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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 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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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.