Lack of Bandwidth Oversight Damages HDTV Quality 292
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.'"
Re:FIOS Baby (Score:5, Informative)
Does the FIOS signal look good? I haven't made the plunge into HDTV because whenever I watch a game at a place with HDTV, the grass looks like it's liquid from all the digital artifacts - presumably over compression by the cable company?
Anyway, I have a relatively high-end standard TV and a converter box, and the picture looks almost as good (though not as big!).
Re:HD channels w/ no HD programming (Score:1, Informative)
I thought the same thing, but this is more a bug than a scam.
MOST HD shows have a little HD icon and list HD in their description. On a few channels (Disney included) they never use the icon, but some shows are indeed HD.
Not every show on Disney HD is high def, but some definitely are. Watch a few shows for 10 seconds at various times of the day and you will find some..
Re:HD channels w/ no HD programming (Score:4, Informative)
On Disney about 10 shows (~6 hours per day) are 720p right now.
It's so true (Score:4, Informative)
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 the channels not DirecTV that is doing that.. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Blame the FCC / ATSC for requiring Mpeg2 only (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:FIOS Baby (Score:4, Informative)
FiOS' HD quality is on par with the OTA feed, well to my eye it is. I don't think they have issues with compression because I don't think they compress the signal anymore than it already is when it leaves the broadcast company.
Re:I completely agree (Score:2, Informative)
(CBS bans secondary channels)
Uh... no. My local CBS affiliate has weather information on a sub channel. The picture quality on the main channel looks just as good as the local NBC affiliate which has no sub channels. In a nearby area, NBC is broadcasting the CW network in standard def on a sub channel, this also has no perceivable effect on their main channel. I agree that once you start cramming five channels in like PBS, picture quality is going to suffer, but adding one highly compressed channel isn't going to make a difference and I'm very glad the stations in my area carry those sub channels.
Re:Blame the FCC / ATSC for requiring Mpeg2 only (Score:4, Informative)
Re:WHA? (Score:5, Informative)
No, it has changing quality, not resolution. They can dynamically adjust how compressed the program is from one second to another. It's still 1080i, just more or less blocky.
Not the same thing. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Some important questions... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Same thing with standard def (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, I think we're due for at least a full year of international loss of all electricity.
And billions would die. Because we'd lose medical equipment, refrigeration (think storing vaccines) the ability to transport and store food, pure water, clean sanitation....... the list goes on.
At this stage in the game humanity/electricity are tied so closely that our species actually requires it to survive.
Electricity is more than just your xbox.
Re:WHA? (Score:3, Informative)
In case you're wondering, this is the bit that gave away that you have no clue what you're talking about:
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.
Uniquely challenging data, eh? You mean like RGB values of 0.01,0.03,0.02 instead of 0.8,0.2,0.6? Tough.. the set is being asked to show a darker color.
Even better is the CD bit. That doesn't even have compression to complicate things. Are you familiar with the concept of digital? I'm fairly certain my $30 dvd player with digital output can "cleanly decode" your passage. If it didn't, it would *skip*.
Which brings us to another issue... (Score:3, Informative)
...urban reception of OTA Digital TV.
There's something called Multipath Interference that happens when a line-of-sight signal hits a bunch of obstacles. Like buildings. The signal degrades, and degrades, and degrades, and you wind up with not being able to lock on to some channels. You wind up with what I call the "Max Headroom effect" where the picture freezes with lots of blocky artifacting and the sound repeats like a stuck CD. Yet another reason why that show was so goddamn prophetic.
Anyway, not everyone can stick an uber-antenna or antenna farm on their roof. And indoor antennas fucking suck, even the legendary Silver Sensor which is better than most. So there will be a lot of angry people come February. And they won't just be the people who forgot to buy their sucky digital TV converter box and digital TV grade antenna.
This whole issue would have been better solved by forcing cable and satellite companies to sell a "lifeline package" to low-income people, and just saying "On February 17, 2009, broadcast TV is going bye-bye." But the electronics companies smelled money, and corporate welfare money at that, so they sold the FCC a bill of goods.
OTA Digital TV works in flat rural areas where people have money and land enough to put up mega-antennas, and there are no buildings to cause multipath for miles. Mongoloid Middle America will be set. Those of us in the cities, on the other hand...suck it up or get cable or satellite, bitches.
Re:Which brings us to another issue... (Score:3, Informative)
Some of the recent STBs actually do a decent job of dealing with multipath. Even in infamous locations like Manhattan. Compensating for multipath has been an active area of research and development. A sophisticated equalizer can compensate for the effects of multipath.
I have a $60 STB that performs much better than earlier generation boxes that were much more expensive. The only problem is that it down-converts everything to SD.
I think they are talking about the cable companies (Score:2, Informative)
Re:There's another wrinkle (Score:3, Informative)
The difference between 480p and 1080i is not as large as you think it is. Hint: the "p" and "i" are important qualifiers.
Satellite HD (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:More Regulation? (Score:3, Informative)
The government never mandated HD in any way, shape or form!
The United States government mandated that all new TVs be able to receive HDTV, even if they need to downscale it to SDTV for display. That involves the licensing of numerous patents.
Coupon-eligible boxes (Score:3, Informative)
I have a $60 STB that performs much better than earlier generation boxes that were much more expensive. The only problem is that it down-converts everything to SD.
By U.S. law, an entry-level ATSC set-top box has to convert everything to SDTV, or else the box isn't eligible for the $40 coupons [dtv2009.gov]. From the coupon site's FAQ: "The intent of the program is to allow consumers to continue to view TV over-the-air on the same TV they used prior to the transition, not to enable upgrades in technology." So the final rule [doc.gov] states that coupon-eligible converters MUST provide RF and composite outputs and MAY provide S-video outputs.
its called.. (Score:1, Informative)
transrating, and if done properly, its used "statistically". each service has a priority. sometimes service needs less bitrate (VBR) so others get more of it.
it is an efficient use of bandwidth and if you don't like it stop asking for millions of services..
BBC has the right idea (Score:2, Informative)
I have a lot more respect for the BBC after checking out their high definition service. As high definition is just kicking off in the UK they have had the opportunity to use the very latest h264 standards. They show programmes in 1080p at around 16Mb/s which looks great on a decent tv.
Looking at providers in the US it seems they're stuck with outdated mpeg2 standards which really doesn't do anything for the picture at low bitrates.
The only trouble is that hardly anything is filmed in HD in the UK. NOTE TO BBC: I want to see Jeremy Clarkson being eaten by dogs in full 1080p glory!