BBC One HD This Autumn

I'd be surprised if they had access to many HD clips at all.

I suspect a lot of the footage was from EPKs (Electronic Press Kits released for promotional purposes) which are usually DigiBeta or SD downloads (720x576 25p MJPEG Quicktimes usually) In the case of older films - and some more recent ones - the EPKs may well have started off life in "NTSC" (or component 3:2 59.94Hz) and been converted... The older stuff may also have been NTSC / PAL converted.

Some of the stuff used for older films may well have been sourced from commercial DVD releases (increasingly common) Blu-ray is problematic as movies are almost always 23.976Hz not 25Hz - so need conversion and ingesting and engineering that in a normal edit is not straight forward. Similarly most high quality downloads are also 23.976p.

Incidentally ... for FREEVIEW HD viewers .....

Cryptic Message today from Danielle Nagler

#HD encoder software change tonight should deliver improvements on #Freeview - let me know what you see.
from ……..
TWITTER.COM/#!
22-Mar-2011 @ 20:39

Maybe a bit early but I notice the Encoder seems more efficient, its using less bitrate, but no noticeable change in quality.

As pointed out in another group, what has the BBC become now it releases engineering information via casual social networking !?

No issues with the way it was released, if done via the Blog mechanism it would only be jammed up with the usual suspects fussing about unrelated matters. I suspect the work announced today is 'in progress' and not final so opening it to a small group of people for comment is no bad thing.

If the reduced bit rate is the main feature of the changes made, then my first reaction having watched BBC HD from 1800 through till 2200 tonight is that personally there's no noticeable difference positive or negative.

My suspicion could be that this is being done to facilitate cloaked testing of the fifth HD service space before Ofcom advertise the slot for commercial use in 18months time.

In another group, a poster with a DVB-T2 IDTV is reporting that the BBC HD Channel is now broadcasting in 1080p.
It's not known whether that's p50 or p25. If p25, then that makes sense (I suppose?) for '25Hz' filmic effect programming, which there appears to be a significant amount of now, if p50, then surely that can only be a 'wrapper', because native 50p would require a doubling of bandwidth, and there is currently very little if any production in it yet ?

Aha! That might explain why my DVBViewer is doing this every time I switch to BBC HD:http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/6820/beebhd.jpg

Stats of the stream:

After conducting some investigations this morning, it seems that on DTT the BBC are dynamically switching the BBC HD channel between 1080i50 (as used for native interlaced programming) and 1080p25 for programmes that have been subjected to the 'filmic' effect (where odd and even fields are identical), and native film sourced material.

How come the DOG has switched from left to right?

Not good, combined with the Multiscreen Red Button prompt during the Boat Race!

This is done during sports coverage as the score graphic is usually shown in the top left. When ITV2 showed sport they did this too, I think they do it on ITV4 but haven't watched much sports coverage on there to know for sure.

Happens to prevent it distracting from/blocking an in-programme graphic, usually a scoreboard, though you may have noticed it was shifted over to the right for Comic Relief (donation info) too.

Did you know you can remove the red button prompt by pressing back-up on Sky or green on Freeview (probably a way of doing this on VM too if someone would care to enlighten me!)?

Blue button, in reply to Jonny.