Broadcasters Squeezing HD Picture!

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HDFury

rbinck

Been a peeve of mine for years now. There are a lot of people who are satisfied with poor picture quality in lieu of having more channels though. They get giddy over a station broadcasting 5 SD channels over a HD channel because they don't have a HDTV yet or just don't care about HD.

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1080PsF

Of coarse the author of this article is passing on incorrect information. He is saying that a 720p signal is half of the bandwidth of a 1080i signal but that is wrong because the 720 signal is 60 frames per second where as the 1080 signal is only 30Fps. 720 is half the pixels but double the frames making the bandwidth the same.

NonMcTubber

Its been a peeve of mine, all my life, that by in large, television is a vast wasteland. 90% of the time, its very hard to find anything OTA worth watching, the addition of multicasts has perhaps reduced that to only 85% of the time. If I don't like the television offering and will not watch it because its junk and garbage, what difference does it make if its offered in HD or SD?

As it is, I can tell little difference between a OTA digital HD picture and a SD picture, except to note that both run rings around an OTA analog signal. And its the increased content variety of multicasts that has made the digital transition a positive experience for me. And since multicasts are fairly new, I expect more and more stations to take fuller advantage of multicasts in the future.

And to answer the question, no I do not use a converter box and a old analog TV incapable of delivering HD, both my TV sets can and do deliver HD.

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High definition is not the definition of my life.
But knowledge is power and HD does have some potential to increase content variety and choices.

BrianO

Not true.

Neglecting differences in compression efficiencies between interlaced and progressive scan (progressive scan compresses more easily), 720p/60 uses approximately 11.8 perecent less bandwidth than 1080i. A 720p frame only contains approx. 4/9 the number of pixels in a 1080i/p frame.

Also, 720p does not have to broadcast at 60 frames per second. Under the ATSC spec, it can be broadcast at 30 frames per second or even 24 frames per second, but I have yet to see any broadcaster using the two lower frame rates.

rantanamo

are you sure? The offerings have been outstanding the last few years. Right now, not so much, but during TV season, yes.

1080PsF

Doesn’t matter what the ATSC has deemed a format the only professional videotape playback of 720p is either 59.94Fps or 50Fps but the later one is for Europe.

There is more to the signal than just active pixels.

NonMcTubber

Perhaps the giant mistake made in this whole digital transition thing is the lack of standardization. We have 1080P, 720P, an older set of of 1080&720I standards, and an even older set of only 480 scans lines, and then to add injury to insult, we can't quite decide if we want 4:3 formats or 16:9. And then to add more injury to more insult, we should be using better MPEG4 compression, and instead we use MPEG2.

And then we wonder why this Turkey fails to fly to its full potential.

As they say, a camel is a horse designed by committee.

Will we soon need a digital transition #2 to get things right? Thereby screwing even more consumers.

__________________
High definition is not the definition of my life.
But knowledge is power and HD does have some potential to increase content variety and choices.

rbinck

No OTA 1080p or 720i, btw. mpeg4 didn't exist as a standard when the ATSC was adopted.

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BrianO

Partially true about 1080p, but the rest is accurate.

1080p at 24 fps and 30 fps are both ATSC formats that noone to my knowledge is using yet. Neither exceeds the bandwidth limitations of 6 MHz channels. Whether or not either is ever used by broadcasters remains to be seen. OTOH, 1080p at 60 fps requires about twice the available bandwidth and will in all likelihood will never be added to the ATSC spec because to do so would render millions of existing ATSC tuners out-of-date.

There is no 720i because it is incompatible with MPEG compression which requires the number of scan lines to be divisible by 16 for progressive scan and by 32 for interlaced scan. 720 is not divisble by 32.

One might also note that 1080 is not divisible by 16, but a trick is used to make both 1080i and 1080p compatible with MPEG. 8 blank lines (black pixels) are added to the bottom of the frame before compression takes place and they are simply discarded when the signal is decompressed to give the desired 16:9 aspect ratio. 1088 is divisible by 32 making it MPEG-compatible with both progressive and interlaced scan.

Incorporating MPEG-4 into the ATSC broadcast standard would also render millions of existing ATSC tuners out-of-date.

BrianO

Oh, come now. You are nitpicking with your 59.94. Also, 50 fps is used in all countries that use 50 Hz AC power, not just in Europe.

rbinck

I had qualified the 1080p as OTA. While there is 1080p/24 and 1080p/30 there is no OTA broadcasts of these formats. So what I said was completely accurate. However, the point I was trying to make to Non was although they had all of the choices, the two he chose to cite were never ones they adopted. I think he got his p and i mixed up.

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NonMcTubber

In reply to my assessment that Television is a vast wasteland, rantanamo asserts, "are you sure? The offerings have been outstanding the last few years. Right now, not so much, but during TV season, yes."

And the only thing that I can say is that there is no accounting for viewer preferences. And since my preferences are not the mainstream norm, it somewhat leaves rantanamo's viewing tastes as the winner of the argument. Even though prime time television is mainly an endless diet of cops and robbers themes, situation comedies, and similar, more geared to distractions than learning or thinking.

Its my hope that multicast technology when multiplied by a fairly large number of OTA channels, will finally open up more choices for me and other people with other niche market viewing tastes. Even though religious channels are not my cup of tea, at least other people are getting more choices.

__________________
High definition is not the definition of my life.
But knowledge is power and HD does have some potential to increase content variety and choices.

electrictroy

Ding! If I have a favorite movie or TV show I desire to see in HD, I just buy or rent the Bluray disc. For over-the-air television, I don't care if it's only DVD quality so long as I can later acquire it on HD Disc. (Examples: Star Trek TOS or Heroes) I agree with your conclusion, but aren't you exaggerating just a little bit? Since June 12, I have been watching THIS movie channel, RetroTV, Global, Megahertz, and a syndicated subchannel (reruns). I'd say the percentage dropped from 90% "nothing to watch" to around 30%. My time is filled much more easily.

If you disagree then I respectfully suggest selling your DTV converter boxes and antennas, putting the money in the bank, and then getting a nice Internet connection which will let you watch any program you desire at any time. You can even pre-download shows while you're at work, and then watch them when you get home.

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TV Band/whitespace Devices will block my Baltimore/Philly stations. No more channels 2,3,6,10,11,12,13,17,35,45,57,61,65

NonMcTubber

Electrictroy suggests that, "If you disagree then I respectfully suggest selling your DTV converter boxes and antennas, putting the money in the bank, and then getting a nice Internet connection which will let you watch any program you desire at any time. You can even pre-download shows while you're at work, and then watch them when you get home."

I might just do that if I had any viable broadband choices in my area, but I have only satellite options that are both super expensive, and will not deliver the 2.5Mb/sec required to do much of anything. As for my telco, its AT&T and they do not even offer vanilla DSL for my exchange.

__________________
High definition is not the definition of my life.
But knowledge is power and HD does have some potential to increase content variety and choices.