World's First 4K TV Channel Goes Live

[Tom Snyder]

Article from Mashable on the new ultra Hi Def TV channel.

ht.ly/gNKcP

[popegreg]

That's mighty interesting.  Too bad in 2013 we still can't get good 720p or 1080i content from locals or pay providers. much less 1080p.

[PONIES]

1) There's no such thing as "good" 720p.
2) There's a lot of "good" 1080i on free-to-air satellite. It's the suckers who are paying money who are receiving a crap product.

Not surprisingly, free-to-air satellite is leading the way when it comes to 4K TV as well.

I'm sure the first sources of broadcast 4K will pop up on FTA here in America before it even starts to be dreamed about on cable.

[popegreg]

1) There's no such thing as "good" 720p.
2) There's a lot of "good" 1080i on free-to-air satellite. It's the suckers who are paying money who are receiving a crap product.

Not surprisingly, free-to-air satellite is leading the way when it comes to 4K TV as well.

I'm sure the first sources of broadcast 4K will pop up on FTA here in America before it even starts to be dreamed about on cable.

Well I distinctly remember when WISN/ABC were showing Lost in nice looking 720p a few years back, but there was a definite backslide in quality once they switched to 1080i.  720p with adequate bitrate falls into the "good" category as far as I am concerned.

How much does a free-to-air setup cost?  A quick google search didn't really tell me.

I will call myself the biggest sucker in the world if you tell me that I can get shows like Game of Thrones or Homeland or Breaking Bad free-to-air, because that's the kind of stuff we suckers are paying for.  

[PONIES]

A few hundred dollars, assuming you cannot acquire the necessary equipment for free.

You can't get those particular shows FTA, but they're all released reliably on Blu-ray so... why would you want to get them FTA? The scripted material is always available in higher quality elsewhere like 1080p copies on iTunes.

It's always the sports that people use to justify why they haven't "cut the cord." There is always an awful lot of sports popping up on satellites. I'm talking 1080i MPEG-2 backhauls @ 38 Mbps. Sometimes they're even 1080i H.264 at those bitrates.

WISN is actually an excellent example of why 720p is so crap. All of their ABC scripted programming, which they receive directly from the ABC national satellite distribution feed, which is 720p H.264 video @ 24 Mbps, looks awful. But then the local news comes on WISN, which is produced natively at 1080i, and it looks crystal clear.

I have a lot of material from the ABC feed, and I can tell you right now that it looks awful at the source. It doesn't matter what the bitrate; 720p always leaves much to be desired. I have lots of 720p H.264 material at bitrates in the 20's of Mbps and 720p MPEG-2 material with bitrates that are 35+ Mbps.

I'm not impressed by any of it. I don't know why Murdoch and Disney are so adamant about only using 720p but their execs must have terrible vision.

[KryptoNyte]

When I record HDTV via Time Warner coax feed and QAM tuner, WISN channel 12, it always come in via pure mpeg2, the bitrate is always variable, always 1080i, and the overall bitrate is right around 18 Mbps.  Channel 12 is one of the best looking (visually) stations I get via QAM tuner and then through the rest of my equipment.

So what you're basically saying is that the national ABC network is sending its media to our local affiliate as 720p h.264 video, and our local affiliate is then re-encoding that to a straight up mpeg2 container in 1080i, and then handing that back to Time Warner ...

How did you arrive at that conclusion?  Or perhaps you're using some other crappy source for your Channel 12?

[PONIES]

When I record HDTV via Time Warner coax feed and QAM tuner, WISN channel 12, it always come in via pure mpeg2, the bitrate is always variable, always 1080i, and the overall bitrate is right around 18 Mbps.  Channel 12 is one of the best looking (visually) stations I get via QAM tuner and then through the rest of my equipment.

So what you're basically saying is that the national ABC network is sending its media to our local affiliate as 720p h.264 video, and our local affiliate is then re-encoding that to a straight up mpeg2 container in 1080i, and then handing that back to Time Warner ...

How did you arrive at that conclusion?  Or perhaps you're using some other crappy source for your Channel 12?

Basically, the national ABC needs are being uplinked to the Galaxy 3C satellite and Galaxy 16 satellite on C-BAND. There is one for each time zone. These feeds air all ABC network programming according to the national schedule. They use the DVB-S2 broadcasting standard and because they are not encrypted they are receivable by anyone with a satellite dish with a diameter of 8' or larger.

The ABC network feeds are variable bitrate using the H.264 codec at bitrates up to 24 Mbps. They use Tandberg phase-aligned MPEG-Audio: three .mp2 tracks which each contain a stereo audio track at a bitrate of 384 Kbps. These three tracks must be combined by the affiliate's equipment to a single 5.1 AC-3 audio track before being sent on to you. So again, another quality loss the affiliate introduces at this step.

For ABC network programming such as Modern Family or Jimmy Kimmel Live, our ABC affiliate takes one of these feeds, molests it with their own logo on top of the ABC network feed, slaps whether warnings and all kinds of other garbage on the screen, and then adds insult to injury by re-encoding it to the inferior MPEG-2 codec. They also insert local commercials during this process.

Basically, affiliates are the ultimate in obnoxious middlemen between you and the ABC, CBS, NBC, etc. network. The only purpose affiliates serve is to make the national network feeds on C band easier for the public to receive by re-transmitting them on cable and via the ATSC wireless standard so that everyone doesn't need an 8 foot satellite dish in their backyard. As we can see with all the bull**** WISN likes to pull, this service comes at a heavy price.



I don't see how anyone can say that this looks good.

Here's a screenshot of that same performance taken from the national ABC network feed (720p H.264 @ 24 Mbps):



See the difference? Zero compression artifacts! And no stupid WISN bug either.

[KryptoNyte]

First of all, ABC channel 12 via Time Warner *never* looks like the image to which you linked, it always looks like the second image.  

Second, my original question was simply, based in the info that I provided in my original post, how did you arrive at your conclusion that ABC's primary network feed is h.264 encoded?

[PONIES]

Because I have the equipment to receive it directly.

Channel 12 does look like the first image during scenes with high activity (lots of lighting effects, streamers, etc)

Their MPEG-2 encoders aren't up to the task of maintaining a stable image during high activity scenes. No doubt their needless upscaling to 1080i exacerbates this issue. As they are effectively doubling the resolution of the ABC content they are also doubling the bitrate required to maintain an artifact-free picture.

[KryptoNyte]

I have the strange feeling you don't have a flying frack what you're talking about.

[PONIES]

That's what ignorant people say when they are presented with an overwhelming influx of information that they cannot comprehend.

Here's an example of what NBC's national distribution feeds to their affiliates (like our very own WTMJ) look like:



ABC's feeds are basically identical to NBC tech spec wise. They use the same encoders and bitrates. Except NBC is 1080i, and ABC is 720p.

ABC looks considerably worse than NBC because of this.

[Ralph Kramden]

1) there's no such thing as "good" 720p.

Wrong !! Wrong !!

[PONIES]

Right !! Right !!

You could supply me with the lossless 720p source files straight from the camera and the 24 Mbps 1080i H.264 national NBC distribution feed would still **** all over 720p in the quality department.

720p is never capable of achieving a quality higher than "mediocre."

A good 1080i feed will destroy the best 720p feed. The two are only in the same league when the 1080i source has been molested so badly by an obscenely low bitrate that all that extra resolution detail that 1080i supplies has been stripped away.

[KryptoNyte]

What is the source of the last image file, specifically (including the tuner that you used the resulted in that data)?

[Ralph Kramden]

I'm done here. PONIES is obviously here just to argue.

Is 720p a "good" signal? Yes. Is it great, NO.