Digital Signals

[DealsR4theDevil]

I have an amplified antenna feeding me digital/HD broadcasts from standard network TV stations. Late Night with Connan O'Brien, The Tonight Show, and Channel 7 news all look pretty pristine, but Shows like Heroes and Prison Break look very, i guess "compressed" is the best word to use. Now I have never had a desire to get Cable or Satellite, mainly because i dont watch that much TV. But would you guys say that i can get a better HD feed from cable/satellite than from an amplified antenna? Or have i been spoiled by Blu-ray and this is as good as TV gets?

[gand41f]

Originally Posted by BAND-AID

I have an amplified antenna feeding me digital/HD broadcasts from standard network TV stations. Late Night with Connan O'Brien, The Tonight Show, and Channel 7 news all look pretty pristine, but Shows like Heroes and Prison Break look very, i guess "compressed" is the best word to use. Now I have never had a desire to get Cable or Satellite, mainly because i dont watch that much TV. But would you guys say that i can get a better HD feed from cable/satellite than from an amplified antenna? Or have i been spoiled by Blu-ray and this is as good as TV gets?

I'm assuming your signal is strong enough and you are not seeing pixellation (large blocks of squares, often in a completely wrong color/texture). If so, you need to get a better antenna or signal booster, but from your description, that doesn't seem to be the case.

By the way, the shows you mentioned with people sitting on a desk generally look better than action shows because there is less movement, so it's easier to compress. Also, they may have put in an extra smoothing filter to hide people's, ahem, skin imperfections, which will make it even easier to hide artifacts.

As for normal compression artifacts, in general, OTA HD broadcasts are about as good as it gets for image quality of what's traditionally considered "TV" (including cable/satellites, not including Blu-ray/HD DVD/games). Cable will give you the same signal or compress it further. Satellites generally don't provide local channels, you need an antenna for those anyway, and some give you 1280x1080 quasi-HD (yuck). OTA digital broadcast is 19Mbps MPEG-2 CBR (constant, not max) so it's around the range of a very bad Blu-ray movie. If you have extra sub-channels (7.1 and 7.2, for instance), it will reduce the bandwidth even more, of course.

It depends on where you are too. In my area, the local NBC affiliate seems to have a very bad MPEG-2 encoder, and their HD channel looks much worse than ABC-HD when there is lots of motion on the screen even though they both have one SD sub-channel. The local Fox and CBS HD channels have no sub-channels and their quality is better than the aforementioned two. The worst is PBS which has something like 4 sub-channels. Absolutely terrible whenever there is any movement on the screen.

Oh, wait, is this the rant thread? Oops, never mind...

enjoy
gandalf

[DealsR4theDevil]

Thanks

I also noticed that I don't get a digital CBS channel. I never noticed before because I never watched nething on CBS before. But i wanted to start watching The Big Bang Theory. When I input 2.1(2.001) nothing happens, I just get a black screen.

[Aaron]

You need to upgrade to satallite or cable because over the air transmissions will cease in Feb. 09.

[WickyWoo]

You need to upgrade to satallite or cable because over the air transmissions will cease in Feb. 09.

Not true

OTA ANALOG signals will cease then.

Anyone who doesn't have a DTV will be able to purchase a subsidized by the government box for about $50 (this is required by law, as they're taking your property, in this case the publically owned spectrum)

[Aaron]

Originally Posted by WickyWoo

Not true

OTA ANALOG signals will cease then.

Anyone who doesn't have a DTV will be able to purchase a subsidized by the government box for about $50 (this is required by law, as they're taking your property, in this case the publically owned spectrum)

Ok, I was thinking it was all OTA transmissions. Thanks for clearing that up.

[Iceman_II]

Originally Posted by Aaron

You need to upgrade to satallite or cable because over the air transmissions will cease in Feb. 09.

Originally Posted by WickyWoo

Not true

OTA ANALOG signals will cease then.

Anyone who doesn't have a DTV will be able to purchase a subsidized by the government box for about $50 (this is required by law, as they're taking your property, in this case the publically owned spectrum)

There is a story over on engadgethd today about how the FCC is going to make broadcasters continue to broadcast analog signals for three additional years.

That said, I have discovered something very interesting in comparing the size of files saved onto the external USB HD from my Dish satelite DVR... a 1/2 hour show from the satelite takes up MUCH less space than 1/2 hour from some over the air stations, and about the same as 1/2 hour from others.

I have read that the signal on the satelites is REALLY 720p, which is upconverted to 1080i in the tuner, while some terestrial signals are no-sh*t 1080i signals... my observations have confirmed it. For all you know your local NBC affiliate may be broadcasting in 720p as well.

[raginranger]

I was wondering myself about this problem. For me, ABC and Fox look the best, and they use 720p. CBS, and NBC use 1080i and look worse. My tv is a 720p LCD. Do these channels look better because the signal matches my tv's native resolution or does 720p always just look better than 1080i?

[Iceman_II]

An argument is made that 720p is better than 1080i simply because it does not have to be de-interlaced in the TV. By definition LCDs and Plasmas ONLY display progressive signals, so the 1080 signal must be deinterlaced.

You can't really use the performance of an individual station to judge how the network looks, so much is dependant on what the local affiliate is doing to the signal. I have seen some pretty marginal broadcast stuff come out of my local affiliates, however, when viewing the corrisponding MKV file downloaded from usenet, the picture quality is MUCH better. (and that is AFTER transcoding the MKV to a format playable on the PS3)

[WickyWoo]

The problem is half that your TV is 720p, and half that not every station has invested in quality encoders.

Satellites squish the crap out of the signal, and cable companies are almost as bad. You're not seeing even close to the 19.2mbps. That's why I'll always have an antenna hooked up no matter what.

[gand41f]

Originally Posted by BAND-AID

Thanks

I also noticed that I don't get a digital CBS channel. I never noticed before because I never watched nething on CBS before. But i wanted to start watching The Big Bang Theory. When I input 2.1(2.001) nothing happens, I just get a black screen.

Make sure your digital tuner has found that station first. 2.1 is the logical channel number, used because the analog channel of your local CBS afficiate is at 2 (which specfies a particular frequency). If the tuner hasn't learned the physical channel for the station yet, entering 2.1 won't help. You can let you tuner rescan the channels again (not recommended, you may lose some it has found before) or enter the physical channel number and let the tuner discover the mapping. To find the physical channel number, go to www.titantv.com. The small number in parenthesis, like "(56)", is the physical channel number.

If you still can't get it, you may need to adjust your antenna. Is your CBS affiliate in the same direction as the others? Go to www.antennaweb.org and enter your zip code. There are other factors as well (some frequencies travel over water better than others, etc.) Just play around with it a bit and let us know. (If you usually use an outdoor antenna but also have a spare "rabbit ear" antenna, you may want to try that and point it at different directions. I've seen surprising results with those little things.)

enjoy
gandalf

[phloyd]

In general, the OTA antenna will be better than satellite and cable will be exactly the same as the OTA signal since it will be sourced from the same place.