Not all HD is created equally?

[IndyMichael]

Please excuse my newbie questions, as I've only had HD since the 29th of December. Mostly I've watched football in HD and all except CBS looked great. Games on CBS sometimes looked good and sometimes looked as if you were viewing your tv thru the exhaust of a jet engine.

Even though my 2 year old Hitachi 52 inch rear projection tv states it works with 1080i, I can on get 720p to work correctly. When I set it to 1080i, the picture doesn't fit the screen. I have my HR20 connected to the tv via a HDMI cable.

[harsh]

How do you have your HR20 connected to your TV?

What is the model number of your TV?

[Pepster]

Some people have to go into setups for both the television and the receiver. In the TV setup, make sure all of the resolutions are enabled, especially if your receiver is set to output "NATIVE". For HD, also make sure that you're using either the HDMI cable or Component Cable (red-green-blue). If you use the component cable, you'll also have to run one additional cable to get the audio.

[IndyMichael]

How do you have your HR20 connected to your TV?

What is the model number of your TV?

HDMI cable. It's a Hitachi model # 51F59 or 51F59A. I'd have to do way too much work to get a look at the back to see which one.

[bighoopla]

I've had HDTV for 1 day now. I'm using a 46" 1080p 120Hz LCD TV on DirecTV with an HR22 HD DVR. Here's what I've noticed. Please tell me if all this is normal:

1. Some 720p programs look better than 1080i. Is this because nothing's actually broadcast in 1080p, and there must be some sort of conversion to display 1080i on a 1080p TV? I thought maybe 720p was sent progressive scan, received progressive scan, and displayed in progressive scan, hence no conversion and a picture as good or sometimes better than 1080i.

2. Some movies on TNT HD claiming to be 1080i look stretched and distorted no matter what setting I choose (stretch, crop, pillar box, original format, etc.).

3. I'd have to say with my 36" Toshiba Trinitron CRT, all programs were either "Good" or "Very Good" as far as picture quality goes. With my HDTV the spectrum of picture quality is much wider. Picture quality between programs seem to vary from "Stunningly Great!" to "Total Crap" and everything in-between.

[Stuart Sweet]

I'm moving this to the HD DVR forum for more discussion.

[BattleZone]

2. Some movies on TNT HD claiming to be 1080i look stretched and distorted no matter what setting I choose (stretch, crop, pillar box, original format, etc.).

I don't have time to address #1 right now, but I'll take these.

Ted Turner seems to love to screw up the media he owns. 20 years ago, he was colorizing all of these old black & white movies he owned, and refusing to release them in the original version.

Today, he's running SD movies on his HD channels and doing a stretch up-convert, which can't be un-done and should NEVER be done at the source like the Turner channels do. As much as I hate it, folks should be allowed to CHOOSE to use their TV's or receiver's stretch modes to fill their screens if they want, but never should a movie be broadcast in other than the original aspect ratio (OAR).

3. I'd have to say with my 36" Toshiba Trinitron CRT, all programs were either "Good" or "Very Good" as far as picture quality goes. With my HDTV the spectrum of picture quality is much wider. Picture quality between programs seem to vary from "Stunningly Great!" to "Total Crap" and everything in-between.

Your new HDTV is probably much larger than your CRT. Also, because CRTs are analog, they handle scaling more smoothly than fixed-pixel digital displays, so low-quality broadcasts that have to be up-scaled to fit a big HDTV will always look lousy. True HD content looks fantastic, of course.

Ever see one of those Mitsubishi 60" or 70" SDTVs? Even though they used CRT projection, they looked AWFUL, because you just can't stretch a standard-def image that big and get any kind of reasonable quality. But no one seems to connect the low SD quality with the larger size of their HDTV for some reason...

[russdog]

Ted Turner seems to love to screw up the media he owns...

Today, he's running SD movies on his HD channels and doing a stretch up-convert, which can't be un-done and should NEVER be done at the source like the Turner channels do.
While your point about stretch-o-vision is right, I don't think Ted has had anything to do with how things are run for years now.
He's in the buffalo-burger business now, not the TV business.

[bonscott87]

Please excuse my newbie questions, as I've only had HD since the 29th of December. Mostly I've watched football in HD and all except CBS looked great. Games on CBS sometimes looked good and sometimes looked as if you were viewing your tv thru the exhaust of a jet engine.

Even though my 2 year old Hitachi 52 inch rear projection tv states it works with 1080i, I can on get 720p to work correctly. When I set it to 1080i, the picture doesn't fit the screen. I have my HR20 connected to the tv via a HDMI cable.

Congrats.

I know when I first got HD about 6 years ago it took me about a month or two of calibration to get it "right" and recalibrate every year or two.

But even then the quality from station to station is just that, from station to station. Typically the "national" HD channels are all pretty similar. However do realize that not all content on an HD channel is actually HD, some of it can be SD upconverted.

Your locals is where you can see a lot of variation and it depends on a lot of factors:
1) How good is the network in general? (i.e. NBC is historically bad on sports)
2) How good is the equipment they have and how old is it?
3) Do they have an engineer that knows what they are doing? And do they properly "flip the switch" to HD?
4) How many subchannels do they have and how much bandwidth are they stealing from the main HD channel and how much are they compressing it?
5) How good is their OTA transmitter? Is is low power?
6) As for DirecTV, how far is their receive facility from said OTA transmitter and obviously their signal quality is effected by #5. Also, how good is the equipment at the receive facility?

Those are just off the top of my head. So in my market CBS has been historically bad and here are the answer to the above questions:
1) CBS is good network wise
2) Equipment is just barely enough. Station management only went HD because they were forced to. They will spend the least amount of money possible. That is changing now though with the digital conversion.
3) Engineer is good but hands are tied by station management
4) They have one subchannel (CW) and it sucks 3-4 mb of bandwidth, often leaving the HD channel starved leading to pixelization
5) OTA transmitter is good enough but lower power leading to video and audio dropouts for those even just 20-30 miles away
6) DirecTV receive facility had faulty hardware on launch of HD locals on the sat but an upgrade fixed that problem. CBS however has the same pixelization and drop out issues obviously because DirecTV gets the same signal I do OTA. Garbage in/garbage out.

The same questions for our NBC station:
1) NBC quality usually good for network fare, bad for sports.
2) Equipment is top notch and they spend the big bucks for the good stuff which does minimize the network issues. For example weather warnings or school closings do not drop the program from HD, they paid for HD overlay equipment.
3) Engineers are top notch as is management.
4) They actually have 2 subchannels but they don't effect the HD primary much due to their great equipment.
5) Tranmitter is a beacon and very strong
6) No problems with DirecTV receiving the station.

You'll learn all these things over time and I'd suggest spending time on the HD local thread for your city over on AVS where many local station engineers post as well. Good luck and have fun!

[BattleZone]

While your point about stretch-o-vision is right, I don't think Ted has had anything to do with how things are run for years now.
He's in the buffalo-burger business now, not the TV business.

I was being somewhat facetious. It probably isn't Ted personally, but all of the networks in the Turner family have a long history of screwing with their content, in various ways, that no one asked for or wants. And given that this stuff has been going on for over 20 years means it isn't a fluke, so there has to be a high-level decisionmaker, at the network level (not just the channel level), who is signing off on this stuff.

[TomCat]

...Please tell me if all this is normal:

1. Some 720p programs look better than 1080i. Is this because nothing's actually broadcast in 1080p, and there must be some sort of conversion to display 1080i on a 1080p TV? I thought maybe 720p was sent progressive scan, received progressive scan, and displayed in progressive scan, hence no conversion and a picture as good or sometimes better than 1080i...You are correct about there being no need for deinterlace/reinterlace for 720p. But that is typically a very transparent process, especially in newer sets. All 1080i is reinterlaced for a 1080p-native HDTV. The perceived resolution and quality for 720p and 1080i are usually indistinguishable from each other, at least with all else held equal. The difference in quality of the original content, and sometimes of one cam shot to the next, is usually greater than the difference between whether it is sent in 720 or 1080. Short answer: it's normal.

...3. I'd have to say with my 36" Toshiba Trinitron CRT, all programs were either "Good" or "Very Good" as far as picture quality goes. With my HDTV the spectrum of picture quality is much wider. Picture quality between programs seem to vary from "Stunningly Great!" to "Total Crap" and everything in-between.I think it's either a "Sony Trinitron" or a Toshiba, but not likely a Toshiba Trinitron. CRTs, especially Sony sets, have an ability to raise the "crap" level. IOW, good looks great and crap looks OK, where many other sets don't have that ability. But you are again correct, in that there is a wide range of quality available with HDTV, Some of that is because SD lowered the potential ceiling for quality so that everything was the same. Part is because SD looks fuzzy on big screens. Part of it is due to the natural ability of a CRT to make SD look sharper than it really is, a feat flat-screens can't do (and of course don't need to do with HD).

While the TNT/TBS Stretch-O-Vision is probably the worst implementation of SD stretch you will find (and is not really reversible on viewing), regardless whether the input material is 480 or lower, the output format is technically HD (1080i). Of course since the perceived rez of SD upconverted to HD is still SD quality, claiming that you are in HD when upconverting SD borders on the criminal, IMHO. We can only hope they will some day see the error of their ways, and realize that they are by far the worst offenders. Even the lowest fly-by-night cable channels don't claim they are 100% HD (unless they are) and don't use this abominable stretch. You would think that two of the premiere channels (TNT/TBS) could bear down a little bit and do a better job than the embarrasment they give us every day.

[CorpITGuy]

I think the TNT/TBS S-o-V issue is a result of the market. People think that when they buy a 16:9 TV, all the content should be 16:9. They have the equipment to make the stretch/zoom look much better than what we can do on our sets, so they do it that way. I think it's more about the ignorance of the consumer and the resulting business model used by the content providers.

It'll take some time, but folks will become more educated on this stuff eventually.

[jgrade]

I think the TNT/TBS S-o-V issue is a result of the market. People think that when they buy a 16:9 TV, all the content should be 16:9. They have the equipment to make the stretch/zoom look much better than what we can do on our sets, so they do it that way. I think it's more about the ignorance of the consumer and the resulting business model used by the content providers.

It'll take some time, but folks will become more educated on this stuff eventually.

The plethora of options available between the converter/decoder, TV, disc player etc. allowing crop, stretch, zoom, etc. is overwhelming for even the videophile let alone the average consumer.

On the opposite side, what about the Fox's of the world, which add the "black bars" to the content so the picture can't be stretched or resized. How confusing is it to have some channels that fill the entire screen and then some that don't. Granted some networks and programs add logos to the side bars, but thats even more annoying.

I say leave the content alone and let the END user do their thing.;)