HD broadcasts on TV

[RichiPuppy]

Does the quality of HD on cable have to do with the cable company, cause I know my cable HD looks a hell of alot better then my ota HD.

[BStecke]

My g/f's mom just got Verizon Fios with the HD receiver. It seemed a lot more stable than their old Bright House (Time Warner) cable, in that the pixellation was a lot better, even nonexistant in some broadcasts. Details were still nowhere close to Blu Ray though. I've never been to anyone's house where they have HD satellite, even though I have Dish, I watch it so little that I can't justify the cost of equipment. Anybody have comparisons of FIOS and satellite?

[Blu-Ray Buckeye]

Originally Posted by RichiPuppy

Does the quality of HD on cable have to do with the cable company, cause I know my cable HD looks a hell of alot better then my ota HD.

It has to do with the company, the network and the show itself. All are part of the chain of quality. In general, I've never seen a cable network that looked quite as good as DTV but even there some shows are weak and others far better. Comcast has not impressed me at all.

[Pilam69]

http://www.hdtvgalaxy.com/whatson.php

This is one link I have found to compare channels and what is offered.

[aaronwt]

Originally Posted by Blu-Ray Buckeye

For TV Broadcasts:

#1 OTA
#2 Satellite
#3 (by far) Cable

Cable is a joke compared to DirecTV or other sat providers. OTA is a bit better than sat. If you watch a pre-recorded Blu-ray disc, even OTA is a bad joke.

Quite the opposite here. DirecTV is a joke compared to Comcast here. DirecTV down rezes the 1920x1080 signal to 1280x1080. It is very obvious on my 1080P TVs. The HD from Comcast has more detail than the HD from DirecTV here. And all of DirectV channels are over compressed, HD and SD. The SD from DirecTV pales in comparison to the SD from Comcast here.

[Blu-Ray Buckeye]

Originally Posted by aaronwt

Quite the opposite here. DirecTV is a joke compared to Comcast here. DirecTV down rezes the 1920x1080 signal to 1280x1080. It is very obvious on my 1080P TVs. The HD from Comcast has more detail than the HD from DirecTV here. And all of DirectV channels are over compressed, HD and SD. The SD from DirecTV pales in comparison to the SD from Comcast here.

Could be but I have never heard that from anyone else. Currently I have Comcast and it sucks cornhole.

[PBJblu-ray alltheway]

Originally Posted by Blu-Ray Buckeye

Cable is a joke compared to DirecTV or other sat providers. OTA is a bit better than sat. If you watch a pre-recorded Blu-ray disc, even OTA is a bad joke.

I have cable HD and a friend of mine that lives down the street has Direct TV HD and my picture is much better than his Direct TV (junk). I guess it depends on where you live and the cable provider. In my area (central jeresy) I would say that cable is better.

[Pilam69]

Originally Posted by Blu-Ray Buckeye

It has to do with the company, the network and the show itself. All are part of the chain of quality. In general, I've never seen a cable network that looked quite as good as DTV but even there some shows are weak and others far better. Comcast has not impressed me at all.

I think it is really a question of location and # of homes drawing on the signal, much like cable internet. I cannot complain about my Comcast signal. I do fully agree with the above quote though, it has to do with the company, the network, and the show itself. A deficiency in any one of those is, unfortunately, plainly visible on an HDTV set.

You know, though, when you are watching a UHD show like Northern Exposure, that was never recorded in HD and never meant to be seen in HD that it's not going to stack up. Battlestar Galactica looks great and that's on the same channel, just meant for HD vs. filmed before HD was a twinkle.

[Krazy]

Blu-ray and other "offline" media will always have better audio and video quality that broadcast media simply because:
1. BD has much more bandwidth than broadcast. The current 6Mhz-wide channels used in broadcast TV max out at just under 20Mbps vs. the 40Mbps maximum of BD
2. Broadcast HD uses the older MPEG2 codec compared to the newer (and more efficient) MPEG4/AVC and VC-1 on BD (although HD broadcasts in some countries will be in MPEG4/AVC)
3. BD has the luxury of variable bitrates enabling video quality to be tweaked for each scene (higher bitrates for high-motion scenes, lower bitrates for still scenes) while broadcast is streamed at a fixed bitrate

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by ra1024

Shadowself, you seem to be pretty knowledgeable in this area. Can you say how cable, satellite, and ota differ in hd quality? I thought I had read that ota was actually better than cable which was better than satellite. I wasn't sure if this was accurate and wondered if you could shed some light on this.

Thanks for all the info.

Originally Posted by clyon

Cable is the worst for HD.

Originally Posted by Blu-Ray Buckeye

For TV Broadcasts:

#1 OTA
#2 Satellite
#3 (by far) Cable

Cable is a joke compared to DirecTV or other sat providers. OTA is a bit better than sat. If you watch a pre-recorded Blu-ray disc, even OTA is a bad joke.

Which is best? At the moment it is 50-90% dependent upon your supplier, source and lots and lots of other conditions -- even weather. As a general perception cylon and Blu-Ray Buckeye are not far from reality. Personally, I wouldn't say that cable is far worse than satellite as a general rule, but it's not better either.

The real question is going forward. Five or ten years from now which will have the better picture/sound? It's all about signal to noise ratios (SNR) and bandwidth.

In theory cable has the brightest long term future. With cable plants going to almost exclusively fiber to the home for runs into new areas (not old lines), the bandwidth and technology can support several hundred HD channels at very, very good quality. I'd suspect that within 10 years or so almost all urban and suburban areas will be 100% fiber. Rural areas will take significantly longer. With "smart" technologies only sending down to your local neighborhood those signals which are actually being viewed, the available bandwidth in fiber is sufficient for very high quality HD (given, of course, that it is only 720p or 1080i after all!) Fiber to the home will easily support the likely maximum 4 or 5 concurrent HD channels you'd want to in your home (out of several hundred from which to choose) and the trunks will easily support the several dozen concurrently viewed channels to your neighborhood.

Last I checked, you can't get 500+ 1080i channels over satellite no matter how you play the game unless the ITU and FCC authorize more bandwidth. That probably won't happen except at Ka band and and higher. Those frequencies are very susceptible to rain and other weather effects. (Most direct satellite broadcast systems today are Ku-band which are affected by weather much less than Ka-band.) Higher order modulations and more advanced FECs are helping and will help further in the future, but higher order modulations are much easier to do over fiber than over a satellite (e.g., satellite systems are currently using a coding scheme giving 3 bits per Hz bandwidth and investigating techniques using 4 bits per Hz; conversely cable systems often use 7 or 8 bits per Hz and are investigating 9 and 10 bit per Hz encoding methodologies). Also the neighborhood multiplexing technique won't work with satellites, you just cannot launch a satellite with big enough dishes to give you footprints as small as a single neighborhood in a city and make it commercially viable.

OTA also is limited in the number of channels it can support. Just like with satellite you won't get anywhere near 500+ channels of HD. The allocated bands just won't support it.

As far as on a "per channel" basis (ignoring the theoretical number of channels): In theory cable should still win out. However, for commercial reasons, cable runs closer to the ragged edge than OTA or satellite. Thus it *may* forever have, on average, poorer quality.

Why? Think of it this way: OTA and satellite have to put into their "link" calculations losses for things like weather, solar interference, variances in "sky noise temperature", even multipath effects for OTA in urban conditions, etc. Thus they build in significant margin to accommodate those variations. It's only when they concurrently get hit with those variations does the quality significantly suffer. On a clear day with no significant negative effects the signal gets through virtually lossless.

On the other hand, cable operators typically assume a fixed loss system. The cables, connections, repeaters, fibers, etc. are a "known" quantity (they're not really, but they assume they are and the assumption is often not too far from reality.) Thus the cable operators run things with much lower margins in their links. When even small things go astray the thin margin disappears. This typically shows up in the bit error rate going up long before loss of a discernible signal which in turn causes a degradation in picture (and sometimes sound) quality. Not all cable operators run so close to the edge, but many do.

That's why most people currently rank the quality of OTA and satellite higher than cable.

(Disclosure: I was the technical authority [a specific term with the FCC meaning you are the top person certifying the system will perform technically just as you describe it] on one of the first direct broadcast systems, and while I have a fondness for satellite distribution it does have it's drawbacks. Anyone who is not willing to admit this [like those fools who claim that weather never affects direct broadcast satellite signals] is not owning up to reality.)

[MrBogey]

Originally Posted by Shadowself

With cable plants going to almost exclusively fiber to the home for runs into new areas (not old lines)

I don't know of any real FTTH plans by the major cable providers. I do know they just started engineering equipment for the cable companies to DOCSIS over GPON. I know there's GPON equipment that will do an RF overlay (Verizon uses it, for one) but I don't believe any major cable provider is doing FTTH right now as they feel DOCSIS 3.0 on a HFC network is good enough. AT&T is doing FTTH in greenbuilds and Verizon is doing FTTH in both old and new neighborhoods but I don't know offhand of any major cable system doing FTTH, just HFC with DOCSIS 2.0 or 3.0.

But yeah...it's all frequency blocks and modulation really. DirecTV has 5 satellites and x amount of frequencies per satellite. Their bandwidth is pretty fixed. Cable companies have the theoretical limit of the coax in their system and that's pretty well fixed. Having to deal with legacy analog chewing up a good chunk of their bandwidth they hope that forcing people into digital and going with SDV will free up enough bandwidth to offer more HD programming.

Lower the bitrate...add channels. Or raise the bitrate and reduce channels. Just like XM and Sirius.

Hopefully the bugs get worked out of IPTV as it'll scale really well to the needs of the end-user. Realistically you'll have as many channels as the backhaul can carry with the limit locally being only set to the maximum amount the bandwidth between you and the backhaul could support. Meaning you can have a network system of 200 1080p channels as only those channels being viewed by you and those on your node are under the total aggregate bandwidth to that node and all the channels you're currently watching are under the bandwidth total of your connection to the node.

[JToddler]

I think Directv's HD broadcast from their current few channels in HDTV is excellent!

[aaronwt]

I've had DirecTV for HD for 5.5 years. It was great until a couple of years ago when they started over compressing and downrezing. Prior to that the picture ws excellent. PArt of the reason I recently switched to Comcast was becasue the DirecTV picture quality became so bad. Now if you watch DirecTV with a 720P/768P set you won't notice the downrezing, but you will notice it on a set that can resolve the full 1920x1080 resolution. Anyway I switched to Comcast and will switch to FIOS when it is offered later this Summer since FIOS has the capacity to add many more HD channels than Comcast since they have more bandwidth, plus the FIOS internet speed is faster.

[JToddler]

Originally Posted by aaronwt

I've had DirecTV for HD for 5.5 years. It was great until a couple of years ago when they started over compressing and downrezing. Prior to that the picture ws excellent. PArt of the reason I recently switched to Comcast was becasue the DirecTV picture quality became so bad. Now if you watch DirecTV with a 720P/768P set you won't notice the downrezing, but you will notice it on a set that can resolve the full 1920x1080 resolution. Anyway I switched to Comcast and will switch to FIOS when it is offered later this Summer since FIOS has the capacity to add many more HD channels than Comcast since they have more bandwidth, plus the FIOS internet speed is faster.

Their new HD receivers H20 and HR20 are the ones to get if you have directv.

[aaronwt]

Originally Posted by SumYonGuy

Their new HD receivers H20 and HR20 are the ones to get if you have directv.

Another reason I left was TiVo. I got three HDTiVos when they came out in 2004 for DirecTV. Comcast decided to embrace TiVo while DirecTV didn't. Even if DirecTV or any provider gave me free service and their DVR I would rather pay $100 for service and My TiVos to be able to use the TiVos. The DirecTV HD DVRs don't compare to the HD TiVos. Not even close.
They offerd me alot to stay with DirecTV. I spent around $120 a month for 5.5 years with them. I told them as long as they didn't offer TiVo for use with their MPEG4 channels that I wouldn't consider them for service. If they had embraced TiVo I probably would have never left them. In the end I'm glad they forced me to leave. I left Comcast in late 2001 to go to DIrecTV because they had more HD to offer. Now the reverse has happened. Comcast is definitely better and cheaper than DirecTV for HD which is what I watch 95% of the time. When I go to FIOS it wil actually cost more than Comcast, but FIOS doesn't share the internet bandwidth with as many people and will be able to offer many more HD channels without having to compromise on picture quality or chnage to Switched Digital VIdeo. ANd I can use my three Series 3 TiVo HD boxes with FIOS like I am with Comcast.

[JToddler]

Directv Plus HDDVR HR20 is far superior than your TIVO right now...

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by MrBogey

I don't know of any real FTTH plans by the major cable providers. I do know they just started engineering equipment for the cable companies to DOCSIS over GPON. I know there's GPON equipment that will do an RF overlay (Verizon uses it, for one) but I don't believe any major cable provider is doing FTTH right now as they feel DOCSIS 3.0 on a HFC network is good enough. AT&T is doing FTTH in greenbuilds and Verizon is doing FTTH in both old and new neighborhoods but I don't know offhand of any major cable system doing FTTH, just HFC with DOCSIS 2.0 or 3.0.

Comcast ran fiber to my home (actually the whole neighborhood) in 2000. Not telephone or internet (wasn't even an option until a couple years following that). Just cable and actually fiber. Had a fiber to coax tranceiver in a box on the back of my house. There have been other areas where cable companies have done the same. My neighborhood (and town) were/are not unique.

Originally Posted by MrBogey

But yeah...it's all frequency blocks and modulation really. DirecTV has 5 satellites and x amount of frequencies per satellite. Their bandwidth is pretty fixed. Cable companies have the theoretical limit of the coax in their system and that's pretty well fixed. Having to deal with legacy analog chewing up a good chunk of their bandwidth they hope that forcing people into digital and going with SDV will free up enough bandwidth to offer more HD programming.

There are other ways to optimize cable that satellites don't have the option to do. One is the technique I mentioned above: only feeding actively requested channels into the neighborhood. Satellites can't do that.

Satellites can do "spatial" diversity and frequency re-use by using multiple spot beams. I know of a system direct broadcast system (though I decline to name names) that filed to do just that. (You do know there's more than just DirecTV and Dish (Echostar) in the U.S.?) However, satellites cannot realistically, in a commercial satellite, get the beams down to the size of a single neighborhood.

Originally Posted by MrBogey

Lower the bitrate...add channels. Or raise the bitrate and reduce channels. Just like XM and Sirius.

This is true for any open air (or space), RF based system. It's not necessarily true of closed medium systems. Remember, as a worst case scenario you can always run another fiber parallel to the first one... and a third one or a fourth one after that ... and on and on. This is not true of RF systems.

Originally Posted by MrBogey

Hopefully the bugs get worked out of IPTV as it'll scale really well to the needs of the end-user. Realistically you'll have as many channels as the backhaul can carry with the limit locally being only set to the maximum amount the bandwidth between you and the backhaul could support. Meaning you can have a network system of 200 1080p channels as only those channels being viewed by you and those on your node are under the total aggregate bandwidth to that node and all the channels you're currently watching are under the bandwidth total of your connection to the node.

I'm not too thrilled about IPTV. I see very little in the near future (next 10 years) that makes me believe IPTV will be better than the three most common modes now (OTA, satellite and cable).

[aaronwt]

Originally Posted by SumYonGuy

Directv Plus HDDVR HR20 is far superior than your TIVO right now...

I use three series 3 boxes now. None of the DirecTV DVR boxes I've seen can even compare to the HD TiVo boxes I used with DirecTV let alone the Series 3 TiVo.

[JToddler]

Originally Posted by aaronwt

I use three series 3 boxes now. None of the DirecTV DVR boxes I've seen can even compare to the HD TiVo boxes I used with DirecTV let alone the Series 3 TiVo.

Coolness!

[MrBogey]

Originally Posted by Shadowself

Comcast ran fiber to my home (actually the whole neighborhood) in 2000. Not telephone or internet (wasn't even an option until a couple years following that). Just cable and actually fiber. Had a fiber to coax tranceiver in a box on the back of my house. There have been other areas where cable companies have done the same. My neighborhood (and town) were/are not unique.

There are other ways to optimize cable that satellites don't have the option to do. One is the technique I mentioned above: only feeding actively requested channels into the neighborhood. Satellites can't do that.

Satellites can do "spatial" diversity and frequency re-use by using multiple spot beams. I know of a system direct broadcast system (though I decline to name names) that filed to do just that. (You do know there's more than just DirecTV and Dish (Echostar) in the U.S.?) However, satellites cannot realistically, in a commercial satellite, get the beams down to the size of a single neighborhood.

I'm not too thrilled about IPTV. I see very little in the near future (next 10 years) that makes me believe IPTV will be better than the three most common modes now (OTA, satellite and cable).

You got FTTH from a cable company? They use Ethernet from the box for internet? Didn't know Comcast was doing that. If they are then I'm sure it's not a widescale deployment as eveything I saw indicates to me they're gung-ho for DOCSIS 3.0 and not FTTH ala FiOS.

IPTV is just a delivery method. Technically it could be brought out on any IP platform that has 2-way communication (Coax, DSL, PON, etc). OTA and satellite really can't do it because of the return path but cable could definitely do it.