HD TV

I was a bit intrigued by the Titanic clips. Not only are they freely offering deleted scenes not in the original film which I've just forked out on the deluxe 4-DVD set it order to see, but they're also in higher quality than the DVD.

However, despite being marked as 'new', I can't get them to play - I get a message that 'my licence to view this content has expired'. Anyone else have problems with them.

I think what mostly determines whether a person prefers either analogue or digital is the amount of digital television they have watched.

The problem is that former-analogue viewers judge the quality of a digital broadcast using the same criteria used to judge an analogue broadcast. Analogue television systems simply don't exhibit blocking/motion artifacts, because an analogue television system by its very nature provides an analogue of what is going into the camera and then the reciever simply translates that electrical analogue back into sound and vision.
Also, PAL does not compress motion, and the resolution is constant at 720x576.

Digital broadcasts in the UK are a 4mbps MPEG-2 stream at best, with a resolution that is possibly much lower than PAL.

So for former analogue viewers, the way to differentiate between rubbish and decent video is just to look for problems in how the analogue signal has been corrupted in its path from encoder to decoder, like ghosting (caused by the signal being reflected), grain (caused by a weak signal), and much else beside!

When the viewer applies this method of judgement to a digital broadcast compressed in this manner, the result is that the signal is initially deemed to be perfect, because these problems of corruption are totally absent. What these punters don't realise though is that instead of each pixel changing at every frame, the pixels are grouped together and may stay the same for many frames to save bandwidth, and the faster the motion, the less successful the trick is with a fixed amount of bandwidth.

Eventually, the new convert to digital begins to notice these problems and becomes even more annoyed with digital than they were with analogue! The only way to totally eliminate this flaw of digital broadcasts would just be to broadcast digital pictures uncompressed. This though would require masses of bandwidth. In any case, standard definition H.264 at 4mbps should be perceived by most people as being equal to or better than PAL.

They could up the bitrates. I've been transfering home videos to DVD, and I've found 6mbps to be fine, even on close inspection (though I use VBR, with a minimum of 2.5, and a maximum of 9. 6 is the target bitrate, but that goes up depending on how much video is going on the disc. 6mbps allows a maximum of 95 mins, with 192kbps AC-3 audio. I capture it at 15mbps, which is the maximum on my capture software). Wouldn't go any lower than 6mbps though. Higher bitrates would mean less channels, but even 1 or 2mbps extra would make a huge difference. another 3 or 4 would be even better- 8mbps is virtually perfect.

I've found digital always looks a lot worse on plasmas/LCDs than on CRTs - granted, that's probably true for everything, for me at least, but compression artefacts in particular are more noticeable on a plasma.

They were also more noticeable back when I had a 100Hz TV and watched DVDs on it - I assumed it was because of the extra processing that the signal goes through, and that it goes through simiar processing in a plasma/LCD.

David

It's possible they've been on the site too long... but it might be worth checking Windows Update for new DRM/Windows Media Player stuff.

The WMVHD trailer for Terminator 2 is always worth a download (the whole thing can be bought from the US if you're so inclined, though I've no idea how region encoding affects it).

David

I have a strong feeling it could be the TVs themselves. When I've been in shops with LCDs hooked up to SKY+ boxes, even the S&S Banner is covered in artifacts- which should not have any as it's not part of the compressed MPEG.

Thats caused by the connections (RGB or Composite, Cheap Scart cable etc.)

That depends what James means by artefacts. The nearest store to my work distributes pictures from satellite via it's own RF cabling, which looks bad to begin with, but the MPEG compression artefacts are also a lot easier to pick out on Plasmas and LCDs than on CRTs.

David

Anyone see these adverts air... by venture3

Sky HD Advert- Click Here

They are showing across the Sky network intermittedly.

More HD adverts will start showing as the launch of Sky HD gets closer.

will the World Cup be in HD then this year?