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Sounds like there needs to be some additional classifications...

HD services are marketed and sold as HDTV. Is the resolution/framerates enough to "label" programming as HDTV?

I understand that Bandwidth costs and what E* is doing. But somewhere there needs to be a disclosure of sorts to the general public who are not technically as savvy as those who are here so they get an idea of what they are buying. This would also allow for those providers who bite the bandwidth bullet and provide higher quality service to differentiate and identify a competitive advantage.

This is just the sort of thing that a well constructed letter to the Attorney General's office could serve to get some resolution.

At worst... some enterprising group of lawyers could turn this could turn into a class action... Not just against Dish but against all HD service providers who scale back the bitrates to save bandwidth.

To use the whiskey analogy... let me know exactly what's in the bottle and regardless of what the "cut" is.
 
dslate69 said:
Given the blocking you see on fast camera moves, doesn't this prove that HD-LITE is not the problem but low bitrates.
A picture can look phenomenal with HD-LITE and High Bitrates and look like crap with HD Resolution and Low Bitrates.
I think all the attention paid to HD-LITE is misdirected; instead we should wage a war against low bitrates.
Click to expand...

Shhhhhh...no one here wants to hear that. They like bitching about raw resolution because it's an absolute. (even if it's an absolute load of crap.) If you start getting into bitrate problems, you have to look at things subjectively.

You can uprezz something and broadcast it at 1920 x 1080 and it might look worse than something shot natively and broadcast at 1440 x 1080.

You could broadcast an art documentary at a reletively low bitrate, and it might look better than a sports event at a much higher bitrate.

All that matters is whether the picture looks good or not. If it doesn't, then complain. But it's pointless to focus on one specific issue- there are too many variables at work. (Although if I HAD to pick one problem, I'd pick bitrate.) Focus on the symptoms. If FoodHD looks blocky, tell 'em it looks blocky.

And for Gus' sake, don't give me that "pixels have to be square" nonsense unless you're willing to throw out your entire DVD collection.

(I still like Tom B though, even though he always fights me on this :) )
 
leejp said:
HD services are marketed and sold as HDTV. Is the resolution/framerates enough to "label" programming as HDTV?
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Uh, yes. Sorry.

In fact it's specifically vertical lines- has to be over 700. I don't even think that's a "rule" though- just an industry guideline. Under that, they call it EDTV

If you have a problem with that, talk to the FTC. You probably should have done it 15 or 20 years ago, though.

And now, I'd like to turn it over to someone who will try to use the "18 standards" to prove me wrong because they don't understand what the standards are for.
 
Sparks,

I don't fight you as much as you imply. I've posted over 50 posts complaining about low bit rates. And I am in agreement with much of what you just wrote.

The problems I am constantly seeing on UHD, StarzHD, TNT, and now HDNET, are mostly due to insufficient bandwidth. Now the razor clarity that I loved from HDNET is gone and I attribute that to the down-rezzing. But yes, the blocking and contouring and motion artifacts are due to bit-starving. And it is a real shame that HD channels are suffering so much from this.

Likewise the problems I've read here about Food HD and HGHD also seem to be a result of low bit rates. I don't know much first hand about these two as I never watch these channels.
 
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No wonder SHowtime looked especially crappy last night while watching Passion of the Christ. TIme to send an e-mail.
 
M Sparks said:
Uh, yes. Sorry.

In fact it's specifically vertical lines- has to be over 700. I don't even think that's a "rule" though- just an industry guideline. Under that, they call it EDTV

If you have a problem with that, talk to the FTC. You probably should have done it 15 or 20 years ago, though.

And now, I'd like to turn it over to someone who will try to use the "18 standards" to prove me wrong because they don't understand what the standards are for.
Click to expand...

So they can sell any over-compressed crap as HD...
 
I would think that they need to stay at 720 lines or more to call it HD.

And I think there would be some public pressure to keep the horizontal pixels at 1280 or higher. But I don't know of any formal standard presently in place that requires this.

So could they drop down to 960x1080i or 960x720p and still label it HD? Don't know.

Also don't know if they could transmit in a 1280x720i resolution and have their receivers upconvert back to 1280x720p or 1920x1080i.

As to bit rates, that's dependent upon encoding techniques. 10Mbps under MPEG2 is not the same as 10Mbps under MPEG4. Here I suspect both E* and D* will squeeze it as much as their customers allow them too. They are already down in the 8-9 Mbps range on some channels, which is pretty bad IMHO.
 
To rephrase my point...

In an ironic sense... There seems to be nothing in the high definition standard that sets the requirtements for the QUALITY of the picture.

I finally got E* to install HD this weekend and thus far have been impressed and disappointed at the same time. The good HD stuff is simply amazing and definately worth the price of entry (set+service). But some of the HD stuff actually looks worse than analog SD on a good CRT.

I watched a little HD baseball and in the normal behind the pitcher camera angle, the grass is actually "dancing" (looks like the grain is shifting back/forth).... VERY annoying... almost enough to make one sick. Unless it's excessively windy or raining, the grass should NOT move/shift. The encoding has a long way to go...
 
Tom Bombadil said:
...
As to bit rates, that's dependent upon encoding techniques. 10Mbps under MPEG2 is not the same as 10Mbps under MPEG4. Here I suspect both E* and D* will squeeze it as much as their customers allow them too. They are already down in the 8-9 Mbps range on some channels, which is pretty bad IMHO.
Click to expand...
I really think this is the Fight you should pick. You would have a dramatic overall increase in picture quality if you could get DISH to up the Bitrates on all the HD channels. I think the whole "HD-Lite" as it pertains to resolution has watered down the whole quality discussion. When a subscriber can tune to a HD-Lite channel that has a high Bitrate and see how amazing it looks, they think that this whole "HD-Lite" taking over every thread (including this one) is nonsense.
Get Bitrate up, so all the channels look great. Then let the purist in you come out and fight the resolution battle.
 
I've been using the term HD-lite to refer to the combination of lower resolution and lower bit rates. Having both or either is HD-lite to my eyes.

I do agree that a 1440x1080i picture that is getting 16Mbps of bandwidth will yield a pretty good image - unless they screw it up somewhere between the source and my TV. It won't have the razor sharpness of a true 1920x1080i with good bandwidth, but at least it will be fairly sharp and without all of the blocking, contouring, and blurring that is plaguing a LOT of E*'s HD channels right now.

Trouble is that bandwidth is the problem area for E*. I believe resolution is reduced in order to save bandwidth. That is, a 1280x1080i video requires less bandwidth than a 1920x1080i video. A 1280 channel at 10Mbps will have fewer obvious compression artifacts than a 1920 channel at 10Mbps because the 1280 is being compressed less - there is less information to compress.

Thus E* is looking to reduce the bandwidth given to each HD channel. Reducing resolution to 1440 but not reducing bandwidth makes no sense from E*'s perspective. They want to put 3 HD channels per transponder. So they down-res, use MPEG4, and squeeze bandwidth to get to their goal. Or they leave the resolution at 1920, use MPEG4, and really squeeze bandwidth - which means the 1920 channel will be rife with compression artifacts.

I don't see anyway to lobby E* effectively to keep bandwidth rates high, unless a LOT of subs complain about the compression artifacts. The cost to E* to keep bandwidth high is to go back to 2 HD channels per transponder. That's a very high cost to them and they won't go there unless they have to.

The other path is that MPEG4 can become much more efficient, which could mean that fewer compression artifacts would be present even given lower bandwidths. So the hope is that PQ would be pretty good even with 3 HD per TP.

However my crystal ball says that if E* can get the buying public to accept and be happy with HD as it is presently being served, that what will happen when MPEG4 improves is that E* will go to 4 HD per TP and we will simply get more of what we are getting now, at perhaps an even lower quality.
 
There are a few other options E* could adopt.

They could decide that even with 3 HD channels per TP that they will allocate the channels in such a way to preserve a few high quality HD channels. Say they put HDNET, FOOD, and HGHD on a single TP. Then they give FOOD and HGHD an average of about 10Mbps of bandwidth, and then give the rest to HDNET. HDNET could then be kept at 1920 with high bandwidth.

In this way they could at least offer a few very good HD channels.

The risk would be that people might notice some of the channels are much better than others and then complain about the lower quality channels.

They may already be doing this with ESPN, where overcompressing would create a lot of obvious motion artifacts.

I guess I would be placated a bit if I had some assurance that there would always be a few great HD channels. Contenders would be channels like premium movie channels, ESPN, HDNET and HDPPV. At least then I could record blockbuster movies or major sporting events in high quality.
 
At a wedding this weekend I was talking to a couple guys involved with U-Verse. They are using mpeg-4/H.264 for everything. They finally just got new demo hardware encoders that allows them to stream 2 full HD streams and 1 SD stream over 25mbit/s vdsl.

The streams are about 30 seconds behind but they are able to compress mpeg-2 almost in half. 1920x1080i mpeg-2 19mbit/s stream is about 10mbit/s when compressed to 1920x1080i mpeg-4/h.264. Their vendor is promising to have that down to 6mbit/s same quality in mid-late 2008.

Sounds like Dish is not the only one struggling with mpeg-4. When U-Verse releases their HD stb's in the next month or two they are only going to support one HD stream until they can get the new hardware (supposedly by end of the year).
 
Tom Bombadil said:
There are a few other options E* could adopt.

They could decide that even with 3 HD channels per TP that they will allocate the channels in such a way to preserve a few high quality HD channels. ...
Click to expand...
I know someone has posted this before but I couldn't find it.

Why can't they mix HD and SD on Transponders to get a better fit?
 
dslate69 said:
I know someone has posted this before but I couldn't find it.

Why can't they mix HD and SD on Transponders to get a better fit?
Click to expand...

Because that requires the SD to be on 8PSK transponders, and there are SD receivers out there (all 4 digit models I think) that dont talk 8PSK, only QPSK.
 
It's in the best interest of Dish to end of life any receivers that aren't 8psk compatible. I'm sure you'll see that in the next 18-24 months. The spectrum is too valuable to not have the flexibility to mix HD and SD on a transponder.
 

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