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BBC Lowers HDTV Bitrate; Users Notice
aws910 writes "According to an article on the BBC website, BBC HD lowered the bitrate of their broadcasts by almost 50% and are surprised that users noticed. From the article: 'The replacement encoders work at a bitrate of 9.7Mbps (megabits per second), while their predecessors worked at 16Mbps, the standard for other broadcasters.' The BBC claims 'We did extensive testing on the new encoders which showed that they could produce pictures at the same or even better quality than the old encoders ...' I got a good laugh off of this, but is it really possible to get better quality from a lower bitrate?"
They just remove the naughty bits.
FTA: ""Even my wife can see a reduction in picture quality and she's got cataracts," wrote one. "
BBC accountant: We provide the $ame or better picture quality with half the bitrate! Just think of the $aving$!
BBC IT decision maker: I $ee what you're $aying.... The$e picture$ look $uper!
Public: This looks like crap.
BBC rep: (waves hand) The$e aren't the compre$$ion artifact$ you're looking for. We can go about our bu$ine$$. There are no complaint$.
was the featureless black-screen video to 4'33" from John Cage. Results were far better at the lower bitrate. The absolute darkness was less blurry.
Nullius in verba
They use the metric percent.
Technically speaking, they suck at "maths".
We Amurkins don't recognize no commie "maths." We want our math to grow up as individuals
SSC
FTA: ""Even my wife can see a reduction in picture quality and she's got cataracts," wrote one. "
They must have a pretty big screen if she can see that difference from the kitchen.
Actually, deary, it's sexist, not racist. I swear it's not making me take you less seriously though.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Aren't you comparing x264 to oranges?
If you use those same 3 megabytes to store a lossy jpeg, you can store a lot more detail in the same file space - at typical compression rates, it might be 5-10 times more detail. I am often puzzled by folks who hate lossy and love lossless, because lossless isn't simply lossless, it's smarter about what it chooses to lose.
I understand that the process of uncompressing and recompressing a lossy image is a lossy process, but we're not talking about multiple recompressions here, we're talking about one cycle. This is true for both broadcast video and for playing back your personal music. And especially if you listen with earbuds, it's silly to worry about audio compression loss, since the earbuds are very lossy. I know that this is a discussion of video, but the same rules apply.
The screen is in the kitchen dipshit.
And I'm doing the cooking.
Hold on a sec- now women are a separate race? Really?
Well, they couldn’t keep up with the men.
As a 3 yo lesbian, father of seven, socialist COBOL programmer, I'm not sure which of your stated attributes qualify you to be racially offended.
So, DVD vs. Blu-Ray is pointless if I'm using eye-buds?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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Now when we go to watch the Christmas special it will look like Cardboard sets, that wibble and wobble. The TARDIS will look utterly horrible and the Doctor will revert to a bloke from Liverpool with big eyes, big teeth, curly hair and a long scarf.
They also lowered the audio rate down to 16Kbps, so that rich orchestral music will sound like it came out of a cheap 1970's Moog.
Great, just when they updated the look of the show this will undo all of their work and it will look like the viewers were taken back to the 80's in an actual TARDIS.
Bravo BBC, Just Bravo......
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
My cranium nearly exploded while attempting to parse
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
I cmprsd ths pst wth jpg nd thn dcmprsd t, lssy ncdng s jst s gd s lsslss ncdng.
My intended reply was unpostable, because although Slashdot accepts the international symbols for pounds, yen, and dollars, it appears to want to filter out the unicode for euro, colón, Cuban pesos, kips, tugriks, nairas, won, baht, dong, and cents.
It's not like the international finance community isn't meeting you halfway. The Peruvian currency is the /.; what more do you want?
Please add support for more international currency symbols ASAP. Also, you're going to need to raise the moderation limit above "Score 5, Funny" for my post. I'd suggest going up to 11. It was going to be EPIC.
Maybe she noticed it while delivering a beer or chips to the living room?
That's just wrong and offensive. I can' not believe you would you would say something so neanderthall.
This is the modern age asshole, and we put TV's in the kitchen~
No TV in the kitchen, sheesh.
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