Do you really like the way HDTV looks?

In alt.tv.tech.hdtv Phil Pease wrote:

| I had a similar reaction when CDs arrived; they just didn't sound as
| natural as vinyl records.

Actually, I found that even vinyl records didn't match up to actually
being right there by a real orchestra. Violins sound so much better
when there's no electrical processing at all.

--
|---------------------------------------/----------------------------------|
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (ka9wgn.ham.org) / Do not send to the address below |
| first name lower case at ipal.net / |
|------------------------------------/-------------------------------------|

In alt.tv.tech.hdtv Bob Miller wrote:

| Heresy!! Very dangerous to talk like that in this venue. MPEG2 and 19.34
| Mbps 8-VSB as used with over the air broadcasting are beyond criticism
| here.

Let's go with 256QAM or 16VSB and MPEG4.


| It has been suggested that capturing at 720P, down converting to 480P,
| transmitting at 480P and then upconverting at the set might be an option
| that would offer a better experience for most at screen sizes 42" or
| under. No one wants to hear anything but 1080i/p here.

I want my 2160p75 uncompressed :-)


| The combination of MPEG2, 1080i and 8-VSB is going to kill free OTA TV
| for channels 2-51 IMO.

Bad programming will kill it off, first. Oh wait, people like that crap.
You may be right about the first 2.

--
|---------------------------------------/----------------------------------|
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (ka9wgn.ham.org) / Do not send to the address below |
| first name lower case at ipal.net / |
|------------------------------------/-------------------------------------|

In alt.tv.tech.hdtv Mark Crispin wrote:

| For the benefit of the other newsgroups: this is Psycho Bob Miller, the
| official crackpot of alt.tv.tech.hdtv. Sometimes he posts under his own
| name, other times he uses sock puppets that loudly "agree" with him.

When you drop down to making personal attacks, you end up lower than
Bob is. Please limit your disputes and rebutals to the specifics of
what he says. The rest can go in alt.personal-attacks.blah.blah.blah.

I don't agree with what Bob says. And I don't even agree with how he
manages to introduce in some many out of context ways. But that does
not call for personal attacks and/or name calling. I've read a lot of
your posts for years, and other than this kind of thing I hold what you
say in high value (whether I agree, or not, or just don't know). But
many newcomers are very likely to judge you the same way they judge Bob,
.... by first impressions.

So, let's put an end to the name calling and let people show others
their own worth (or lack of it). Dispute facts, challenge logic, but
please, this isn't a personals newsgroup.

--
|---------------------------------------/----------------------------------|
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (ka9wgn.ham.org) / Do not send to the address below |
| first name lower case at ipal.net / |
|------------------------------------/-------------------------------------|

wrote:
In alt.tv.tech.hdtv Phil Pease wrote:

I had a similar reaction when CDs arrived; they just didn't sound as
natural as vinyl records.

Actually, I found that even vinyl records didn't match up to actually
being right there by a real orchestra. Violins sound so much better
when there's no electrical processing at all.

Right, and don't get me started about violins on television. There's just way too much.

--
Jim

Alan wrote:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 19:12:15 -0400, "Matthew L. Martin"
wrote:

Elmo P. Shagnasty wrote:
In article ,
Ty Ford wrote:

My fear is that by the time enough HD sets are bought by consumers, the good
video I saw in the Utah games will be a distant memory.
Absolutely.

It happens in every industry.

Giggle.

Now elmo is an expert in _every_ industry.

It's pretty apparent, reading his posts, that he isn't an expert in
*any* industry.

Matthew


In a very general way, he's right.

The bean counters will find a cheaper way to do it, and quality
usually suffers.

Cheaper doesn't automatically mean worse. In constant dollars, cars are
much cheaper now then in the 1930's and a damned sight better.

Usually. Generally. Not in EVERY case, but most.

Moore's law applies.

It's human nature.

See "Moore's Law".

Matthew

--
Thermodynamics and/or Golf for dummies: There is a game
You can't win
You can't break even
You can't get out of the game

I have a 50" Samsung DLP and HD looks so incredible that it is hard to believe. I have an HD Cable
box and all HD programs (as few as there are) have amazing detail. I can tell you that non-HD
broadcasts on the TV do not look so good at all. But the real HD stuff looks amazing.

Tony

On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 03:42:53 GMT, "HiC" wrote:

Went into a local Circuit City and took a good long look at their HDTV
selections. They had several including 2 1080p sets that I was told were set
up correctly and what I was seeing was as good as it gets. Everything HD
from the cams to the screen. Both the 1080p's were running some sort of hard
drive unit, not off a broadcast.

I've been hearing how amazing HDTV is. Well....while there's a certain "pow"
when you first see them, I get the sense it's due to some artifically
induced phenomena. The colors seem vivid, but it seems to me in an
enhanced - i.e. forced way. There seems to be an excessive "whiteness" to
the image that adds a certain kind of sparkle/sharpness, but again it seems
artificial. The real world as viewed by eyeballs doesn't seem that "sharp"
or vivid. The demos that were showing were clearly intended to take
advantage of this, all these closeups of brightly colored flowers,
snowboarders on glaring snow etc. I don't believe a sky exists anywhere the
shade of blue they were depicting in that demo.

I see all kinds of artifacts in the images. Yeah, okay, they're not meant to
be viewed from 6 inches away. But when I back off to 8 - 10 feet, I still
see this odd graininess, especially when the image pans. Plus all these
other odd things that happen to the image. Overall I find it harder on my
eyes than a sharp picture on a good analog tv.

As I understand it, in a few years we're getting all digital whether we like
it or not. Is the whole HDTV thing just a bill of goods we got sold/crammed
down our throats?

On 14 Sep 2006 01:33:10 GMT, wrote:

In alt.tv.tech.hdtv Paul Keinanen wrote:

| On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 03:42:53 GMT, "HiC" wrote:
|
|I see all kinds of artifacts in the images. Yeah, okay, they're not meant to
|be viewed from 6 inches away. But when I back off to 8 - 10 feet, I still
|see this odd graininess, especially when the image pans.
|
| Most likely a compression artifact in the signal source, i.e. a too
| low bit rate was used.
|
| If the original source was from a (feature) film, which may have been
| upconverted from 24p to 1080i x 60 with 3:2 pulldown and then
| converted to 1080p x 60 in the display, you may observe some jerkiness
| when panned.

I believe there are several issues here.
1) I'm in "50Hz country" so with film material I don't have 3:2
jerkiness but I am annoyed by the low frame rate in film material
(that is too low content update rate) when displayed without "motion
compensated" upsampling in the time domain. (To be specific in Philips
terms this is when switching off "Dynamic Natural Motion"= DNM).
This gives a stroboscope effect when panning or object movement with a
"medium" speed. Especially white/bright objects show this effect.

2) In "60Hz country" there will be an extra 3:2 jerkiness added to the
effects from the low content frame rate (if not upsampled as above
with DNM or similar.)

3) The problem I have at the moment is that my Philips TV can not
process HDTV signals with DNM and I haven't found another model, yet,
that seems to be able to do that. Any hints (other than HTPC) is
welcome.

What I see when they pan, and in some other cases, is the compression
artifact. It's the fact that a given 16x16 has too much change taking
place and the block can't be encoded in full. I don't know if this is
due to the MPEG interleaving and this isn't an I-frame, or if there is
just not enough bit capacity.

Not enough bit rate.

A lot of frames can compress well. If the set were to delay the picture
long enough, it would be safe to have _some_ frames take _more_ bits than
their frame time slice would account for. You just can't go over that
for longer than a standard delay line, or else the picture really will
get jerky.

I don't understand what you mean here. Variable bit rate encoding is
already used (as well as constant bit rate) and for "real time"
encoding a delay buffer is needed whether the bit rate is fixed or
variable. The delay is more than a frame. The frame rate (field rate
in interlaced formats) is always constant. I guess you are thinking of
delaying specific frames in order to have transmitted enough bits.
What I believe is already included in MPEG2 is that the encoder can
terminate the GOP sequence due to too much delta from the I-frame and
transmit a new I-frame.
If and how often the encoder can do that is limited by the allowed
(momentary and average) bit rate.

But I wouldn't trust the engineers to get the audio delay correctly matched.

The today's TV:s with digital processing is a proof that "they" don't
care too much about this and you need to run the audio to an external
audio amplifier with a delay feature to correct for it. It is only
recently I have seen (top) models that are supposed to delay the sound
the equal amount and have sound outputs marked "Display Synchronised".
/Jan

On 14 Sep 2006 01:41:56 GMT, wrote:

In alt.tv.tech.hdtv Phil Pease wrote:

| I had a similar reaction when CDs arrived; they just didn't sound as
| natural as vinyl records.

Actually, I found that even vinyl records didn't match up to actually
being right there by a real orchestra. Violins sound so much better
when there's no electrical processing at all.

Much of the early digital recordings were made using PCM add-ons to
ordinary VCRs. Three samples from the left channel and three from the
right were inserted between the horizontal sync pulses with mediocre
error correction coding.

The units had bulky unstable LC anti-alias filters in front of the
ADC, causing quite drastic phase and usually also amplitude variations
in the upper audio frequencies. ADCs were 14 bits or nominally 16
bits, but often non-monotonous and effective resolution below 14 bits.
The dither noise generator (usually a zener diode connected as a noise
source) was set to a too small amplitude, at least relative to the
true ADC accuracy, to show an as large signal to noise ratio as
possible.

It is no wonder, that the first recordings sounded bad, even when
played on a modern high quality CD player.

Paul

On 14 Sep 2006 01:33:10 GMT, wrote:

In alt.tv.tech.hdtv Paul Keinanen wrote:

| On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 03:42:53 GMT, "HiC" wrote:
|
|I see all kinds of artifacts in the images. Yeah, okay, they're not meant to
|be viewed from 6 inches away. But when I back off to 8 - 10 feet, I still
|see this odd graininess, especially when the image pans.
|
| Most likely a compression artifact in the signal source, i.e. a too
| low bit rate was used.
|
| If the original source was from a (feature) film, which may have been
| upconverted from 24p to 1080i x 60 with 3:2 pulldown and then
| converted to 1080p x 60 in the display, you may observe some jerkiness
| when panned.

What I see when they pan, and in some other cases, is the compression
artifact. It's the fact that a given 16x16 has too much change taking
place and the block can't be encoded in full. I don't know if this is
due to the MPEG interleaving and this isn't an I-frame, or if there is
just not enough bit capacity.

If the encoder would simply give up and wait for the next I-frame and
with typical GOP parameters of 10-15, the I-frame would be produced
about twice a second, i.e. the panned picture would move only twice a
second.

Those panning problems that I have seen, especially in news footage,
seems to be much faster than that and I have always assumed that this
was due to frame rate (30-25 fps) conversion artifact. If the
converter could not track the movement, but instead decided to restart
the conversion at the next time the frames are aligned, this will
happen five times a second, which would better match the observed
picture, which jumps several times a second when panned.

I think it is proper to talk here about frames and not fields, since
to do the 525/60 to 625/50 conversion, you would first have to
deinterlace the incoming signal, do the conversion and re-interlace
the new signal.

Paul

In article om,
Mark Crispin wrote:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, Jim Mack wrote:
As many have said, it isn't just the set that's off. If it's coming from
a hard drive then it's likely that it's re-compressed at a bit rate
around 12-15Mb/s, maybe even from an original off-air signal that was
broadcast at 18Mb/s. When you consider that the prime source used maybe
400Mb/s, you can see why it might suffer.

There is also a very real possibility that the set is being fed an analog
signal and thus is not HD at all. Not much attention is paid in these
mass market stores to proper grounding either.

-- Mark --


There is hope, though. At least, the Best Buy near me is doing a
much better job of showing off their HD displays now than they
were six months ago. Back then, they would show a "full screen"
DVD of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, with the monitor in
stretch-to-fit mode so that the Deathstar would be this eggshaped
thing... now they are, at any rate (pun intended), showing what
looks like an HD source loop of some kind.

I am actually rather surprised at how quickly HD has captured
consumer attention in the last year or so (look how the number of
daily postings in this newsgroup has increased in that time - and
USENET groups are relatively obscure). Frankly, the big stores
can't afford to regard it as a novelty item any more; they have to
understand the technology much better than they did a year ago.