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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*
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.
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
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
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.
I don't think cartoon network needs full bandwith just so it can show powerpuff girls in full 1080p
I disagree.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
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.
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.
Let me explain to you how this works: you see, the corporations finance HDTV, and then HDTV goes out... and the corporations sit there in their... in their corporation buildings, and... and, and see, they're all corporation-y... and they make money.
1. Dunno how you can have uncompromised, compressed video (unless you mean lossless). Blu-ray (and HD-DVD) can support multiple codecs as well as compression ratios. The idea is that they can always use 100% of the space. That being said, you can get 2 hours onto 25gigs roughly. 7 200 seconds, 0.0035GB/s, 0.28Gb/s. So roughly 1:4 compression ratio (see below). In actuality, it will almost certainly be higher, because they need to fit in extra features and the like.
2. As the article states, the compression ratio is all over the place, but tops out at 12-15Mbps (depending on which HD standard is being sent). It will almost certainly be lower. And that's the entire point of the article.
3. No idea.
4. Uncompressed HD video takes roughly one gigabit per second (as stated in article). That's roughly 52 channels worth of bandwidth.
"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.
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.
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)
1. What is the standard, uncompromised compression rate for full HD video? eg. The rate of compression on a Blue Ray disc.
The uncompressed HD signals flying around in a TV truck or control room are 1.5 gbps. Blu-Ray compresses that down to 36 mbps or so using an MPEG-4 class codec.
2. What is the standard compression rate for cable HD video? eg. What I can expect from Time Warner.
Last I saw, the industry standard was to fit 3 MPEG-2 HD channels into each 38 mbps cable channel.
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. Netflix streams in Standard Def. ABC streams 720p from their web site at 2 mbps using H.264 and it looks pretty good. At least the quality of OTA HD (which is MPEG-2). 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. Again, HD-SDI (the professional uncompressed video standard) is 1.5 gbps. One video signal requires its own coaxial cable and has a maximum run length of 300 feet. The dirty little secret, however, is that once the signal leaves the production truck, it's MPEG-2 up to the satellite (36 mbps max) or over fiber (typically 100-200 mbits, but only available from select venues) to the network's master control.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
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.
That's assuming there is competition in the area...
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.
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
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.