2005 Grammy Awards exposing multicasting issues at CBS58

[Joseph S]

Just a few years ago we were hoping we'd be one of the locales to get DD5.1. We now have that, but we still have multicasting and it looks like garbage tonight whereas others are praising the quality. Any strobes or movement is causing excessive artifacting of the picture.

[Joseph S]

And now they cut out of the HD feed early again!!  :bang:

[Mark Strube]

I doubt the strobe looked great on the full bitrate feed, but the problem probably wasn't quite as serious on it.

[Joseph S]

One engineer mentioned it was perfect of the original feed, but said the limited 16Mbps feed for his station was another story. (We don't even get that much, we have <15Mbps)

People watching without multicasting complained of some macroblocking during the U2 and Madonna segs, but nothing compared to what we had. In general the macroblocking we see on a constant basis with any movement on the multicast feed is not a problem on the standard feeds. This was something I proved to myself for sure in comparing full BR AFC playoffs versus CBS58's broadcast of the same game. The strobes and movement only made our problem worse. It was unwatchable for the most part during performances as the usual macroblocks progressed to blue/grey artifacts  sailing on a macroblock sea as the compressor was overwhelmed with data. Even minimal action of the volleyball segment on CSI Miami the other day proved too much for it.

The switching issue could clearly be solved with monitor on site as has been mentioned in the past. It may not have been a problem when CBS didn't run stuff to the hour, but this year and on live programming it's going to be an issue and has been on several occasions.

[StarvingForHDTV]

The macro blocking reminds me of channel 36-1.

[mhz40]

One engineer mentioned it was perfect of the original feed, but said the limited 16Mbps feed for his station was another story. (We don't even get that much, we have <15Mbps)

The 'original' feed is uncompressed HD video, so one would expect perfection.  The mpeg encoding is generated at the local affiliates.