Dish messing with Voom, All are now HD-Lite 1280x1080i

[Gary Murrell]

As of right now Dish just flipped the switch and all voom are at 1280x1080i, gone is my beautiful Equator and MonstersHD :(

I posted a thread about this on the AVS:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=611874

and on the Sat Guys:

http://www.satelliteguys.us/showthread.php?t=112993

hopefully this is a good sign and they are messing with some stuff, if they plan to put all Voom at 1280x1080i they can kiss this customer gone, I do not pay for HD and receive HD-Lite instead, MonstersHD was worth my 5$ alone

Here I come 4DTV!!!!

I will keep checking things tonight

-Gary

[RichMert]

oh my god.......i was about to schedule an eye exam because smart travels and the monster movie were looking a little off to me. i dont have any special equipment to mearsure the resolution but darn it does look a little soft doesnt it. i used to watch smart travels on my local PBS station until i found them on equator but i guess i will go back to the local PBS station for now. not that i am planning on going to any of these places they show but the show always looked so nice. now it looks a little more like wide definition than high definition. too bad i was hoping for good things from E* and VOOM.

now tales from the crypt has black bars on the side. i havent seen that before on any of the VOOM channels. my 811 is set to HD: normal and there are black bars. that is very discouraging.

[P Smith]

Not that tragic ;)
61.5
Service name: GLLRY
Elementary Stream PID 4386 (0x1122) MPEG-2 Video
MPEG Video: Bitrate 16.000 Mbps Resolution 1920 x 1080i
MPEG Video: Framerate 29.97 fps Aspect Ratio 16:9 Chroma Format 4:2:0

[Stewart Vernon]

Regarding the black bars... if it was a program that was not originally 16:9, then I prefer them black barring rather than stretching or zooming just to fill the screen. Perhaps that was a non-widescreen program. I believe I saw at least one black & white movie once on there that wasn't widescreen.

I *was* on a similar note planning to watch Wizard of Oz on TNTHD but from the commercials so far, I have a nasty feeling like they will be doing the weird stretchy thing to it instead of leaving it alone in 4:3 as it was originally!

Back to Voom... I haven't exactly noticed the drop in resolution even though I have a 1080i TV, because most of the Voom stuff has been lower quality movie conversions today anyway... but I wonder, if they are considering converting to 1280x1080 instead of the full 1920x1080... I wonder why they wouldn't just drop to 1280x720p and go with that mode of HD like ESPN uses. I think that would get less complaints than the sort-of-1080 downconverting.

Overcompression and downsampling on the SD channels is bad enough... but if they do that to HD then it isn't HD anymore, which kind of defeats the purpose!

It would be like buying a moped instead of a bicycle... but never cranking the motor and only pedalling it around.

[Gary Murrell]

P Smith

Gallery just went to 1920x1080i 30 mins or so ago, this was a of course a previous 1280x1080i, so this is interesting

it has a horrid bitrate of under 10 Mbps, I am looking at it live on my 942 a minute or so ago, they are teaking and tinkering folks, the Voom channels are a mess right now

-Gary

[nsafreak]

If you're going to do tinkering might as well do it really late at night.

[RichMert]

HDME:"Regarding the black bars... if it was a program that was not originally 16:9, then I prefer them black barring rather than stretching or zooming just to fill the screen"

HDME i agreee if something isnt produced or converted to 16 9 then it is best to see it with the bars. i think we see the proof of that every night on tnthd but maybe i just havent been paying attention because i have never seen side bars or wide definition on the monster channel. it has always looked great to me. maybe i dont watch it enough but i have NEVER seen side bars on monster. hopefully someone can correct me and explain that tales from the crypt is always in SD but i just havent seen it.

[Stewart Vernon]

HDME i agreee if something isnt produced or converted to 16 9 then it is best to see it with the bars. i think we see the proof of that every night on tnthd but maybe i just havent been paying attention because i have never seen side bars or wide definition on the monster channel. it has always looked great to me. maybe i dont watch it enough but i have NEVER seen side bars on monster. hopefully someone can correct me and explain that tales from the crypt is always in SD but i just havent seen it.

I don't think I was watching when you were, and I can't remember what the Tales from the Crypt I watched (only saw about half of it) earlier was... so I can't say for sure about what you saw.

I can say that I believe I've only seen a black-barred program on one of the Voom channels maybe twice since Dish started carrying them... so it is rare enough that you might have only seen one just today.

Oh, and it still may have been in HD. Sometimes (HDNet has done this with Hogan's Heroes and Charlie's Angels) they will "zoom & crop" the original film to make a widescreen image when they scan for HD... to fill the screen, but cutting off part of the picture as a result.

Other times I've seen where they keep the original aspect 4:3 ratio, and pad the sides with black or gray bars... but the 4:3 is still an HD quality of image from the original film.

And still other times, particularly on HBOHD or SHOHD, I can tell that they didn't do any kind of HD scan at all and are just sending the same SD level (kind of like what ESPN does most of the time).

On an old movie where the film quality (not preserved well or poor film to begin with) is low, an HD version sometimes doesn't look that much better than DVD quality does anyway.

[Ghostwriter]

could this be a problem with the 129 bird? I have seen a few people moving to 129, but I have also heard that 129 is damaged and possibly not running at the potential that E* wants. I have yet to exp. black bars as mentioned.

[LtMunst]

I think we are confusing what HDlite is all about. D* style HDlite is a result of high compression / low bitrates, not line resolution. The vast majority of us with 60" or smaller HDTVs have native resolutions of 1280X1080i or 1280x720p. As long as the compression is not increased, lowering from 1920 to 1280 is NOT going to affect our PQ. In fact, we may end up better off. Based on Gary's stats, it looks like Monsters went from 1920 to 1280, a 33% reduction in line resolution. The Bitrate went from 17.05 to 14.08, an 18% reduction. Based on this, the bitrate per line actually increased.

So, unless your HDTV has a native resolution greater than 1280x1080i, this will not harm your PQ. Most of us may actually get a better picture and Dish frees up some bandwidth.

[Gary Murrell]

Totally untrue, this downconversion of material no matter if shown 480i via composite, 1280x1720p, whatever, it softens the picture to a great degree and creates artifacts and a overall fuzzy HDTV image

read around, everyone is talking about how bad the Equator and Monsters channels are looking now

directv does Identically to what Dish is doing right now with Voom, they both down-rez 1920x1080i HD to 1280x1080i and then stretch to make a 16:9 aspect ratio(simulating 1920x1080i, which is 16:9) Directv actually has bitrates higher than Dish

It's all a lie and a case of advertising HD and delivering HD-Lite

-Gary

[LtMunst]

Directv actually has bitrates higher than Dish

-Gary

Really??? This does not make sense. D* has HDlite in order to free up bandwidth. Bandwidth=Bitrate. Anyway, I've read that D*s HD channels are often as low as
7 Mbs.

Also, I'm the one who started to MonstersHD video problem thread. I'm sure it may have something to do with the tinkering. The breakup and pixelation is not due to lower line resolution, however.

[Stewart Vernon]

I think we are confusing what HDlite is all about. D* style HDlite is a result of high compression / low bitrates, not line resolution. The vast majority of us with 60" or smaller HDTVs have native resolutions of 1280X1080i or 1280x720p. As long as the compression is not increased, lowering from 1920 to 1280 is NOT going to affect our PQ. In fact, we may end up better off. Based on Gary's stats, it looks like Monsters went from 1920 to 1280, a 33% reduction in line resolution. The Bitrate went from 17.05 to 14.08, an 18% reduction. Based on this, the bitrate per line actually increased.

So, unless your HDTV has a native resolution greater than 1280x1080i, this will not harm your PQ. Most of us may actually get a better picture and Dish frees up some bandwidth.

Depends on how you look at it. There are lots of different ways to "convert" 1920 horizontal pixels down to 1280 pixels. Discard random ones? Discard ones the "average" as being the same as the one immediately before or after? Compression? Lots of different ways I don't even know about.

Your TV would have one method of conversion... which may or may not be better than the one Dish (or Voom) would be selecting. I think 1280 is definately worse resolution than 1980... but how that manifests in appearance on your TV set would vary... and whether it is better for them to convert it or you to convert it also would vary, I would think.

[LtMunst]

Depends on how you look at it. There are lots of different ways to "convert" 1920 horizontal pixels down to 1280 pixels. Discard random ones? Discard ones the "average" as being the same as the one immediately before or after? Compression? Lots of different ways I don't even know about.

Your TV would have one method of conversion... which may or may not be better than the one Dish (or Voom) would be selecting. I think 1280 is definately worse resolution than 1980... but how that manifests in appearance on your TV set would vary... and whether it is better for them to convert it or you to convert it also would vary, I would think.

I agree. My 50" Panny is 1280x720p native. One way or another 1920x1080i would have to be downconverted. Whether my set would do it better than Dish doing it, only time will tell. My point was that all this talk of HDlite is premature. D*s HDlite is due to low bitrates. If Dish starts dramatically dropping the bitrates, then I'll worry.

[Ghostwriter]

I have been reading here and there and everywhere in between. From looking at my TV I think people are blowing this a bit out of proportion. Certain people are making it sound like E* all the sudden is D* and some say it is "unwatchable". I think everyone needs to take a deep breath and relax for a few days. Yes HD has seen better days but its not as bad as some people are making it out to me, the Voom channels are very watchable IMO.

[Gary Murrell]

Sean Mota of the Voom forum over at Sat guys has said that his contacts indicate all 21 HD channels to be 1280x1080i with 15 Mbps video by CES, which is where Dish is going to announce the Voom 21 HD-Lite package

I think that pretty much sums everything up, I will cancel around the beginning of Jan

I would love to visit CES and heckle dish with "HD-Lite" comments during their announcement

what a friggin joke !! :mad: :mad: :mad: :(

Again I say RIP MonstersHD

Munst Directv(with the exception of HDNet Movies) has bitrates around 16 Mbps on HD channels, they downconvert ALL 100% of their HD offerings, except the native 720p ones of course

Voom would have been better going to 1280x720p and things would have been all peachy, if this is Voom or Dish doing this that is unknown, but being how they have been switched around by Dish, I am 99% certain this is Dish Network's doing

-Gary

[Mikey]

.. if this is Voom or Dish doing this that is unknown, but being how they have been switched around by Dish, I am 99% certain this is Dish Network's doing

-GaryHard to tell. VOOM had a history of fooling with PQ and encoders.

[Mike D-CO5]

Okay, I am not an expert on all this bitrate resolution stuff , but I am not noticing anything different on my picture with Voom. Maybe that is what Dish is counting on? That the average customer , who doesn't know that much like me , will not notice? Charlie has said that there would be no more hd till mpeg 4 started. Maybe this is the only way to get anymore hd up at mpeg2 turbo 8spk. Although I agree , that if getting more hd channels up on the service means cutting picture quality I am against it.

[P Smith]

Mike, those new 11 channels will be on new (for Dish) transponers and will not use existing ! Perhaps it have something common with statistical multiplexer farm ? What eventually will affect when new channels will come.

[Ghostwriter]

Yes Mike that is what E* is hoping for. I would like to know if there is any email address and or phone number to complain directly about deteriorating PQ. I am almost sure there is and that someone has it handy.

[James Long]

Sean Mota of the Voom forum over at Sat guys has said that his contacts indicate all 21 HD channels to be 1280x1080i with 15 Mbps video by CES, which is where Dish is going to announce the Voom 21 HD-Lite packageI wouldn't guarantee that E* knows what they will be doing with the Voom 21 yet. They do like making major announcements at CES. MPEG4 was one of the major announcements last year. Adding more unique HD channels would be a good announcement.

It appears that E* is still testing to see what to do with Voom. It is a shame that the test is apparently affecting live channels. (BTW: Are you taking your Voom from 61.5 or 129?) Hopefully they will work it out soon.

JL

[Gary Murrell]

James I have tested all Voom from 61.5 and from 129

they are identical in resolution and bitrate but the video headers are different

61.5 headers give 16 Mbps Video for all 10
129 headers give 18 Mbps Video for all 10

this means nothing of course, but it is a mystery to me why they are different

Also GalleryHD is still true HD right now, 1920x1080i 14.05 Mbps Video

Before the change this has always been a 1280x1080i channel since being lite up, they are obviously testing stuff out

ghost email: dishquality@echostar.com

I have had many a conversation with those folks and they are always responsive and forthcoming with info, even with folks like me who keep up with what they are doing with the HD channels

-Gary

[Bill R]

I would like to know if there is any email address and or phone number to complain directly about deteriorating PQ.

Try sending an e-mail to DishQuality@Echostar.com. It will be interesting to see what DISH's reply will be.

[ehren]

1920x1080 needs to be mandaded, this is getting sick.

[JohnH]

BTW: TNTHD is doing something unsual. They are not stretching The Wizard of Oz.

[BFG]

Umm, unrelated, but that's because it's the HD version converted from the film and it's preserved in it's OAR, they've already shown the Wizard of Oz on TNT anyways..

[Mikey]

Umm, unrelated, but that's because it's the HD version converted from the film and it's preserved in it's OAR, they've already shown the Wizard of Oz on TNT anyways..His point is: unusual for TNT not to strech. :D

[Ghostwriter]

At this point I think we should all write quality control an email and CC it to the ceo. We should let them know that an HD PQ is VERY important to us and that is why we picked E* to begin with. Hopefully our voices (ahem emails) will be heard!

Just say no to HD-Lite.

[Gary Murrell]

Yep that is the issue, I picked and have always stood up for Dish because of their quality of HDTV and decent standards, HBO/showtime HD on 110 are getting pretty bad but other than that Dish is pretty decent to HD

This Voom stuff will I am afraid open a new can of worms in regards to HD-Lite acceptance by Dish sub's, this sub will not accept it, I know that for sure

-Gary

[Stewart Vernon]

I was amazed, but in a good way, that TNTHD didn't stretch Wizard of Oz tonight. I bought the new deluxe DVD set recently, so I didn't watch it all tonight, but I checked in to see and was glad to see they didn't stretch it out.

Back to Voom...

I wonder how many of the running-with-arms-flailing-panicking folks actually knew anything was different until they read the posts here about it. I know some people can tell, I can sometimes myself... but I've found that a lot of people don't notice and don't complain until someone else tells them they should be complaining.

I've been flipping around the Voom channels periodically tonight... and I have to say that while I did notice the pixelating problems mentioned in another post... I can't say I'm seeing a major drop in quality. I do have a true 1080i 65" TV set... and I can tell a big difference between a CBS football game and an ESPNHD or FOX one... but since most of the Voom channels have been showing older movies that don't look as crisp as live programming anyway... I honestly can't say I've noticed a drop in quality today.

Maybe this is bad, if it means they are dropping quality and it encourages them to continue... but I have to be honest and say that I haven't seen anything that I could make a direct comparison and say I would have noticed any lower quality today had I not been reading this forum.

[LtMunst]

Munst Directv(with the exception of HDNet Movies) has bitrates around 16 Mbps on HD channels, they downconvert ALL 100% of their HD offerings, except the native 720p ones of course

-Gary

We can debate whether or not changing the line resolution impacts PQ for the average user all day long. There is no way I'll believe D* has higher bitrates, however. Bitrates are what determines bandwidth used, not line resolution. Are you trying to tell me that D* purposely uses MORE bandwidth for lower quality than E*? This really makes no sense. You may be right about 1280 res harming PQ vs 1920. I think you are wrong about D*s bitrates vs E*, though.

[dfergie]

I'm watching the NFR right on D* HD, it compares to my E* V* channels very closely...

[Gary Murrell]

Directv Bitrates from Cheezmo:
http://www.widemovies.com/dfwbitrate.html

My Bitrate page for Dish:
http://home.bigsandybb.com/gmurrell/bitrate.html

compare them

Holy Hell Directv's bitrate's have went way down, last time I compared them Directv was averaging 1 or 2 more Mbps video on lots of channels

some are better on Directv, lots are better on Dish

Directv Discovery used to have higher bitrate than Dish, now I see it is about equal

ESPN is better on Directv

Dish HDNets kill Directv, Showtime and HBO are a smidge better on Dish

This is all only speaking of bitrate and not resolution(of which Directv lowers), Dish does not downrez anything but Voom

-Gary

[dfergie]

I assume LA's Cbs Hd is comparable to NY's.. they look the same on E*...

[Gary Murrell]

I don't have access to 148 just yet or I would gladly check :)

-Gary

[Stewart Vernon]

Something else worth noting in regards to bitrates... Your viewing experiences varies in proportion not just with the bitrates but with how many "changes" occur on the screen.

A movie, for instance, that has a rather dark background and most of the "action" takes place in a smaller area of the screen would require less of the maximum bitrate/bandwidth in order to look good... whereas a live sporting event with bright lighting and lots of motion all over the screen requires more bitrate/bandwidth.

Thus... a live NBA game on TNTHD would show a lack of bandwidth/lower bitrate before an old movie on MonstersHD would.

Which is why I think not all of us see the flaws as quickly as others do, when they are tinkering with things.

[sgiwiz]

WARNING: Rant Ahead - read at you own risk.

This is exactly why I still haven't bothered getting an HD set for home. I see full resolution uncompressed HD all day at work and would just be so massively disappointed to watch over-compressed, down-sampled HD at home. Instead I bought my 924 and my HD packages to watch 16x9 letterboxed SD at far superior quality than the regular SD channels, and partly so I get to see the 30% extra that ABC cuts off the sides of LOST!

While I imagine that watching a compromised HD signal on a descent HD tube would ruin my every evening, anything I record from the HD channels looks 2 or 3 times better on my very nice SD set than the mush we now get on most SD channels.

I have taken a big step forward in the cost of watching TV just to regain the quality we lost as the broadcast industry has taken hundreds of incremental step backward in the ridiculous race to provide every single consumer with a unique channel devoted to their specific needs.

The exact same thing is happening to HD that happened to SD over the last five years. Did you notice how the word "digital" has replaced the word "quality"? And joe consumer ate it up... "500 digital channels! Where do I sign?" Never mind that they are all being sent down a pipe that was only intended to carry 50 channels of full res video. Because the people want choices more than they want quality AND IT MAKES ME MAD! Just as MP3s have replaced CDs, and you can download an "HD" movie trailer from Apple at just 200Mb. Makes me wonder why we bothered getting terrabytes of storage to finish HD trailers at work when all the public wants is a crummy little QuickTime movie that's CALLED "high-definition".

So now the same thing is going to happen to HD. Just as manufacturers start rolling out true native 1920x1080 LCD screens and projectors for the home market instead of 1366x768 which 90% are now, (and by the way, you find the trinitron HD tube TVs on the bottom shelf at the back of Best Buy marked for clearance) all the available sources of HD are going to end up downsampling to 1280x1080, 1280x720, or dropping the bitrate to SD levels or lower. What's next? Mini-HDV tape decks at the broadcast station? BluRay DVD players? "It's HD right?" Yeah, so is the stuff on the Apple trailers web site.

My "Wish for Dish" is that they take a stand and RAISE the bar, instead of trying keep their head barely above the average as the standards get slowly lowered by popular demand.

Yes, I want my local HD stations via my dish instead of an antenna, but I don't want it to be at the cost of everything turning to mush.

Our only hope... MY only hope, is that the market's declining advertising revenue forces 300 of the 500 channels to drop off the face of the planet and free up all that bandwidth for the remaining cream of the crop. That way we can have fewer, higher quality channels with more varied content that the people with money to spend on $5,000 televisions and $1000 satellite systems will actually enjoy watching. This model HAS TO BE the future of television. With DVRs making the exclusivity of prime time a thing of the past, they could fill the small hours with popular shows like "Battlestar Galactica" in HD (which they have on SKY-TV) instead of more infomercials.

Or even better. Split up all the bandwidth from those spare channels and let it take two hours to stream all the data for a one hour show, just so when I do watch it - it's full resolution, and full bit rate. Seriously, I can wait. I can't remember the last time I watched TV live anyway!

But that's a whole other topic isn't it.

This has been a rant. I thank you.

[bavaria72]

Gotta tell you all of you "Voom-ites" out there, I have spent some significant time looking at the Voom channels this weekend and quite frankly I really can't see much of a difference. I have watched 'Race of Champions', '633 Squadron', ' Space Amoeba', and 'Fail Safe' and they all look great. Yes, higher res is always better but damn folks get a grip. The difference between 1920 and 1280 ain't that much. You really need to pick your battles. If you are not happy then go to D* and good luck. We are damn lucky E* even bothered to carry any old Voom programming anyway. Talk about killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Go ahead and drop E*/Voom. Enjoy what ever the hell D* carries theses days. Quite frankly I'm just a little tired of your bitching. :mad: Remember Voom went out of bussines for a reason.

[Gary Murrell]

Bavaria you are incorrect, HD-Lite is no where close to the picture quality of True 1920x1080i HD, it isn't even in the same ball-park

I sometimes forget that most folks have never seen good true HDTV, like D-Theater D-VHS for example, those who have lived with true HDTV since way back(1999 for me) find this downright insulting and unacceptable

Dish can take this HD-Lite Voom and stick it you know where, I will not pay for this garbage nor bare and strain myself to sit thru it and try to enjoy it's fuzzy qualities

to put this into perspective, I am a die hard near obsessed Red Wings fan and if Dish put up all 82 games in HD-Lite I wouldn't even so much as give it a glance

This is about providers ripping us off, selling HDTV and sending is putrid and downrezzed "near" HD quality

-Gary

[Gary Murrell]

SGIWiz you are my Hero :)

my thoughts exactly have been put into your post

I am a HT hobbyist and enthusiast, it is basically the only thing I live for

I am not a casual viewer of HDTV programming

I do not care to watch downrezzed internet quality HD on my 20,000$ system that I have worked hard many many years to pay for and put together, I have spent thousands on Dish HD receivers and the like and like I said before, this is insulting

You can only imagine what these HD-Lite channels look like on the 9" CRT's in my display :( , it is not pretty

-Gary

[Stewart Vernon]

Not arguing that Dish isn't downrezzing the Voom HD right now....

but... is it fair to call it HD-Lite?

As I understand it, HD can either be 1280x720p or 1920x1080i... Anything less than 1280x720p would be HD-Lite in my book... but the 1280x1080i is somewhere in between the lowest and the highest HD resolutions...

So, while I prefer 1920x1080i... It is hard for me to say 1280x1080 isn't HD, when it is higher than the 720p resolution.

[LtMunst]

Maybe if I had a $20,000 system that could display near infinite line resolution, I would be upset also. With my 1280x720p set, however, it is very unlikely there will be any difference (unless bitrates start to drop).

[bavaria72]

Bavaria you are incorrect, HD-Lite is no where close to the picture quality of True 1920x1080i HD, it isn't even in the same ball-park...
-Gary

Gary, technically speaking you are correct when you say 1920x1080 is better than 1280x720 but quite frankly I can't tell that much of a difference. Perhaps my eyes are not as good as they used to be but IMHO I really don't think E* is "ripping" those of us who are paying whole $5 a months for the old Voom channels. Heck, I would hate to see their current business case on keeping the Voom channels. I certaining don't have a $20K system ($2295 return special is what I have). If you pissed over the $5 bucks for Voom then I would assume you are livid over the $10 for the 5 other HD channels. I'm just thankful E* decided to keep the old Voom programming, 1920x1080 or 1280x720. - Art

[Ghostwriter]

My biggest problem here is that you almost need to let them know that you are aware of what is going on with the quality of your picture. Although I can not say it is unbearable to sit through, if you take it all in stride you can almost bank that they will lower the resolution again. Now if they feel that enough people are aware of what they are doing, then maybe at least they stop here.

Bavaria, all in all I am happy with Dish, and considering they are the only ones that carry the international channels I desire I am not leaving all that soon. And just to say if you are unhappy leave, I always thought you should voice your opinion, not just take your ball and go home. JMHO

[LtMunst]

With the current crop of HDTVs, most people would not see any difference with 1280x1080i. Long term, though, we will see many more 1920X1080i or even 1920x1080p sets hitting the market. Hopefully Dish is planning to keep up.

[Ghostwriter]

I have a 1080i so I already see a difference. I am just worried the downrezzing will continue. For now although it is not as good (some voom channels) not all since a few already came online a 1280x1080i I can almost hold out and hope that things will become better with the Turbo or MPEG4 when they start being used.

[James Long]

Dish can take this HD-Lite Voom and stick it you know where, I will not pay for this garbage nor bare and strain myself to sit thru it and try to enjoy it's fuzzy qualitiesFine. Go. Bye. Nobody is stopping you. Don't let the door hit you where the doctor slapped you. If you don't like the way you perceive E* is operating you can always try someone else.

There are only two reasons why you wouldn't just make the switch:
1) E* is still the best HD option available
2) You would rather scream your head of than lose (not loose) Voom

By your definition, millions of satellite customers have been watching SD-Lite channels for years. It is part of the business. And at this point you don't know where E* will leave the channels. Calm down and react intelligently.

JL

[Bill R]

Maybe we should just refer to it as "lower quality HD".

The vendors that are doing it (both DirecTV and DISH and some cable companies) need to know that this is NOT what we want and something that we are not willing to pay for.

[Gary Murrell]

I will gladly be syaing by to Dish and their HDTV offerings if this sticks, I am working on installing a C-Band 4DTV setup right now, I would rather have 4/5 true HDTV channels than 30 HD-Lite's

I have spent thousands of $'s on Dish and their HDTV offering's and have been with them since the day Discovery HD Theater was lite up and this is downright insulting

1280x1080i is actually much worse than 1280x720p, because if you factor in the interlaced vs progressive stuff, you are comparing:

1280x720

vs

1280x540

Dish would have been better off having Voom or themselves convert to 1280x720p

I do not think that Dish would suddenly switch all Voom to this garbage if that is not where they were going to leave them, I won't have to wait long for my decision to dump Dish's HD, CES is where the Voom 21 will be announced and things will be set by then

-Gary

[sgiwiz]

Not arguing that Dish isn't downrezzing the Voom HD right now....

but... is it fair to call it HD-Lite?

...snip...

So, while I prefer 1920x1080i... It is hard for me to say 1280x1080 isn't HD, when it is higher than the 720p resolution.

I'll say it then. 1280 x 1080 ISN'T HD! It's not even the same aspect ratio. It is not one of the many white paper defined HD standards for broadcast. IT IS NOT HD - and if it's being sold as HD then there is a strong case for a charge of false advertising. 720p or 720i on the other hand IS one of the HD standards, and if your TV only displays 1366x768 natively you are probably better off trying to watch 720 than 1080 anyway.

Let me take you on a journey in the life of a pixel in this resize scenario that we've all been moaning about.

In a true HD 1080 image you have 1920 pixels of clean, crisp horizontal resolution. For argument's sake we'll say that this image is TRUELY a 1920x1080 image such as a frame from a Pixar film, or a nice bit of branding on HDNet. NOT from a film telecine transfer, or from an Sony F900 HD camera (I'll get to that in a minute).

These crisp 1,920 pixels are the best looking thing you're ever likely to see, and the only way you will be able to see them is if you have the chance to run uncompressed dual-link HD-SDI 4:4:4 into a monitor like this one from DataCheck: http://www.datacheck.com/products/21245a.html playing the media directly from hard drives as uncompressed data. Try and hit an HD trade show if you want to see this, it's pretty.

So, anyway, you take those 1,920 pixels and you squeeze them to fit into 1,280 pixels. That's a 1/3 reduction per line. So you're dropping one pixel for every two that you keep on any given line. But you can't just drop out every 3rd pixel and keep the nice clean ones you have left, because you would see the damage clearly when fine detail moves horizontally, or as jagged edges on curves and diagonals. So you have to throw out ALL the clean pixels and blend the color values that they represented. Your new pixel A gets some of the color value of pixel B and your new pixel C gets some of the value of pixel B to make two new pixels that are a "blur" of the three that used to define that part of the image. Of course it doesn't stop there because you have to spread the old pixels' data more evenly than that, but I'm not going to do that kind of math in my head and you get the point anyway. The new 1,280 pixels are a blurred version of the old ones. They look okay from a distance, but they are a "mushed" version of what used to be there. It's called interpolation and it's the reason a lot of things look blurry on TV, on film, in magazines... all over the place, it's done all the time. Everyone knows that when you take you 2.3 magapixel photos and reduce them to e-mail them to your mom they aren't as good as the originals. But you never think about it because you aren't going to blow-up that lower res version of the photo to the size of the original to look at it are you? You'll look at it at the new smaller size and it looks fine, maybe even better.

But that's not what Dish is doing. They ARE blowing it back up to the original size.

And this is where it gets very ugly, you have to stretch those 1,280 pixels back out to 1,920 pixels to return it to an HD standard. So (you guessed it) you take your new blurred hybrid A and B pixels and you move them apart and you make a new pixel to go in the middle that's a blend of the two colors and you have 3 pixels again where there only used to be 2. 1,280 becomes 1,920 again. But you have now blurred the image twice. Twice the damage, the second compounding on the first.

I would say tough, almost none of the source material out there is truely native 1920x1080. The vast majority of film transfer machines used for HD (The "Spirit" from Thomson/Grass Valley) are actually not scanning film at resolutions any higher than about 1440 pixels of horizontal resolution, and then only on the luminance channel. There are very few (if any) cameras in the field that have imaging sensors that come close to 1920x1080 native and until very recently they only recorded to HD-CAM (see below). So almost everything has already been interpolated once, BEFORE it get's to tape. This is SLOWLY changing as more movies are using digital post production techniques that allow HD masters to be created directly from true high-res scans rather than telecine, but they are few and far between right now.

No we get to compression.

To deliver HD masters to a broadcaster you have few choices; HD-CAM, D5 or HD-CAM SR. They are all compressed, some much more than others, HD-CAM being the worst. HD-CAM is also the cheapest... guess which one is most popular.

So by the time the the master sources get to the broadcaster they have for the most part already been interpolated from a lower resolution and they have all already been compressed.

So then they squeeze it to 2/3 of the original horizontal resolution, and compress it to send it you us.

In actual fact, the reduced resolution helps a lot in cutting the amount of data needed to represent the image, not just because there are fewer pixels to store, but because after the interpolation those pixels are less crisp, less contrast between them... they are blurry. So the compression algorithm can more often look at a small area of the picture and say "Hmmm... this bit of contrast falls below my threshold to try and maintain the detail, I'm just going to blur it into a solid area of one color" than it would if the image were sharp. Sharp, detailed images are much more diffiult to compress and take up much more bandwidth. So the saving in bandwidth by doing this reduction and mushing is two fold. And so is the damage it does to the image.

Now, don't get me wrong... the guys who worked all this stuff out are geniuses. This hardware/software all works very very well and is probably doing the best it can possibly do to keep the image as clean and crisp as possible. But that doesn't mean it going to come out the other side looking as good as it did on the way in. It's just not possible.

All you users who are saying "it looks fine to me" are probably watching the image on a lower resolution screen, through hardware that was doing a bad job of displaying the detail of an HD frame to begin with. I wouldn't expect you to notice the difference. But I also wouldn't expect you to get upset at the complaints of people who CAN tell the difference and are unhappy about it.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I haven't bothered to buy an HD set for home for EXACTLY this reason. If I don't display the image on a system that can show me every pixel then I will never be able to tell that the source image is garbage. And in the mean time, everything that's broadcast in HD looks like uncompressed, clean, sharp SD. And I'm happier with that than I would be with garbage HD.

It just burns me up that just as the technology that can display HD at it's native resolution is gaining popularity, so the sources for that content are disappearing.

[Stewart Vernon]

1280x1080i is actually much worse than 1280x720p, because if you factor in the interlaced vs progressive stuff, you are comparing:

1280x720

vs

1280x540

No it isn't... 720p has 720 scan lines (actually a few more, but I won't get into that)... and 1080i has 1080 scan lines.

720p is progressive scan, which means all 720 lines are displayed in one contiguous scan of the screen. 1080i is interlaced, which means every-other-line (540) is displayed on the first scan, then the other 540 lines are displayed on the next scan.

There used to be more of a problem with "flicker" in the old days of interlaced... but that is mostly gone now unless your eyes are particularly sensitive.

In no way is 1080i anything like 540p... because 540p would only be 540 scan lines, barely more than what SD currently uses.

I hate to see people who are confused or being fed misinformation spread the misinformation so people think that somehow 1080i is less vertical information (scan lines) than 720p.

[Stewart Vernon]

All you users who are saying "it looks fine to me" are probably watching the image on a lower resolution screen, through hardware that was doing a bad job of displaying the detail of an HD frame to begin with. I wouldn't expect you to notice the difference. But I also wouldn't expect you to get upset at the complaints of people who CAN tell the difference and are unhappy about it.

That might apply to some users... but I have a 1080i true native display... and I can tell a difference between 1920x1080 and 1280x1080. In the past I've definately seen problems on the Equator channel, for instance, with downgraded pictures.

However, lately when Monsters is showing a 1950s Godzilla movie that wasn't cleanly transferred, and is in black & white... I can't tell the difference between 1920x1080 and 1280x1080 for that movie.

Some channels and programming show the flaws better/more than others... which is why when I've flipped around lately since viewing the threads about the downrezzing... I haven't noticed a big difference. If they were showing live or better transferred programming, then I would probably notice.

[hammerdown]

I'll say it then. 1280 x 1080 ISN'T HD! It's not even the same aspect ratio. It is not one of the many white paper defined HD standards for broadcast. IT IS NOT HD...

So, anyway, you take those 1,920 pixels and you squeeze them to fit into 1,280 pixels. That's a 1/3 reduction per line...

...They ARE blowing it back up to the original size...you have to stretch those 1,280 pixels back out to 1,920 pixels to return it to an HD standard.

I'm trying to wrap my brain around this. If they blow it back up to 1920 then how come the captured frames show up as 1280x1080? Wouldn't it fool the capture device into seeing 1920? If they are blowing it back out to 1920, how are we able to know it's 1280? And if they don't blow it back to 1920, why doesn't the aspect ratio come out all funky?

Hammer

[sgiwiz]

I'm trying to wrap my brain around this. If they blow it back up to 1920 then how come the captured frames show up as 1280x1080? Wouldn't it fool the capture device into seeing 1920? If they are blowing it back out to 1920, how are we able to know it's 1280? And if they don't blow it back to 1920, why doesn't the aspect ratio come out all funky?

Hammer

I'm actually not sure HOW they transmit the lower resolution stream, probably just an MPEG data stream. I can guess that the transmission is in encoded and decoded as 1280x1080, and that is what people are getting a reading from. I don't think my 924 unit actually tells me that info, but maybe I just haven't found that menu yet.

I would be very interested in knowing that info like I do on my EyeTV500, if anyone knows where it is stored on the 924?

But the fact remains that the image has to be stretched back out to 1920x1080 to get to your screen if you are watching in 1080 (not 720 or SD). Regardless of whether "they" do it at the broadcast station, the uplink, or inside your receiver it's still being done.

sgiwiz

[sgiwiz]

That might apply to some users... but I have a 1080i true native display... and I can tell a difference between 1920x1080 and 1280x1080. In the past I've definately seen problems on the Equator channel, for instance, with downgraded pictures.

However, lately when Monsters is showing a 1950s Godzilla movie that wasn't cleanly transferred, and is in black & white... I can't tell the difference between 1920x1080 and 1280x1080 for that movie.

Some channels and programming show the flaws better/more than others... which is why when I've flipped around lately since viewing the threads about the downrezzing... I haven't noticed a big difference. If they were showing live or better transferred programming, then I would probably notice.

Exactly right HDMe. There is lots of content that the compromise would be less noticeable on. That doesn't make it less of a compromise because they don't switch it off and on when a good quality show comes on, everything suffers the same fate.

You can't say "Oh, well, Steven Soderbergh made the movie 'Traffic' really grainy so we can just dowres it and compress it more because most people won't see 'much' difference." and then "Hero" comes on and you set the resolution back to the "high" setting.

If it doesn't matter if the content is high resolution or not, why bother with high definition at all? I'm sure a really high quality DVD of 1950s Godzilla would look just as good as bad HD does but that's not what we are paying for is it?

The people arguing on the side of lower resolution are saying "I don't see MUCH difference" not "I don't see ANY difference." It seems like people are having to make the choice between quality and quantity. And I know which side of that argument I fall.

My honest and humble question is this:

Why is anyone sticking up for the idea of reduced quality, even if they don't see "much" difference?

Has someone issued an ultimatum? "Either you accept this or we're taking the channels off the air!" I haven't heard that from Dish, have you?

sgiwiz

:confused:

[Stewart Vernon]

I'm actually not sure HOW they transmit the lower resolution stream, probably just an MPEG data stream. I can guess that the transmission is in encoded and decoded as 1280x1080, and that is what people are getting a reading from. I don't think my 924 unit actually tells me that info, but maybe I just haven't found that menu yet.

I would be very interested in knowing that info like I do on my EyeTV500, if anyone knows where it is stored on the 924?

But the fact remains that the image has to be stretched back out to 1920x1080 to get to your screen if you are watching in 1080 (not 720 or SD). Regardless of whether "they" do it at the broadcast station, the uplink, or inside your receiver it's still being done.

sgiwiz

I don't have any technical knowledge of what they are doing.... but I have a theory.

They take a 1920x1080 and use some kind of semi-advanced algorithm by which they toss pixels here and there until they end up with a 1280x1080 image. Then they transmit this encoded so that the receivers see it as a 16:9 image that is suposed to fill the screen. The receiver automatically stretches horizontally to fill the width of the screen.

I *think* this technically is happening all the time... its just that when a 1920x1080 or 1280x720 image is sent, that is 16:9 already, there is no stretch because it is already the right width... but when the image is less than that width it is horizontally stretched.

I don't know what the stretching algorithm is... or if my theory is correct, but I'm sticking with it until someone comes up with what really is happening.

[Stewart Vernon]

Exactly right HDMe. There is lots of content that the compromise would be less noticeable on. That doesn't make it less of a compromise.

Agreed. A street sign with fonts (letter sizes) too small for most people to read is still an improperly designed street sign even if I have better than 20/20 vision and can still see it.

You can't say "Oh, well, Steven Soderbergh made the movie 'Traffic' really grainy so we can just dowres it and compress it more because most people won't see 'much' difference."

Also agreed... it's just that I can't see the difference when they do it on that movie, so I don't know to complain. If I hadn't been reading these discussions, I wouldn't know anything was happening.

If it doesn't matter if the content is high resolution or not, why bother with high definition at all? I'm sure a really high quality DVD of 1950s Godzilla would look just as good as bad HD does but that's not what we are paying for is it?

True. If it is an HD channel it should be HD. However, the part and the reason why I can't get as up in arms about it is... since HD is either 1280x720 or 1920x1080... its hard for me to say 1280x1080 isn't HD, when it is better than 1280x720 technically... so even though I know they are technically cheating, how can I complain?

They could reduce to 1280x720 and actually be a less quality image to save even more bandwidth... and then no one would complain it isn't HD... but it would still look less detailed than the 1920x1080 image and, to me at least, be more obviously so.

My honest and humble question is this:

Why is anyone sticking up for the idea of reduced quality, even if they don't see "much" difference?

I compare FOX to CBS regularly and CBS to ESPN as well... for various sporting events... and I always like CBS 1080 much better... but when I see ESPN or FOX without directly comparing it still looks nice.

Given the choice, I'd love it all to be 1080, but if it is 720 or better, I can't complain like I could if they were showing, say 1024x720 or something less than the 720p standard.

[Gary Murrell]

like I said before, Dish or Voom would have been better off providing 720p, that would have gave them the bandwidth room they need and keep picture quality top notch, as 1280x720p picture quality is superb

now with considering the whole interlaced vs progressive, on these 1280x1080i channels we have:

1280x540 now

vs

1920x540 before

interlaced upon motion is only 540 lines, still shots is were 1080i looks best

with 720p we would have 1280x720 instead of 1280x540

1920x1080i gets it's pristine crisp look from the 1920 horizontal pixels of info

this is a huge difference and anyone who thinks this 1280x1080i HD is not much different than TRUE 1920x1080i HD is dead wrong

the hole point of TRUE 1080i HD is that is has high 1920 horizontal rez to offset the interlaced 1080 lines of vertical which is most of the time only 540(when there is motion) you get the benefit of 1080 on still shots

HDMe 540p and 1080i are 99% identical because of the motion factors of 1080i(with motion 1080i only has 540 lines active)

many many HD set top boxes from Directv and upconverting DVD players even output 540p instead of 1080i

1280x1080i is NOt technically better than 1280x720p because of the above stated interlaced motion concerns
and it is cerntainly not better than 1920x1080i we all know that

1280x1080i is not a HD resolution at all as sgiwiz stated, it isn't even 16:9(1.78:1) and must be streched somewhere in the chain to make that aspect ratio

sgiwiz, the Voom mpeg2 streams recorded directly from Dish on my pc(no set top box involved) are 1280x1080i, I us TSreader to give me that info, they also originate from Dish in 16:9 aspect ratio

-Gary

[Stewart Vernon]

now with considering the whole interlaced vs progressive, on these 1280x1080i channels we have:

1280x540 now

vs

1920x540 before

interlaced upon motion is only 540 lines, still shots is were 1080i looks best

with 720p we would have 1280x720 instead of 1280x540

1920x1080i gets it's pristine crisp look from the 1920 horizontal pixels of info

this is a huge difference and anyone who thinks this 1280x1080i HD is not much different than TRUE 1920x1080i HD is dead wrong

the hole point of TRUE 1080i HD is that is has high 1920 horizontal rez to offset the interlaced 1080 lines of vertical which is most of the time only 540(when there is motion) you get the benefit of 1080 on still shots

HDMe 540p and 1080i are 99% identical because of the motion factors of 1080i(with motion 1080i only has 540 lines active)

many many HD set top boxes from Directv and upconverting DVD players even output 540p instead of 1080i

I thought perhaps you just didn't know better, or had been given incorrect information... but repeating it makes it seem like you really believe what you are saying.

I don't mean to be insulting, but what you are saying about "540p" simply isn't true. I'm obviously not a good "teacher" either, because I couldn't communicate it well enough, so maybe someone else can.

Interlaced is a different way of presenting the information on the screen than progressive. Progressive is still a relatively new technology in terms of TVs or monitors. The difference between interlaced and progressive is NOT the amount of information presented, but rather HOW it is presented.

If I am dealing cards... I could either lay 6 cards one beside the other (progressive) OR I could lay 3 cards, skipping spaces between them and then go back and put the other 3 cards in those spaces I left. You still get 6 cards either way!

A 720 scanline image has 720 scanlines. A 1080 scanline image has 1080 scanlines. A 720p picture puts all 720 scanlines one right after the other on one pass of the screen. A 1080i picture puts all 1080 scanlines in two sweeps, with each sweep laying down 540 of the lines... but there are 1080 scanlines that form the entire image.

The same argument that would say "but there are only 540 lines on a pass" can be used to say there are only 360 lines in a 720p image when it is halfway done too!

I don't know how else to say it... 1080i has 1080 lines... there are not 540 and it isn't "like" a 540p image. A 540p image would only have 540 scanlines.

1280x1080i still has 1080 scanlines, so it is higher resolution than a 720p 1280x720 image. It is not a full 1920x1080 1080i picture, but it is still more than a 720p one. No matter how you slice it, that is the fact of the matter.

I don't mind people complaining about the downrezzing or saying it is "ripping us off" by saying they are sacrificing picture quality... but I don't like the misinformation saying that 1080i is 540p, which is simply not anywhere close to being right.

[Gary Murrell]

Never did I say that 1080i was 540p, I said it was close

the fact is that 1080i is interlaced and when there is motion interlaced is only perceived as half the vertical resolution or Temporal Resolution

for still shots 1080i cannot be beat(Spatial Resolution), but for motion 1080i is basically 540p, it has 1920 dots of info per each scan line which is a massive amount of horizontal detail, 1280 reduction reduces that down by alot resulting in a horrid image

1280x720p has more vertical resolution, that is why it fairs so well against 1920x1080i,

1280x1080i is not a higher resolution image than 1280x720p because with anything other than a still image you are comparing these resolution's with Temporal Resolution(of which most video we watch is)

1280x540(HD-Lite 1080i) = 691,200 pixels of Temporal Resolution

vs

1280x720(720p) = 921,600 pixels of Temporal Resolution

vs

1920x540(True 1080i) = 1,036,800 pixels of Temporal Resolution


here are the numbers per each second of actual viewed video:

1280x1080i: 1280x1080x30 = 41,472,000 pixels
1920x1080i: 1920x1080x30 = 62,208,000 pixels
1280x720p: 1280x720x60 = 55,296,000 pixels
720x480p: 720x480x60 =20,736,000 pixels

the numbers at top would also come into play if you were to pause a program of each resolution above and look at the image

720p vs 1080i is a touchy subject and as you can see 1280x720p is a higher resolution than 1280x1080i HD-Lite

this new HD-Lite is only 2X DVD quality
while True 1080i HDTV is 3X DVD quality
720p is 2.7X DVD quality

big difference between these

-Gary

[Stewart Vernon]

The whole "temporal resolution" thing is meaningless. The whole screen, even with a progressive image, doesn't light up instantaneously... it takes some fraction of a second to put a 720p image on the screen, just as it does to make the two passes for a 1080i interlaced image... so at no time are all the parts of the image on the screen actually on the screen simultaneously!

The scan sweeps, generally speaking, top to bottom and left to right... either in single pass (progressive) or dual pass (interlaced) to make an apparent image for our eyes to see and our brains to interpret.

The argument that the time between each pass of a 1080i interlaced pass results in some loss of detail due to "motion" is no more or less valid than saying the time between each 720p progressive pass also results in some loss of detail due to "motion" that occurs between each frame.

The most lost of detail in digital TV comes from downrezzing OR the MPEG-2 compression which is a lossy compression algorithm. a 1920x1080 image contains more data than a 1280x720 image, and thus takes some finite amount of time longer to process and display, and thus technically allows for more changes to happen and be present due to the combination of elapsed time, compression, and scan frequency... but the interlaced vs progressive part of this equation is a very minor part. Most noticed problems are directly from the MPEG-2 compression and/or downrezzing.

I defy anyone with good eyesight and properly configured equipment to watch the exact same program on a 1920x1080 native set in 1080i and on a 1280x720 720p native set and say that the 1080i does not look more detailed, motion or otherwise.

We are usually not able to make direct comparisons, however, because different programs show different flaws in different ways.

If we're going to be technical... the image you see also is a result of how far you sit from the TV, not just due to your eyesight but because it takes the light longer to travel to you the farther away you sit... so there is also a delay which results in a loss of image data if you sit far enough away.

There are so many infinitesimal factors we could factor in... but the meat of it is, 1080i contains more data than 720p... the image is presented differently, but your eye and brain put the images together in a way that perceives the greater detail of the 1080i image.

[Gary Murrell]

Yes I agree(and personally like 1080i much more than 720p), 1080i does have slightly more detail and the numbers do indicate that so:

1920x1080i: = 62,208,000 pixels
1280x720p: = 55,296,000 pixels

I just wanted to get the fact over that 720p DOES have more resolution than 1280x1080i HD-Lite, that is my only beef

1280x1080i: = 41,472,000 pixels
1280x720p: = 55,296,000 pixels

-Gary

[James Long]

I wish more HD was in 720p, even though my set is native 1080i.
The 60 frames per second would be great for fast action stuff.

I'd also like to see 1080i at the 24 frame rate for movies - That IMHO would be a better way to reduce the load on the system than scan width reductions. If you factor in everything that happens between the original and the STB there are a lot of conversions going on.

JL

[landcruiser00]

I am very disappointed that this has happened. I will email a complaint to E*. I told my wife last evening that RAVE did not look right, that the PQ was not as crisp. Sure enough - logged in this morning and saw this thread. I was watching the John Mayer Soundstage episode again tonight - hoping to see the res back up to what it had been. But no - it was clearly lower quality than the last time I saw it last summer. The lower resolution is especially noticeable on wide angle shots of the performers and the crowd. Looks like SD on my 90" theater screen.

[hammerdown]

...1280x1080i is not a HD resolution at all as sgiwiz stated, it isn't even 16:9(1.78:1) and must be streched somewhere in the chain to make that aspect ratio

sgiwiz, the Voom mpeg2 streams recorded directly from Dish on my pc(no set top box involved) are 1280x1080i, I us TSreader to give me that info, they also originate from Dish in 16:9 aspect ratio

-Gary

Is there any way you can post a non-resized screen cap of one of these 1280x1080 shows, please. I'm curious if it shows up stretched/squished or if it looks normal?

I've used TS Reader to look at OTA HD. Are you saying the PID's say the video is 1280x1080? I thought that info is simply inserted by the broadcaster and not actually interpolated by TS Reader? If so... couldn't, or why wouldn't E* just fudge the numbers?

Hammer

[Stewart Vernon]

I wish more HD was in 720p, even though my set is native 1080i.
The 60 frames per second would be great for fast action stuff.

I'd also like to see 1080i at the 24 frame rate for movies - That IMHO would be a better way to reduce the load on the system than scan width reductions. If you factor in everything that happens between the original and the STB there are a lot of conversions going on.

JL

When I'm watching NFL on CBS or the college basketball I've seen on HDNet in 1080i... it is amazing, and if I have the chance to flip over to a similar broadcast on FOX or ESPN in HD at 720p, I can definately say that I like the 1080i detail. In football, I can see the blades of grass with 1080i... and in basketball I can see the "twines" in the net on the hoop.

That said, however... when watching FOX NFL or ESPNHD basketball and not having something to flip and directly compare to... the 720p picture quality looks great to me also.

The obvious sad part, though, is that when I have to watch a game in SD on another channel... I am so spoiled that the SD, even when not overcompressed to death, looks really bad to my eyes now. :(

[Ghostwriter]

I have been reading up on this and some people are getting WAY out of control.

LandCrusier just so you know, RAVE was no downrezed it has been 1280x1080i for months now, I think this thread got a tad into your head. As far as I have read and have seen mentioned before the only "true" HD channels on Voom were Monsters, Equator, Animania and Ultra these were the 1920x1080i everyone is mentioning otherwise the remaining 6 channels are still the same as they were before. So that concert on RAVE should not have looked any different, I think you just made yourself believe it after you read this thread.

[Stewart Vernon]

The lower resolution is especially noticeable on wide angle shots of the performers and the crowd. Looks like SD on my 90" theater screen.

I guess it would on that large of a screen! My 65" really hasn't shown me much obvious... though I can admit that HDNet/HDNet Movies usually does look sharper and clearer than the Voom channels... but often that is because of what is on and not so much the channel resolution, so I tend to not notice as much on those channels.

I notice, for instance, that the MonstersHD "commercials" in between movies look nice and bright and sharp to me.

On a related note... The HD News channel (9482) always looks sharp, especially when they are showing the big maps during the weather segment. Has this channel been downrezzed too?

[Stewart Vernon]

I have been reading up on this and some people are getting WAY out of control.

LandCrusier just so you know, RAVE was no downrezed it has been 1280x1080i for months now, I think this thread got a tad into your head. As far as I have read and have seen mentioned before the only "true" HD channels on Voom were Monsters, Equator, Animania and Ultra these were the 1920x1080i everyone is mentioning otherwise the remaining 6 channels are still the same as they were before. So that concert on RAVE should not have looked any different, I think you just made yourself believe it after you read this thread.

You said what I've wondered (out loud too)... I wouldn't argue that there are some technical changes with some of the channels, and I myself doubt I would have noticed anything if I wasn't looking harder at the channels after reading this thread. I wonder how many other people actually noticed.

Especially in light of folks noticing changes in channels that haven't actually changed, as you point out!

[Jon Spackman]

Two thoughts here-

How are you guys coming up with the "facts" that dish is suppose to be sending 1280X 1080i images?


I have read on the AVS forum and elsewhere that even with a bad-ass tv you cannot get more than about 1500 lines x 1080i resolution. I heard that even DiscHD which is suppose to have the best resolution because of their HD cams, 1400-1500 lines is the maximum real-world resolution. 1920 simply never gets sent to us.......

I do not want my HD quality lowered. I also vote for less channels of REAL HD instead of more at HD-lite quality.

IF there is not enough bandwidth to add more currently, Then WAIT!!!!!!;)

[Gary Murrell]

First let me set a few things straight here as to make sure no one is misunderstanding what has happened here

I use a modification for my 6000 receiver that allows me to record Dish Network HDTV to my PC or D-VHS deck, I can also analyse anything they do and get all sorts of info from this data stored on my PC

I can also do this for SD also, but I have no interest in that

this mod pulls the straight mpeg streams from the satellite, nothing is involved set top box wise or etc., my device records the straight .TS streams from Dish

when the Voom channels were put up in August or so( ?? )

This (explained below) were how the channels were from the get go

I was setting at my PC early that morning when they were first turned on (so I know):

Monsters
Ultra
Animania
Equator

these 4 Voom at the get go were 1920x1080i True HDTV with bitrates over 17 Mbps, they looked so good, MonstersHD is the best HD that Dish ever had to offer

Gallery
Rave
GuyTV
Majestic
HDNews
Rush

these 6 channels were HD-Lite from the get go, 1280x1080i with horrid bitrates of 12 Mbps or less, they have looked like **** from day one and still do to this day

these channels HAVE not been effected in anyway these recent few days, again they are the same now as from the 1st minute they were turned on by Dish

so what has happened then??

the 4 True 1920x1080i HD channels of Monsters/Ultra/Equator/Animania have been NOW lowered to match the other 6 in quality, this happened a few days back

again nothing has changed on Dish but the 4 True HDTV channels being lowered in quality to match the other 6 Voom that were like that from day one

what this means is that all 10 current and upcoming 11 Voom channels are going to be in 1280x1080i with bitrates around 14.5 Mbps

Sean Mota even reported this before it happened over on Sat. Guys

to answer the one question:

The Actual video and headers are both reading 1280x1080i and the actual raw mpeg data coming from dish is in 16:9 aspect ratio, so after the down conversion the channels are being stretched to a 16:9 aspect ratio

I do not need anything but my 942 and Mits WS-65813 display to tell me that these channels are garbage in regard's to picture quality, I have seen many many DVD's look better on my display and if this is what Dish wishes to send me then that(DVD) is what I will be viewing instead of paying for this ****

I understand that everyone is not a picky Videophile like me, but this is about Dish advertising HD and giving us HD-Lite

Just in case everyone doesn't know:

Directv does this same exact thing with 100% of it's HDTV offering's, it has for 2 years now and has gotten by with it, so it is now time for Dish to start

If this sticks until CES time, We have to let them know we will not stand for it, or it will be accepted and become the norm for Dish the same as Directv

-Gary

[James Long]

I believe that E* WANTS to be able to do 1920x1080i on all the Voom channels but the reported problems with the (can I say ancient?) model 6000 have held them back. Perhaps they need to get the existing 6000's off the network and replace them with 411/Vip211s as soon as possible. They may be waiting for the new DVR to be available to give both options as an upgrade path for 6000 owners.

If there is an issue with model 6000s (exceeding the total bits per transponder that the 6000 is capable of handling) it will prevent E* from doing what they *want* to do with the feeds. Contracts come into play here too. We have been hearing since Voom was first added to E* that all 21 channels would be available in 2006. There may be an obligation at play here.

JL

[hammerdown]

...to answer the one question:

The Actual video and headers are both reading 1280x1080i and the actual raw mpeg data coming from dish is in 16:9 aspect ratio, so after the down conversion the channels are being stretched to a 16:9 aspect ratio...

I am in no way doubting your findings. I am just very curious about how a 1280x1080 picture can come out of my 6000 and show up on my screen as 16x9. I'm not understanding this.

Are you saying the "actual video" is 1280x1080? That means if you play it back via the PC using a 16x9 screen resolution it does not fill the screen? Right?

Please post a non-resized screenshot.
Hammer

[Gary Murrell]

James I have heard the same thing from everyone I have spoken to

Even some Dish engineers told me that the 6000 was why the 6 Voom's were HD-Lite from the start, Dish even told me that they were going to get the Voom all at 1920x1080i eventually

but and this is a big but

They are using 3 1920x1080i True HDTV per transponder on 110, they are doing it on 2 different transponders:

Showtime/Discovery/ESPN on 1 transponder
HBO/HD PPV/TNT on 1 transponder

now the bitrates on these channels are getting way too low, but the 6000 handles this just fine

I wish someone from this board could get into contact with Dish and get some info or statement for us, don't some of the folks here talk to Dish??

My Bill is 130$ a month and I would like to keep it that way :D, but if Dish wishes to do this with their HDTV my bill will have to reduce

-Gary

[Gary Murrell]

Hammer

Video it is coming down in 1280x1080i resolution, but has been stretched horizontally by Dish to simulate 16:9

so in essence Dish is sending a fake 1920x1080i with only 1280x1080i worth of pixels

so a screencap shows 16:9 resolution, as does playing the content back on anything via PC/D-VHS/Dish Receivers etc.

if anyone wanted, I could show some screen caps comparing stuff recorded on MonstersHD in True HD before the switch, comparing to how they look now in HD-Lite

-Gary

[hammerdown]

So a screencap is 1920x1080? Which means the only thing telling you it's 1280x1080 (besides your EYES) is the "header" inside the PID, planted by the broadcaster?

Hammer

[sgiwiz]

This is a sad day for the consumer.

I can't wait for the future. I will cross my fingers that as technology makes great things possible, the companies who use that technology to make money from consumers will try and use some of that possibility to IMPROVE the quality not just make their profit margins greater while hoping we don't notice.

Perhaps BluRay will make movies at home look good enough that even the average consumer will be able to see that the HD they get from D* or cable just isn't up to standard.

And it's my hope (and I'm sure E*'s hope) that those consumers will not settle for mush, but will seek out better options and turn to the competitive market-place in which Dish Network are still a small step ahead.

I have another set of fingers crossed in the hope that E*'s investors have the patience to keep the bar high until the consumers come to that realization.

sgiwiz

[Gary Murrell]

Hammer, I have been trying to figure this one out for you and I finally did:

The video is 1280x1080i and is using non-square pixels to achive the 16:9 aspect ratio, in a sense simulating 16:9

all my programs and data analyzers(along with the headers) are giving me 1280x1080i video

but that is how they are doing it(took me a while to figure it out), they are using non square pixels so that 1280x1080i is a 16:9 resolution

Believe me, if anyone has seen D-Theater D-VHS(1920x1080i/25 Mbps video), then they would know(and see) this stuff is pure trash

-Gary

[James Long]

now the bitrates on these channels are getting way too low, but the 6000 handles this just fineThe link budget for 8PSK on E10 has 41,200 listed as the "Information Bit Rate per Carrier" (FCC Filing). That leaves E* with about 13.7mbits per channel *if* the receiver can handle 41,200 kbits. (Standard QPSK gives 27,647 kbits (3/4 FEC) or 30,719 kbits (5/6 FEC) according to E*'s filings for E-10.)

If all of E*'s deployed HD receivers can handle 41.2mbits it comes down to an issue of how to make a channel fit into 13.7mbits - compression or horizontal reduction? Not presenting three per transponder HDs as 13.7mbits tends to support the thought that certain HD receivers cannot handle the aggregate feed.

So for now 1280x1080i might become a reality - the best they can do without immediately replacing the older receivers. I don't see it as a permanent choice.I wish someone from this board could get into contact with Dish and get some info or statement for us, don't some of the folks here talk to Dish??There are some here with contacts into E* and the E* folks do read DBSTalk.

JL

[Jon Spackman]

If HD purists want the best HD and that means upgrading their old receivers from 6000's to 811 or newer....then it is in the hands of model 6000 owners, buy a new receiver and you can have better PQ.....

[Gary Murrell]

Thanks for the data James

lets put it this way, Does Dish not have room for 2 HD per transponder?? they certianly do for 61.5 right??

also there is the consideration of the Movie channels, they (when using 3/2 pulldown for film material) do not need as much bandwidth

the Showtime and HBO on 110, are getting around 12 Mbps
Discovery is getting around 13.75 Mbps

with your info above, I see now why NO HD on 110 ever get's over 13.75 Mbps

there will be around 5 movie channels when all 21 Voom are said and done, there is some way Dish could play this out and not have to ruin these nice channels by down rezzing

I never have understood why Dish doesn't do what BEV does??, putting HD and SD on the same transponder

Dish could put 2 HD per 8PSK transponder at 17 Mbps each and then 2 SD on the remaining 7.5 Mbps

-Gary

[James Long]

If HD purists want the best HD and that means upgrading their old receivers from 6000's to 811 or newer....then it is in the hands of model 6000 owners, buy a new receiver and you can have better PQ.....Actually "get all the 6000's off the system and everyone can have better PQ" :D.

JL

[James Long]

lets put it this way, Does Dish not have room for 2 HD per transponder?? they certianly do for 61.5 right??129° would be the bottleneck at the moment. Voom on 7 transponders or Voom on 11 transponders would be the choice - they have the 11 transponders for Voom at 61.5°. They don't at 129° without giving up the "single dish locals" fix that is required by law to be in place by the end of May. (E-10 will also be part of that fix.)I never have understood why Dish doesn't do what BEV does??, putting HD and SD on the same transponderIn a nutshell, only HD receivers can do 8PSK. If they put up SD channels on 8PSK transponders only the newest SD receivers (111/311/522/625) and all HD receivers could see those channels. That eliminates a lot of subscribers with 301/501s and other not so old receivers as well as the old four digit customers.

JL

[Gary Murrell]

Oh Shoot, forgot that lots of receivers can't receive 8psk :(

-Gary

[JohnH]

Well, the 301 and 501 had better be able to do 8PSK or this talk about 8PSK being a usable medium for improved thoughput is a waste of time.

I doubt the 6000 has any shortcomings versus the 811 and high bandwidth.

[cebbigh]

129° would be the bottleneck at the moment. Voom on 7 transponders or Voom on 11 transponders would be the choice - they have the 11 transponders for Voom at 61.5°. They don't at 129° without giving up the "single dish locals" fix that is required by law to be in place by the end of May. (E-10 will also be part of that fix.)

JL

A good deal of what I've been reading here implies misgivings that Dish has made a permanent and fixed decision to offer reduced product. Is it possible that they are just doing it as a stop gap to get around problems they might be having with 129? Less as a business decision and more as a temporary solution to work around a problem?

p.s. Since this post have joined those e-mailing Dish that sacrificing quality for quantity is NOT ACCEPTABLE. Keep up the pressure!!!

[Mikey]

A good deal of what I've been reading here implies misgivings that Dish has made a permanent and fixed decision to offer reduced product. Is it possible that they are just doing it as a stop gap to get around problems they might be having with 129? Less as a business decision and more as a temporary solution to work around a problem?We can't tell what E*'s intent is until they come out and tell us. All we can tell is what's happening now, and how it affects our viewing enjoyment.

[UTFAN]

Watching on our 36" HD monitor, really didn't notice. The only Voom channel we really watch is Rave.

Question: What are the additional Voom channels rumorville has Echostar adding?

See ya at the Rose Bowl!!

[hammerdown]

The video is 1280x1080i and is using non-square pixels to achive the 16:9 aspect ratio, in a sense simulating 16:9

all my programs and data analyzers(along with the headers) are giving me 1280x1080i video

So a screencap would be 1280x1080 pixels, and displaying the picture on a 16x9 PC screen would appear stretched/squished? Right?

Seems I keep asking the same questions, but I'm not any closer to their answers. Sorry I'm a bit dense ;) Wouldn't it be a lot easier for everyone if you just post a non-resized screenshot, please. Even better how about a ~2 second video clip;)

Hammer

[Ken Howe]

Is there something wrong with the 61.5 bird? Maybe they are preping for a big move to a alt bird. I have heard rumor that Dish may be using the dish 500 for the 110 and 119 sats for HD... who knows... anyone thought about that end?

[P Smith]

...
I doubt the 6000 has any shortcomings versus the 811 and high bandwidth.
Totally agree !
There is some sort of marketing smoke around utilizing bandwidth on existing and planned transponders. Money driving for the HD-Lite changes. :(

[DoyleS]

The 6000 has the unique feature of having either Component or RGBHV output. Unfortunately for some of us with CRT projectors, they really want an RGBHV signal and not a Component signal. Decent transcoders are in the $300 range so I would need to add that to the cost of any new receiver that I upgrade to. I am fortunate to be in an area where I can receive about 20 OTA HD signals and that with an HTPC with a MYHD card and TitanTV allows me to watch or record OTA HD. In the end, for me it will boil down to where the compelling content is. Currently the E* HD material (HDpak and VOOM) only gets about 10% of my viewing time.

..Doyle

[LASooner]

What I don't understand is why they would choose 1280x1080? Why not 1440x1080 which makes a little more sense. Since a lot of cameras have a 1440x1080 sensor?

[Gary Murrell]

Hammer

The 1920x1080i resolution uses pixels that are EXACTLY square, that resolution is 16:9 so the pixels are square

this 1280x1080i resolution uses pixels that are NOT square(wider than taller) so that this odd resolution fills a 16:9 picture size

1280x1080 is not a 16:9 picture size, so the pixels are more wider than taller to get a full 16:9 sized frame

screen caps are 1280x1080i, but are 16:9 also, because the pixels are NOT square in nature

Voom vast archive of programming was filmed true 1920x1080i, as is all HD, not getting into how much resolution and all is resolved and such(that is a huge discussion)

-Gary

[hammerdown]

Thanks... Is it against your religion or something to post a screencap? Not talking rocket science to cap & post a frame. And I would really love to get a sample video clip so I can run it through my machine.

Hammer

[Jon Spackman]

Gary Murrell
" Voom vast archive of programming was filmed true 1920x1080i, as is all HD,..."

What are you talking about? Espn and ABC shoot in 720p. You can't say stuff like this, you will confuse people who think you actually know what you are talking about.

[Gary Murrell]

Races

you misunderstood me, of course there is 720p, everyone knows that

there are VERY little 1080i content that isn't filmed full 1920x1080i, that is what I meant by my comment, Voom's HD content is 1920x1080i in nature, not 1280x1080i or 1440x1080i

Gosh, I have spell everthing out to a T on this board :rolleyes:, I am too used to being over at the AVS Forum

-Gary

[LASooner]

there are VERY little 1080i content that isn't filmed full 1920x1080i,

This is not entirely true. The imaging sensors on the HD cameras that have BEEN in use are interpolating to 1920x1080.

"Panasonic Varicam has a 1 million pixel imager. Sony has 2.1 million pixel imager (both cameras do not use all of the pixels) Varicam records 960x720 pixels of luminence detail Sony 1440x1080 pixels of lumence. On playback vtrs convert the image up to 1920x1080 pixels. HDCAM samples the original 1920x1080 to 1440x1080 whereas the Varicam samples 1220x720 to 960x720. "

http://hd24.com/panasonic_v_sony.htm

New cameras are starting to show up with full res sensors, but for the most part footage shot on Varicam and F900's are interpolated to 1920x1080, but actually captured at a lower resolution.

All the new HDV cameras are also using 1440x1080 with an pixel aspect ratio of 1.333 The footage these cameras produce look pretty good. The stuff I've shot with my Sony HDV look better on my TV than the stuff on the Dish Network compressed Discovery HD.

Which brings me back to, why 1280x1080 and not 1440x1080?

[P Smith]

I've seen Sony HDVS cameras like HDC 1500L, it is really shooting in 1920x1080p/i.
"High Sensitivity f10 @ 2000 Lux
Full Featured Multi-format Studio/OB camera system
720 Progressive : 50P/60P
1080 60 frame progressive image capture
1080 Progressive 24/25/30 frame with 3:2 capability
HD SDI, SD SDI, NTSC or PAL ouput
New HDCU-1000 / 1500 Control Units
Compatible with current HDC-900 / MSU-750 infrastructure
Sophisticated, low profile design HDLA-1500 Large Lens Adaptor (optional)
External HDTX-100 triax operation
Triax and/or Fiber operation capability
Allows Hybrid Fiber/Triax operation for long cable runs "
But little costly :).

[LASooner]

I got your costly and I'll raise ya. I'm working on a short film shot on a Dalsa 4k camera.... a mere $3000 a day rental fee gets you the camera body. :D

[Stewart Vernon]

I'm going to try one more stab at this...

Let's assume that 1280x720 in 720p format shows 60 720 scanline frames per second.
Let's also assume that 1920x1080 in 1080i format shows 30 1080 scanline frames per second.
Also assume that the 30 1080 scanline frames are formed by showing TWO 540 scanline frames that are interlaced, so that we are actually getting 60 frames per second with 1080i, just that each frame only contains half of the actual required data to form the full picture.

Now... smart people long ago determined that 30 frames per second is enough to fool the eye into thinking they are seeing "real" images and not just a bunch of stillframe pictures flipping by.

This means 1080i, clearly fills the 30 frames per second requirement to the human eye's ability to detect.

Each 1920x540 frame (60 in total) contains half of the total image resolution, and two successive 1920x540 frames are interleaved to form a picture.

What does this mean? Interleaved is like weaving... the 540 scanlines are not sequential ones, and each frame does NOT overwrite the previous one... but rather the first frame shows lines 1,3,5,...,1075,1077,1079 and then the next frame shows lines 2,4,6,...,1076,1078,1080 and that completes the picture.

The total image contains 1080 lines of resolution, and this is more information than a 720 scanline image.

The difference in interleaved vs progressive is simply in how the data is displayed. With 720p you get 60 frames of information. With 1080i you get 60 frames of 540 that are interleaved to form 30 frames of 1080 resolution.

Now... for those who ask isn't 60 better than 30? The answer is a resounding maybe! Movies are 24 frames per second... less than 30... and if you look closely at a motion picture reel you will find many times that successive pictures (2 in a row) are virtually identical. They need 24-30 so that your eye doesn't notice flickering... but there may actually not be a change from frame to frame.

So... 60 frames may or may not be 60 brand new frames! It is entirely possible that a 60 frame 720p second contains 30 or less new frames of information... even with a moving object.

Ok... so why do 1080i instead of 720p? It's a nice "cheat" way to get higher resolution without increasing the bandwidth proportionally as much.

1280x720 = 921,600 pixels in a frame
1920x1080 = 2,073,600

If BOTH are progressive, then you can clearly see that the 1920x1080 image takes more than twice the pixels as the 1280x720 picture does.

60 frames per second x the above numbers gets big, but still the 1080p would be more than twice the data of a 720p stream.

Ok, so... lets take advantage of the fact that the human eye needs only see 30 frames per second AND the fact that 60 frames per second doesn't always get you 60 new frames anyway... So, if we interleave the picture, and only send half the image for each frame...

1920x540 = 1,036,800

You can see that this is only marginally more than the amount of pixels in a 720 frame... so we can accomplish a picture resolution that is more than twice the resolution of 720p by using 1080i and interleaving the data... and the human eye is ok with this. Only computers and monitoring equipment will notice the difference.

Its like if you are hungry, and you need a hamburger and fries... I could give you a 1/4 lb hamburger all at once... or I could give you 1/3 lb hamburger and while you are eating the fries and finishing that first burger I give you another 1/3... you end up eating 2/3 hamburger, get more filled up... but you didn't notice you didn't have the whole thing on your plate because I was there with the second burger before you needed it.

OK... if that has all digested :)

Why would Dish/Voom convert to 1280x1080i instead of using 720p?

Think about what is happening...

1280x540 = 691,200 pixels

Sending 60 interleaved frames of 1280x540 (gets you 30 frames per second of 1280x1080i) takes less data than 720p! BUT it produces a picture that is higher resolution than 1280x720... and your eyes and your brain see 30 frames per second and don't notice the interleaving vs the progressive scan.

Interleaving is a nice way to make use of limited bandwidth and send higher resolution images without sending more data. Since 60 frames per second is very often overkill when 30 frames are sufficient... the "sacrifice" we are making here is often not a sacrifice at all.

Most of the detectable problems with digital TV come from the MPEG-2 compression, by design a loss-based algorithm that attempts to average changes out across an image.

With all of the above said... I doubt that most people would know the difference unless someone told them or they have a really large 60"+ TV like I do... and with that, 1080 looks better than 720... and even 1280x1080 looks better than 720p, as it should.

I hope that made sense... and sorry for the very long post!

[gdarwin]

With all of the above said... I doubt that most people would know the difference unless someone told them or they have a really large 60"+ TV like I do... and with that, 1080 looks better than 720... and even 1280x1080 looks better than 720p, as it should.


I think this is the root of all these downsizing threads... I have a 50 inch Sony and can not see the difference... BUT - When I go to buy my next TV and have to put up with this I will be very upset...

G.

[hokieengineer]

The link budget for 8PSK on E10 has 41,200 listed as the "Information Bit Rate per Carrier" (FCC Filing). That leaves E* with about 13.7mbits per channel *if* the receiver can handle 41,200 kbits. (Standard QPSK gives 27,647 kbits (3/4 FEC) or 30,719 kbits (5/6 FEC) according to E*'s filings for E-10.)

If all of E*'s deployed HD receivers can handle 41.2mbits it comes down to an issue of how to make a channel fit into 13.7mbits - compression or horizontal reduction? Not presenting three per transponder HDs as 13.7mbits tends to support the thought that certain HD receivers cannot handle the aggregate feed.

So for now 1280x1080i might become a reality - the best they can do without immediately replacing the older receivers. I don't see it as a permanent choice.There are some here with contacts into E* and the E* folks do read DBSTalk.

JL


8PSK at 2/3 FEC would be that link budget of 41,200. The 6000 can easily handle this. In fact, Dish is broadcasting 3 1920x1080i channels on one TP at 110. TNTHD, HBOHD, and PPVHD are all one TP. All of Dish's recievers tune this TP perfectly fine.

Don't forget the audio channels take up space. 380kb/s per channel. Then you have all the administrative data on each TP, which is about 900kb/s. So, you really are left with about 38Mbit/s to work with for the video.

I see several people on here blaming the 6000 for what Dish is doing. This is not true and doesn't have anything to do with the problem. The only problem the 6000 had with HD was when they uplinked the 1280i voom channels. It would not display these correctly when outputting at 720p. A software release fixed that.

[BFG]

The reason the 6000 was brought up (at least by me) was because when voom was first uplinked we asked why the channels that were 3 to a TP were 1280 and the answer we got (I beleive from a voom contact Sean has) is that dish network is the one's that said their 6000 model wouldn't handle that. Then we all pointed out that this is BS because of the transponder at 110. I never agreed with or beleived that the 6000 was really the reason and is why I've been seeking a true answer as to why those voom channels 3 to a tP have to be at 1280 (when most of us believe that they don't have to be, because of the 100 tp)

[James Long]

The reason the 6000 was brought up (at least by me) was because when voom was first uplinked we asked why the channels that were 3 to a TP were 1280 and the answer we got (I beleive from a voom contact Sean has) is that dish network is the one's that said their 6000 model wouldn't handle that. Then we all pointed out that this is BS because of the transponder at 110. I never agreed with or beleived that the 6000 was really the reason and is why I've been seeking a true answer as to why those voom channels 3 to a tP have to be at 1280 (when most of us believe that they don't have to be, because of the 100 tp)Part of the issue mentioned for the 6000 was the agregate bandwidth on a transponder. It isn't an issue of being able to handle a single channel that is 1920x1280i even at a decent bandwidth per channel. It is the total bandwidth per transponder that was the concern. expressed.8PSK at 2/3 FEC would be that link budget of 41,200. The 6000 can easily handle this. In fact, Dish is broadcasting 3 1920x1080i channels on one TP at 110. TNTHD, HBOHD, and PPVHD are all one TP. All of Dish's recievers tune this TP perfectly fine.You don't mention the bit rate used for those 1920x1080i channels. I believe that is the crux of this issue - when you run out of bits where do you skimp? Compress the heck out of 1920x1080i or reduce the number of bits going into the compression stage? You've got to get to the same target whether it is the maximum bits a particular popular receiver can handle or the maximum bits that the transponder can handle. There is a limit.

JL

[hokieengineer]

Part of the issue mentioned for the 6000 was the agregate bandwidth on a transponder. It isn't an issue of being able to handle a single channel that is 1920x1280i even at a decent bandwidth per channel. It is the total bandwidth per transponder that was the concern. expressed.You don't mention the bit rate used for those 1920x1080i channels. I believe that is the crux of this issue - when you run out of bits where do you skimp? Compress the heck out of 1920x1080i or reduce the number of bits going into the compression stage? You've got to get to the same target whether it is the maximum bits a particular popular receiver can handle or the maximum bits that the transponder can handle. There is a limit.

JL


Yep, there is a limit. We seem to have lived peacefully within that limit for some time now. In fact the 3 per tp came about right around the time NBC had the summer olympics. Before that it was 2. It still is 2 per TP for HDnets (each at 17Mbit/s). There actually is some spare capacity on that TP. Either HDnet is only sending that to dish, or their boxes can't handle a higher bitrate. (17Mbit/s)

I would rather have Dish test 3 1920x1080i channels on an 8psk TP for voom and see what happens. Why does it work with TNT,HBO, and PPV? Gary suggested mixing the movie channels with the more HD video oriented channels.

In my perfect world, there should only be two mpeg2 HD video feeds on a 8PSK transponder. They can mux in 2 SD channels along with them to use the full bandwidth of the TP. This is already being tested on 129 with an HD voom channel and a SD local station.

Dish is already in damage control mode, and has asked some people who complained to give them feedback about tweaks they are performing on the voom channels. Hopefully we can get this resolved before CES, otherwise some of us will have some good questions to ask Dish :)

[Ghostwriter]

I got a response back from Dish Quality. Here is what they wrote:

Thank you for expressing your concerns and interest in DISH Network. Customer input is an important tool in our efforts to continuously improve the quality of the DISH Network service.



We have received numerous complaints on the VOOM HD package. We would like to thank you for pointing out this information. We have confirmed and are aware of picture quality issues on several of the VOOM channels. Our engineering staff is working towards a resolution. This may take some time to troubleshoot and finalize.



The issue of HD picture quality is always a difficult one. Some of our HD customers want more programming while others want better quality. In general, DISH Network provides HD content in whatever format we receive from the providers. You can rest assured that DISH Network is listening to you. We are constantly striving to provide you with the best A/V quality and variety of programming. With fast changing HD technology, we ask that you be patient. We will continue to make efforts to raise the bar for our customers.



At DISH Network we appreciate the time customers take to email their audio/video quality concerns. Thank you for your patience, information, and for being a valued customer!



EchoStar Satellite LLC

Quality Assurance Department

dishquality@echostar.com


Seems like we have a quantity vs quality issue possible going on. Lets see what happens I hope quality wins.

[absolutic]

I just got the Dish HD and Voom packages. I also get Comcast 10$ cable (the locals hd are unscrambled). I see that we are complaining about bit rates and resolutions through E*. If anyone knows, what are the bit rates and resolution I get through the digital cable HD? 10Mbs/sec? 15?

[Jim Kosinsky]

Seems like we have a quantity vs quality issue possible going on. Lets see what happens I hope quality wins.


That's what really bothers me about this...the HD quality issue is at the heart of why we have HD in the first place! I sent this letter to Dish this morning..

"I’m aware that the Voom HD channels are being down-converted to 1280x1080i. As a long-time subscriber to the HD pack and recently Voom, I’d like to explain why this is not acceptable.

High-Definition content should be exactly that—HIGH DEFINITION. As the customer, I am subscribing to HD programming and expect to get what I’m paying for--full resolution HD video, which is 1920x1080 and NOT 1280x1080i. I can see a difference in quality, and this down-conversion contradicts the statement that these channels are indeed High Definition.

I’ve heard the argument that you try to find a balance between adding content vs using bandwidth to maintain quality. For the average consumer with SD and 27” TVs, this kind of technical compromise is likely not too noticeable or not a great concern—they just want more channels. However, This is NOT a valid argument in the case of HD because, simply put, the basic and primary expectation is to receive High Definition video.

Look at it from the customer perspective. A typical SD customer would be enraged if you converted 80% of your channels to black-and-white just so you could save some bandwidth and add more programming, would they not? They will notice that change and it is unacceptable. HD customers expect HD video, not a down-converted compromise.

Yes, we want more content, but If Dish Network is not interested in prioritizing its bandwidth to correctly display HD content, then it should not ADD additional HD channels until the bandwidth is available to offer it CORRECTLY at full resolution to the consumer.

I do hope this message is being heard and understood. SD customers and HD customers are different and need to be treated as such. Otherwise, you will lose the HD viewers…and remember, there are more and more of ‘us’ every day.

Thank you for your time."


Dish didn't even copy/paste their form response..just a generic reply thanking me for feedback. Very disappointing.

[Bill R]

I also get Comcast 10$ cable (the locals hd are unscrambled). I see that we are complaining about bit rates and resolutions through E*. If anyone knows, what are the bit rates and resolution I get through the digital cable HD? 10Mbs/sec? 15?

I asked my cable company the same question. Their answer is that they send them "as is", that is they don't compress them or change what is coming from the broadcastor. The cable head end tech said this is true for all cable companies that don't use QAM (systems that use QAM require a "cable card" ready TV or a set top box to receive the HD channels).

Sidenote: Some cable customers around here were just subscribing to the basic cable package (25 channels for $13.25 a month) and getting the the local HD channels "for free" (they were just "passed through" unscrambled and anyone with an ATSC tuner could pick them up). About a year ago the cable company realized this and started installing filters (traps) on every drop (at the pole or hub box) for customers that did not subscribe to the digital packages.

[chipvideo]

That's what really bothers me about this...the HD quality issue is at the heart of why we have HD in the first place! I sent this letter to Dish this morning..

"I’m aware that the Voom HD channels are being down-converted to 1280x1080i. As a long-time subscriber to the HD pack and recently Voom, I’d like to explain why this is not acceptable.

High-Definition content should be exactly that—HIGH DEFINITION. As the customer, I am subscribing to HD programming and expect to get what I’m paying for--full resolution HD video, which is 1920x1080 and NOT 1280x1080i. I can see a difference in quality, and this down-conversion contradicts the statement that these channels are indeed High Definition.

I’ve heard the argument that you try to find a balance between adding content vs using bandwidth to maintain quality. For the average consumer with SD and 27” TVs, this kind of technical compromise is likely not too noticeable or not a great concern—they just want more channels. However, This is NOT a valid argument in the case of HD because, simply put, the basic and primary expectation is to receive High Definition video.

Look at it from the customer perspective. A typical SD customer would be enraged if you converted 80% of your channels to black-and-white just so you could save some bandwidth and add more programming, would they not? They will notice that change and it is unacceptable. HD customers expect HD video, not a down-converted compromise.

Yes, we want more content, but If Dish Network is not interested in prioritizing its bandwidth to correctly display HD content, then it should not ADD additional HD channels until the bandwidth is available to offer it CORRECTLY at full resolution to the consumer.

I do hope this message is being heard and understood. SD customers and HD customers are different and need to be treated as such. Otherwise, you will lose the HD viewers…and remember, there are more and more of ‘us’ every day.

Thank you for your time."


Dish didn't even copy/paste their form response..just a generic reply thanking me for feedback. Very disappointing.


I think you forgot to add that why would us high def viewers go out and spend $3000 or more to view hd.

This quantity thing bothers me. I watch my local hd channels more than I watch dish channels. So now they are going to put up crappy channels with crappy quality.

I am going to wait until my commitment ends and then make a decision. It will all be on quality based content.

[Ghostwriter]

Jim Kosinsky. Thats is an automated reply. I received that the first time and then an actual email from Dish Quality. It took about 4 days for them to get back to me. I am almost positive they will reply to you also.

[Stewart Vernon]

On a funny observation note...

I find it interesting when folks complain about for form-generic-replies from Dish... and I do feel frustrated myself at those kinds of things from businesses.

BUT... if you look around this forum, you see some people that cut/paste their replies into various threads and if you look on another forum that some of us visit from time to time, you will even see the exact same message posted on two forums... an obvious cut/paste.

So... I guess my point is... related to the pot & the kettle... people who copy/paste and send the same message to multiple places for convenience kind of lose the right to complain when it is done to them.

[ehren]

Dear Ehren



Thank you for expressing your concerns and interest in DISH Network. Customer input is an important tool in our efforts to continuously improve the quality of the DISH Network service.



We have heard from you as well as many others off the talk forums the past few days as to everyone's recent dissatisfaction with the VOOM/HD channels. DISH is most certainly aware of your concerns and have meetings scheduled over the next few days to discuss this topic. This will not happen overnight. We ask for your patience while we attack this issue.



At DISH Network we appreciate the time customers take to email their audio/video quality concerns. Thank you for your patience and for being a valued customer.



EchoStar Satellite LLC

Quality Assurance Department

dishquality@echostar.com

[Jacob S]

You can fool part of the people part of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

[normang]

Unless you have an amazingly spendy HDTV, or a very recent model that provides 1080p, few HDTV's on the market support true HD. They are all around 1280x720 some are 1366x768 some are even less for their "native resolution"

While Gary think's he's being ripped off, no matter where he goes is he really going to find 1900x1200 HD being transmitted to his receivers, and at 1280x1080i with 15 Mbps of bandwidth, which is nearly 3/4 of the max of 18 or 19Mbps for an HD signal, is going to look just fine to most eyes .

I think this is a big to-do about nothing..

[Gary Murrell]

Unless you have an amazingly spendy HDTV, or a very recent model that provides 1080p, few HDTV's on the market support true HD. They are all around 1280x720 some are 1366x768 some are even less for their "native resolution"

While Gary think's he's being ripped off, no matter where he goes is he really going to find 1900x1200 HD being transmitted to his receivers, and at 1280x1080i with 15 Mbps of bandwidth, which is nearly 3/4 of the max of 18 or 19Mbps for an HD signal, is going to look just fine to most eyes .

I think this is a big to-do about nothing..

That sir is your opinion and you are wrong, anyone who has seen TRUE 1920x1080i HD(D-Theater D-VHS, or Dish/Directv around 5 years back in 1999/2000)
(and this is not concerning resolvable camera detail)
know's that this is butchering the original signal

anyone of these new 1080p TV's or CRT Front/Rear projectors with 9" CRT's shows this garbage signal for what it is

-Gary

[Stewart Vernon]

For the record...

1280x1080 is NOT as good as 1920x1080. No way around that argument. I would prefer 1920x1080 on all of my HD!

However, 1280x720 is also HD... and ABC, ESPN, FOX, and a handful of others use that instead of the 1920x1080... and while a direct comparison clearly shows 1280x720 does not look as good as 1920x1080 it is still HD, per the standard.

So... while the 1280x1080 downconverting of 1080i content is obviously NOT as good as true 1080i HD TV... it is still better than 720p HD... so it is hard to complain you aren't getting true HD, since you are getting better than the minimum level required for HD.

I want 1920x1080! But I can't complain "ripoff" if they are at least giving 1280x720.

Two different kinds of arguments.

Fair to argue they are taking away and giving us less than they were... Not fair to argue they aren't giving us HD.

[Stewart Vernon]

That sir is your opinion and you are wrong...

Regardless of the rest of his argument... By definition, his opinion cannot be wrong!

An opinion may or may not be correct, but it can't be wrong.

In my opinion mushrooms are sickening... but some people can eat them and not get sick... therefore my opinion is not completely correct, but neither is it wrong since it does in fact make me sick.

Statements can be right or wrong. Opinions cannot.

Thus endeth the Webster's rant for tonight! :)

[normang]

That sir is your opinion and you are wrong, anyone who has seen TRUE 1920x1080i HD(D-Theater D-VHS, or Dish/Directv around 5 years back in 1999/2000)
(and this is not concerning resolvable camera detail)
know's that this is butchering the original signal

anyone of these new 1080p TV's or CRT Front/Rear projectors with 9" CRT's shows this garbage signal for what it is

-Gary

Unless you "actually" own a display that displays 1920x1080i, you've never seen True HD.

The only issue here is whether its HD at the signals provided, and it is. Is it optimal, no, but its still HD. And in any event, its going to look significantly better than any SD signal you'll ever find..

[Jim Kosinsky]

Give an inch, take a mile...that's what this issue is for me. If E* reduces quality on HD now, you can bet the idea will come up again as their bit-budget is spread thinner. If we don't express dissatisfaction with the practice of reducing IQ, IMO they'll be more likely to keep nudging it further and further. They need to know that their customers do not approve of this practice, whether it is perceptable on your display or not. I'm paying for HD quality, and that is what I should get.

[Gary Murrell]

HDMe, once again I have to point out that 1280x1080i is NOT better than 720p

per 1 second of actual on-screen video

1280x720p: 55,296,000 pixels
1280x1080i: 41,472,000 pixels

I do not pay for a signal that is better than SD, I pay for HD, 1280x1080i is NOT HDTV, 1920x1080i/1280x720p ARE HDTV

end of story

-Gary

[LtMunst]

HDMe, once again I have to point out that 1280x1080i is NOT better than 720p

per 1 second of actual on-screen video

1280x720p: 55,296,000 pixels
1280x1080i: 41,472,000 pixels

I do not pay for a signal that is better than SD, I pay for HD, 1280x1080i is NOT HDTV, 1920x1080i/1280x720p ARE HDTV

end of story

-Gary

You simply do not understand interlacing. 1080i is not equivalent to 540p as you keep trying to assert. 1080i is 1080 lines of resolution with each line painted on every other pass. You brain still sees all 1080 lines whether painted at 30(interlaced) or 60 (progressive) lines/sec. We all know that 1280x1080i is not as good as 1920x1080i. You do not have to back up this point with mis-information and false assertions of its' inferiority to 1280x720p.

[JohnH]

Your pixel count may be correct, but do not expect to get anyway near that many updated pixels from any HD source.

The end result will always be a compromise between pixelation and sharpness.

I find it interesting that there is no apparent complaint with 720p having only 1280 in the horizontal, but when reducing the 1080i to only 1280 in the horizontal there is all kinds of reaction. Of course, it is not an accepted ATSC standard format.

BTW: ABC's 720p and CBS's 1080i are both delivered to the affiliates using a QPSK SR of ~32360K. Anybody see anything close to that getting to their sets?

Sure would be nice to have 1 HD channel per transponder, but the end result will be a compromise. Probably 3 HD channels per transponder. Now how is the best way to accomplish that? Would be nice to use 10 of the 11 transponders on that $200 million satellite they just purchased, but I cannot afford to pay what the package should cost.

[normang]

Yes, Its time for a reality check... Dish is trying to provide addtional HD programming, without the benefit of addtional satellites yet.. To do this compromises will be made.

You can't have it both ways, you either live with HD that isn't as high quality as you might like, but still significantly better than any SD signal you'll ever watch, and get more HD channels to watch, or you live with less programming and it looks a little better..

[James Long]

I believe the focus it too strong on that horizontal resolution. Lets go back to the transponder - 41.2mbits per second of data transfer on a 8PSK transponder. 62.2 million PIXELS (not bits) in each uncompressed second of 1920x1080i/30. The desire to have at least three HD channels on a transponder to give more variety of content. Something has to give. (Something has to give in order to do two HDs on a transponder, let alone three.)

1920x1280i could be done ... but the cost of those extra bits has to be shifted somewhere. That somewhere is compression. What you end up with is a magic number that looks good on a readout and a signal that is still 'messed up'. Just not in any easy to quantify way.

JL

[LtMunst]

Yep, it's all about the bitrates. We are getting too hung up on line resolution when the compression levels are the greatest driver of PQ.

[Rogueone]

HDMe, once again I have to point out that 1280x1080i is NOT better than 720p

per 1 second of actual on-screen video

1280x720p: 55,296,000 pixels
1280x1080i: 41,472,000 pixels

I do not pay for a signal that is better than SD, I pay for HD, 1280x1080i is NOT HDTV, 1920x1080i/1280x720p ARE HDTV

end of story

-Gary

Gary, I don't contend your numbers are wrong, I would only wish to point out the application of the data in question is where your numbers are fooling you. HDMe did a very nice job explaining it on the last page, and to summarize, it really does not matter AT ALL how many pixels can theoretically be drawn per second.

(the following is written both to Gary and everyone, so some comments will sound like I'm being condescending to Gary if he were the only intended reader. So please understand those comments to be meant for the general reading public since much of this goes beyond things Gary directly mentioned and that I am directly responding to :) )

Please try to understand this reasoning for that statement. Video from the broadcasters is only 30 fps, movie broadcasts are 24fps, even though you're tv only works at 30 fps (I would assume the broadcaster has to convert movies to 30fps right? anyone know that for sure?). When the signal is broadcast from the sat, the local station, etc., it is sent as 30 frames each second for a 1080i signal, and likely 60 for a 720p signal(I'm assuming a 720p broadcast isn't 30 frames that the converter displays twice each). But what is contained in these frames is what matters. The 60 frames in 720p are 30 frames x2. It can not be anything else since the original broadcast is only 30 frames. it's not like the original signal was recorded at 60 fps and 1080i is only giving you 30 of them while 720p gives you 60 of them.

Take frame number 1 from the station: 1080i takes that image and packages it into a signal frame that it transmits to you. This is also what is done with any normal TV broadcast. The original frame is sent to you just as it was originally. Nothing has been altered. You're TV operates at 60 Hz, not at 30 Hz (in case you forgot this), as the TV set uses your AC power to clock itself. Everything in a TV is timed off of that 60 Hz signal coming from the wall. Vertical scanning/drawing is done at 60 hz, while Horizontal lines are converted to a multiple of 60 which equals whatever is needed to get the line across the screen in time. For old normal TV this was something like 15,575 Hz, I can't recall exactly, I just remember it's something in the 15,000 range. For a 1080i set, this would need to likely be something like 32,400 Hz due to all the extra scanning that needs to get down in 1/60th of a second.

What the TV set does is, it takes that original frame, which represents 1/30th of a second, and it draws that image onto your screen. The Vertical component pulls the electron beam down the tube in 1/60th a second, and the Horizontal scan cycle has to be such that it is able to complete a full line in whatever time is needed. For a 1080i set, I guess that would be 1/540th of 1/60th a second since it needs to draw 540 lines in that 1/60th a second (this would be 32,400 Hz if I didnt' mess up the math). The electron beam and the filter mask of the tube and the phosphors on the tube are all designed with the understanding that the first scan will cover the odd lines, and that after the intial pass, the beam resets to the top, and is directed at the even lines. the SAME frame data is used to draw these lines, so the image when completed is 1,080 lines of the originally sent image. It is NOT a meshing of 2 different images to make a single frame. It is the same image drawn twice, half each time.

Now, a 720p TV would have received 2 frames in the time the 1080i received one frame. But the 720p would have to receive the same frame twice, as there are only 30 frames to send. So all the progressive TV did was draw the same full image twice, rather than draw 2 half images.

Also keep in mind, that in both cases the phosphurs on the inside of the picture tube, or the LCD's or plasma components, are all designed to only stay lit for 1/60th a second. This is why interlaced is interlaced, and why progressive has to draw each line twice in the same time period. Line 1 will go dark 1/60th a second after it was lit, so if line 2 is lit at exactly the same time, you do not see a change in picture, and you now see the missing portions of the image you were not seeing that first 1/60th a second. Thanks to how the eye works, your brain sees these as a complete image, not 2 half images.

When the second pass finishes, the second frame arrives, and the TV begins scanning this on line 1, at which point line 2 is going dark with the old image. This is the point at which a sense of motion comes into play, if the two frames are different enough to notice. But again, due to how the eye works, and how little difference there is between the 2 frames, you do not sense any loss. Same thing happens with a 720p set. After the 2nd frame of the first image is drawn, a second original image (3rd frame) arrives to be drawn, just like it did for the interlaced setup. The only time progressive will be a better format than interlaced, is if/when the cameras begin to record at 60 fps. If this happens, and I suspect it will in time, then interlaced would literally give half the picture of progressive. Though again, the eye/brain would never be able to tell without stop motion frame by frame playback.

So, in essence, 720p always shows you 720 lines of definitiion. 1080i always shows 540 lines of definition. But, because of the speed with which the picture is drawn, and the way the eye works, the viewer sees 1080 lines of definitition from a 1080i set, for every single frame of the 30 frames being transmitted to you. All this theorectical talk is pointless since only 30 frames are being transmitted to you in the first place. Until 60fps is being transmitted, none of this theorectical stuff matters to the viewer.

So, to redo gary's pixles math:

with a 30fps signal being broadcast. pixels viewed per second:
1280x720p: 27,648,000 original, unrepeated pixels, if all frames are unique
1280x1080i: 41,472,000 original, unrepeated pixels, if all frames are unique
1920x1080i: 62,208,000 original, unrepeated pixels, if all frames are unique

Based on what we are actually seeing reach our tv screens and from it our brain thru our eyes, 1280x1080i is much better than a 1280x720p image. The issue I would have, which I don't fully understand, is how did they get the image to 1280? If the image started as a 1280x720p image, then it is simply doing a 3:2 upconvert of the vertical rate to get it to 1080. If the original image was 1920x1080i, then it's a simple 2:3 downconvert to 1280. And if the original is like others mentioned, and almost always some odd number that gets converted into one of the 2 prefferred rates, then the image is already jacked up so does it really matter? only a little.

i would also point out that, as far as I know, no one has an HDTV that does both 720p and 1080i (maybe the $20,000 sets do), but for everyone else, their TV does one or the other, and you have to tell the Dish 921/942/821/6000 etc., which format to display. So for me, I have 1080i rear projection Mitsu, so ABC. Fox etc are converted to 1080i from 720p. Did I lose anything in the upconvert? Probably, but not likely much, as the image still looks killer (to that point, is Alias intentionally recorded to look grainy or is that a by product of my local ota station or the upconvert?) and for those with LCD and plasma sets, they are all downcoverting CBS and the other 1080i broadcasts to 720p. Still a great picture. So it's not like any of us are seeing the correct image all the time anyway :)

I do hope I haven't mispoken anywhere, nor worded any comments in such a way that would anger anyone. I simply wished to provide extra background based on my education of TV repair when I took that course in the technical school I attended.

God bless everyone here, who are all simply concerned with getting the best we can for what we pay for, and Merry Christmas to you all.

[jsb_hburg]

Yes, Its time for a reality check... Dish is trying to provide addtional HD programming, without the benefit of addtional satellites yet.. To do this compromises will be made.

You can't have it both ways, you either live with HD that isn't as high quality as you might like, but still significantly better than any SD signal you'll ever watch, and get more HD channels to watch, or you live with less programming and it looks a little better..


Rainbow 1 is an additional satellite. HD channels should be broadcast in an HD resolution and 1280 x 1080i is not one of them. 1280 x 720p is HD and better resolution.

[LtMunst]

Rainbow 1 is an additional satellite. HD channels should be broadcast in an HD resolution and 1280 x 1080i is not one of them. 1280 x 720p is HD and better resolution.


What is it with you people?? Rogueone and HDMe both did an excellent synopsis explaining why 1280x1080i is clearly better that 1280x720p. Repeating otherwise over and over will not change the facts. :nono2:

[normang]

Rainbow 1 is an additional satellite. HD channels should be broadcast in an HD resolution and 1280 x 1080i is not one of them. 1280 x 720p is HD and better resolution.

While rainbow 1 maybe an addtional sat, I for one am not sure whether its in a position in space to do the job of providing several HD channels CONUS..

And you can wish and dream all day, bur your not going to convince me that 1280 x 720p is better than 1280 x 1080i, it doesn't work no matter how you try and slice it..

[BoisePaul]

The only way that I can see 1280x720p beating 1280x1080i in PQ (if expressed as number of unique pixels not accounting for compression) is if the original content was filmed at 1280x720p with an HD camera at 60 fps. Then the numbers work to make that true. However, for any interlaced content or anything originally recorded at 30 (or 24) frames per second, regardless of the resolution it was filmed at, I think that 1280x1080i is going to win versus 1280x720p in the pixel race. I fail to see how progressive scan can show any benefit to content not originally captured using progressive (or 60fps) equipment.

[kstevens]

What is it with you people?? Rogueone and HDMe both did an excellent synopsis explaining why 1280x1080i is clearly better that 1280x720p. Repeating otherwise over and over will not change the facts. :nono2:


I don't care how they explain it.... I purchased the HD packages from dish on the assumption they would be broadcasting 1920x1080i. My television natively displays 1920x1080p. If I'm receiving a 1280x1080i signal, then either my set has to expand the picture, dish has to expand the picture (either way you lose quality or distort the image) or they have to introduce black bars to make up the difference in horizontal resolution. If dish plans on going this route, then I will be rethinking my dish subscription.


Ken

[LtMunst]

I don't care how they explain it.... I purchased the HD packages from dish on the assumption they would be broadcasting 1920x1080i. My television natively displays 1920x1080p. If I'm receiving a 1280x1080i signal, then either my set has to expand the picture, dish has to expand the picture (either way you lose quality or distort the image) or they have to introduce black bars to make up the difference in horizontal resolution. If dish plans on going this route, then I will be rethinking my dish subscription.


Ken


We are not arguing that 1280x1080i is as good as 1920x1080i. Clearly 1920x1080i is better. The issue is with the people posting that 1280x1080i is inferior to 1280x720p and thus no longer HD. This is NOT true.

[Stewart Vernon]

I feel like paraphrasing Sally Field's "You really like me speach" on award night.

You understand me... you really understand me :)

But seriously... Glad to see a few other folks who made sense out of my post, and extra thanks to RogueOne for additional detail. I worried my original post was too long and people might get lost.

As with any technology, there is almost always a bunch of misinformation floating around and it can get people riled up for the wrong or for no reason at all.

I believe we *should* let Dish know we want 1920x1080, and not 1280x1080... but for the *right* reasons. If people go sending emails to Dish saying how it isn't as good as 720p... then Dish techies will know we don't know what we are talking about, and that doesn't help our cause!

Since we have two standards... 720p and 1080i that most broadcasters are picking from for their HD... I'd rather have 1080i, and I'd rather Dish not downconvert to something in between... so asking/protesting that is valid.

I'm MORE afraid, however, that they will get all the "We don't want 1280x1080i because it isn't as good as 720p which is like 1440i" emails and realize that most folks don't "get" HD technology or interlacing... and THEN they will go ahead and downsize some more to 720p since they will have proven that the masses don't understand the technology and won't notice if they lose some more resolution!

[Skyburn]

Very interesting posts here; lots of things I've wondered about with the various "HD" formats. Would any of you (HDMe, Rogueone) be willing to look at what this guy says about 720p vs. 1080i: http://alvyray.com/DigitalTV/Naming_Proposal.htm and post your thoughts in light of what he says?

Just curious...
- Joe

P.S. This page: http://alvyray.com/DigitalTV/DTV_Bandwidths.htm is Alvy Ray (the author of the article I ref'd above, and this guy seemingly does know what he's talking about given his biography) surely stating that 1280x1080i is NOT considered "true" high definition. He agrees 1920x1080i, however, IS true HD.

[Rogueone]

I don't care how they explain it.... I purchased the HD packages from dish on the assumption they would be broadcasting 1920x1080i. My television natively displays 1920x1080p. If I'm receiving a 1280x1080i signal, then either my set has to expand the picture, dish has to expand the picture (either way you lose quality or distort the image) or they have to introduce black bars to make up the difference in horizontal resolution. If dish plans on going this route, then I will be rethinking my dish subscription.


Ken

Ken, I understand your sentiment, but I would point out it is not reasonable to take the attitude that you only bought HD to recieve 1920x1080i when probably half the main content is in 720p. Seriously, even when someone like HDNet does a movie in supposed HD, is it really in HD? If the film stock of the original wasn't at least on 35mm film, then the program can not be converted to 1080i (I'm getting this from some web sources and an article I know i found on CBS's site a few years back but can not find now that I want to). While all movies are shot on 35mm or better, most TV hasn't been shot on 35mm film, if I've understood correctly the information I found. CBS made a point to comment that they were rolling our HD for all of the main programs because they'd been shooting all their programs on 35mm since the 70's, so even if they wanted to show repeats of Dallas, they could in real HD, and this was also why they chose 1080i I believe, as the 35mm film allows that resolution.

Keeping this important part of the process in mind, you can not purchase HDTV and assume everything you get is going to be in 1080i. The best you can assume is that it will be minimally in 720p if it is HD. If you purchased any HD package from anyone on the assumption everything would be in 1080i, you didn't do enough research to inform yourself that only some sources would provide the signal in 1080i while others would use the 720p mode.

So I hope you are able to accept the unreasonableness of your 1080i requirement/assumption, as there is nothing Dish or cable or anyone else can do to deliver you everything in 1080i. Especially consider 2 of the 4 networks do 720p, and it's quite split up with the others as well. While our dish receivers will output a 1080i signal to our TV's, it doesn't make that 720p Fox NFL broadcast look like the CBS 1080i broadcast. it's good, but not as good. And since it seems to be recorded in a lower res to start with, it's not like there is any way to get that image at 1080i natively, it would always have to be upconverted from something else.

[Stewart Vernon]

SkyBurn,

I just went through several pages at the link you provided. Firstly, it is clearly a progressive-biased Web site. Not anything wrong with that, but just an observation.

Secondly, it is not correct in several of the assertions made by comparisons.

It claims that if 1080i is 1080 because the two 540 interlaced frames are added together, then 720p must be 1440 if you add 2 of its frames together. This is an example of someone who doesn't understand math.

1 apple + 1 orange does not equal 2 appleoranges... it is 1 apple and 1 orange. Adding numbers without considering what they are produces irrational results.

Each 540 interlaced frame is part of the whole image. Each 720 progressive image is an entire image. The second 720 frame overlaps/overwrites the previous frame. The second 540 interlaced frame is combined with the first frame to form the entire picture.

As for the examples of "motion loss" on the second scan... The first assumption is that the 720 was taken at 60 frames per second, which may or may not be the case. with each frame being 1/60th ofa second, something would have to be moving very fast to actually change from one frame to the next. Much of the time one frame is virtually identical to the frame preceding it.

A 1080i frame, consists of two interlaced 540 line portions of the image. There are two ways this can happen. BOTH partial images are captured at the same time, thus no motion between the two halfs of the image OR each part is scanned at 1/60th second intervals meaning some motion could occur. IF the image is formed simultaneously, then the "motion loss" argument is bogus. IF the image is formed at 1/60th second intervals, then technically there may be some minute difference.

BUT... think about this. How fast does a second go by? Now think about 1/60th of a second. That is FAST! How much actual change can occur in 1/60th of a second? The amount of change between frames captured at 60 frames per second should be very small.

The human eye and brain is very forgiving about these things, otherwise the real world would be a blur as we would contantly be suffering from these motion loss problems.

The problem, as I see it... is that there are some people who learn part of the technical information, then form logic around only that knowledge without learning how the rest of it works... and it leads to erroneous conclusions.

Kind of like the allegory of the blind men and the elephant. Depending on what part each touches, he describes a different kind of creature. Only when all interpretations are combined can the full picture be measured.

Thus is interlaced a different kind of animal from progressive.

At the same resolution progressive is better because it cuts down on the interlace flicker. However, interlaced technology is far better today than in the early days... Early TVs and computers were sometimes hard to watch without getting a headache, especially if small images that required higher resolution were displayed on them. That's why most computers converted to progressive scan once the technology was refined because progressive is better at a given resolution.

But comparing 720p to 1080i isn't a fair comparison. You are comparing a more stable image display technology to a higher resolution picture. The higher resolution picture is always a higher resolution picture! But the progressive display may be easier on your eyes because it is presented better.

So "better" becomes a measure of whether you prefer higher resolution or less eye strain. If the eye strain isn't noticable, then the higher resolution will look better. If you are bothered, and some people are, by the interlacing frequency then a progressive image will be easier for you to watch.

The above is a valid argument for progressive vs interlaced... but arguing that interlaced is somehow lower resolution is not a valid argument, but some people are misreading the details and forming their own erroneous conclusions that unfortunately get communicated quite fast in the internet age.

[LtMunst]

I'm MORE afraid, however, that they will get all the "We don't want 1280x1080i because it isn't as good as 720p which is like 1440i" emails and realize that most folks don't "get" HD technology or interlacing... and THEN they will go ahead and downsize some more to 720p since they will have proven that the masses don't understand the technology and won't notice if they lose some more resolution!

Or, they'll appease the complaining masses by switching everything to 1920X1080i while at the same time cranking up the compression. The picture may look like crap, but since it's 1920x1080i, it's TRUE HD.

[harsh]

The only way that I can see 1280x720p beating 1280x1080i in PQ (if expressed as number of unique pixels not accounting for compression) is if the original content was filmed at 1280x720p with an HD camera at 60 fps. Then the numbers work to make that true. However, for any interlaced content or anything originally recorded at 30 (or 24) frames per second, regardless of the resolution it was filmed at, I think that 1280x1080i is going to win versus 1280x720p in the pixel race.What's truly best is in the eye of the beholder.

1. If your display isn't the same pixel layout as your source, your receiver/monitor is going to have to do some on-the-fly scaling (henceforth called squishing). Detail will be lost to interpolation. The pixel arrangement of all but the top-line "full spec" LCD and micro displays is typically not a nice round fraction of 1920x1080. Those with micro display projectors featuring electronic keystone compensation are further exacerbating the squishing process.
2. The head end/uplink squisher is probably a whole lot better than yours.
3. Let us never forget the 3:2 pulldown process and what is does to film.
4. Video "resolution" shouldn't be applied to DTV as it is a decidedly analog domain metric.
5. If a content provider can offer more material substantially free of compression artifacting, then most of us win.

For myself, my 34" CRT looks better in 480p mode than 720p mode so 480 vertical pixels is what I "need". Anything greater is a waste of bandwidth in my current situation.

If you have a display and a pair of eyes that allow you to visibly discern the difference between 1920 and 1280 horizontal (or your receiver is directly matrixed to the back of your brain), then you have a valid gripe. If you're hung up about numbers, then you'll never be happy: you probably gripe about the Trinitron wires, could have sworn that you saw DLP color wheel ghosting once, are very disturbed by the latency inherent in LCD technology and are driven absolutely insane by the flicker of flourescent overhead lighting.

[Rogueone]

Skyburn, I tried, but right off the bat the guy somewhat goofed up. His 2 images are being compared at 60fps, not 30 fps. in order to be "fair and balanced" (nod to FoxNews), he would need to do that little representation over 4 such frames, not 2. Notice his first 1080i image is odd lines, and his second frame is even lines, yet the ball in the image has moved. that example is a physical impossibility. Those are frames 1 and 4 of consecutive images over 2/30th's a second time.

You see, interlaced draws a frame's odd lines first, then it's even ones. There is no movement of the objects as the image comes from the same frame for both, so his assumption of a blurred image, at the point he is suggesting it, is false. What is really happening is, there should be 2 identcal 720p frames, each 1/60th a second, and 2 1080i half image frames combining for a perfectly matched image at 1/30th a second that is identical, and higher in defintion, to the 720p image at 1/30th. ONLY at 3/60th's (3rd frame) would his 2 mixed images be present, and only for that single 1/60th a second period. Once the 4th frame is drawn, both images would be identical again. the point that needs to be made is that the human eye can not detect changes in an image beyond 30 per second. This is why in video gaming, especially First Person Shooters, it is such a big deal to have a system capable of not dropping below 30 fps. As long as your screen can redraw more than 30 fps at it's heaviest draw loads, you will not perceive stutter or lack of full motion in the display. Most gamers try for 60 to 100 FPS, so they know they never have to worry about lagginess or stuttering since they have some much processing power they would never have such a low refresh rate.

So, just like in video games, where for non online play, anything over 30 fps is mandatory (online 60 is mandatory due to load issues that routinely drop the rate in half), whether a shooter game, flight sim, race sim, etc., getting 30 fps means a movie like playback. Anything under about 27 fps means you'll noticeably see a stuttery image that is distracting and at times hurts the brain and eyes :)

TV works the same, except TV never varies, it's a steady 30fps at all times since everything is timed off of the AC outlet in your home.

so, I have a partial issue with this guy because he is purposely slanting his arguement and is not discussing the whole truth, only 1/60th the truth :) It's a lot like the old cable/dsl wars where dsl always says it's better because it's dedicated. That is a half truth/lie. No internet connection ever can be dedicated for real. Sure, the dsl line from your house to the phone company dslam box isn't shared by others, while the cable pipe from your house is shared to their router, but once you reach the dslam, you are muxed onto a larger pipe that has all the dsl users sharing the same circuit out of the dslam chassis. And having a "dedicated" line into the dslam doesn't mean anything if they have oversold the box such that the possible user bandwidth needed is 4 to 10 times what the pipe to the rest of their network can handle, which they all do. Every internet provider oversubscribes knowing that that rarely are their customers using bandwidth at such a rate that an 8 or 10 to 1 ratio doesn't work for most of their circuits. There are a few exceptions, but most are between 5 and 10 to 1 oversubscribed. If they could do 20, they would. The point I was making is, did the 'dedicated' portion to the dslam make dsl any less susceptible to the same bandwidth issues as cable? nope, just different factors and points in the network become the choke points.

It's very rare to find someone arguing a point which is their preferred point of view, and also being willing to honestly discuss the opposing views. Which is what I hate most about most tech articles I read, they are rarely not misinforming the public at large. it's not always harmful, it just isn't giving the reader "all" the truth behind the question being answered.

[Rogueone]

the one factor I think that is being missed as well in this which format is better discussion is, how the bandwidth rate affects what makes it on the screen. I will be honest and say I haven't seen a clear enough discussion on how bandwidth affects the picture to form an understanding about it, since I've never gone looking for such an explanation. I guess that time may be coming around haha

[Skyburn]

A 1080i frame, consists of two interlaced 540 line portions of the image. There are two ways this can happen. BOTH partial images are captured at the same time, thus no motion between the two halfs of the image OR each part is scanned at 1/60th second intervals meaning some motion could occur. IF the image is formed simultaneously, then the "motion loss" argument is bogus. IF the image is formed at 1/60th second intervals, then technically there may be some minute difference.

Yeah, this is what I was really wondering about -- whether 1080 "lit" lines appear on the screen at a single instant in time. My understanding is that this is not the case. Alvy Ray alludes to this, but this article: http://ezinearticles.com/?720p-Vs-1080i-HDTV&id=91443 states it plain as day that each 1/60th of a second, 540 lines are presently "lit", then the first set of 540 is "unlit", then the next 1/60th of a second "lights" the next 540 lines.

BUT... think about this. How fast does a second go by? Now think about 1/60th of a second. That is FAST! How much actual change can occur in 1/60th of a second? The amount of change between frames captured at 60 frames per second should be very small.

The human eye and brain is very forgiving about these things, otherwise the real world would be a blur as we would contantly be suffering from these motion loss problems.

Right -- and I guess I don't know the answer to this. The above ref'd article states ESPN's position about 720p vs. 1080i and ESPN clearly feels that for "[the]fast moving orientation of sports television..." 720p (or probably just progressive scan in general) is better. Of course, the source material will dictate what's better given this argument.


The above is a valid argument for progressive vs interlaced... but arguing that interlaced is somehow lower resolution is not a valid argument, but some people are misreading the details and forming their own erroneous conclusions that unfortunately get communicated quite fast in the internet age.

You are absolutely right, the people here stating 1080i is inferior in "resolution" to 720p are missing the boat. But, what it really comes down to is how an individual (or to make a more generic statement as most of the posts here do, consider how the "average" individual) percieves picture quality given similar source material displayed at 1080i versus 720p. My guess is most people won't see a difference -- the average person will say "wow, that looks a hell of a lot better than my 4:3, SD TV picture". Of course, the people on this forum aren't your average TV viewer either...

But, regarding this argument about which is better "resolution" isn't the point Alvy Ray is making -- he's opining that, for instance, 1280x720p looks better to the average person than 1280x1080i -- he's making a very subjective statement, and trying (albeit I don't know how well) to back it up with his explanation.

I'm really not arguing with anyone...just trying to understand better so I can amaze my friends and family with numbers and buzzwords :-)

[kstevens]

Ken, I understand your sentiment, but I would point out it is not reasonable to take the attitude that you only bought HD to recieve 1920x1080i when probably half the main content is in 720p. Seriously, even when someone like HDNet does a movie in supposed HD, is it really in HD? If the film stock of the original wasn't at least on 35mm film, then the program can not be converted to 1080i (I'm getting this from some web sources and an article I know i found on CBS's site a few years back but can not find now that I want to). While all movies are shot on 35mm or better, most TV hasn't been shot on 35mm film, if I've understood correctly the information I found. CBS made a point to comment that they were rolling our HD for all of the main programs because they'd been shooting all their programs on 35mm since the 70's, so even if they wanted to show repeats of Dallas, they could in real HD, and this was also why they chose 1080i I believe, as the 35mm film allows that resolution.

Keeping this important part of the process in mind, you can not purchase HDTV and assume everything you get is going to be in 1080i. The best you can assume is that it will be minimally in 720p if it is HD. If you purchased any HD package from anyone on the assumption everything would be in 1080i, you didn't do enough research to inform yourself that only some sources would provide the signal in 1080i while others would use the 720p mode.

So I hope you are able to accept the unreasonableness of your 1080i requirement/assumption, as there is nothing Dish or cable or anyone else can do to deliver you everything in 1080i. Especially consider 2 of the 4 networks do 720p, and it's quite split up with the others as well. While our dish receivers will output a 1080i signal to our TV's, it doesn't make that 720p Fox NFL broadcast look like the CBS 1080i broadcast. it's good, but not as good. And since it seems to be recorded in a lower res to start with, it's not like there is any way to get that image at 1080i natively, it would always have to be upconverted from something else.

There is a big difference in assuming everything is 1080i (which I don't) and artificially limiting everything to 1280x1080i, which this thread seems to imply. If dish does indeed modify all hd content to 1280x1080i then, that is when I find another provider.

Ken

[kstevens]

Yeah, this is what I was really wondering about -- whether 1080 "lit" lines appear on the screen at a single instant in time. My understanding is that this is not the case. Alvy Ray alludes to this, but this article: http://ezinearticles.com/?720p-Vs-1080i-HDTV&id=91443 states it plain as day that each 1/60th of a second, 540 lines are presently "lit", then the first set of 540 is "unlit", then the next 1/60th of a second "lights" the next 540 lines.



Right -- and I guess I don't know the answer to this. The above ref'd article states ESPN's position about 720p vs. 1080i and ESPN clearly feels that for "[the]fast moving orientation of sports television..." 720p (or probably just progressive scan in general) is better. Of course, the source material will dictate what's better given this argument.


You are absolutely right, the people here stating 1080i is inferior in "resolution" to 720p are missing the boat. But, what it really comes down to is how an individual (or to make a more generic statement as most of the posts here do, consider how the "average" individual) percieves picture quality given similar source material displayed at 1080i versus 720p. My guess is most people won't see a difference -- the average person will say "wow, that looks a hell of a lot better than my 4:3, SD TV picture". Of course, the people on this forum aren't your average TV viewer either...

But, regarding this argument about which is better "resolution" isn't the point Alvy Ray is making -- he's opining that, for instance, 1280x720p looks better to the average person than 1280x1080i -- he's making a very subjective statement, and trying (albeit I don't know how well) to back it up with his explanation.

I'm really not arguing with anyone...just trying to understand better so I can amaze my friends and family with numbers and buzzwords :-)

How can anyone make a universal argument that 720p is better than 1080i. Depending on the content being viewed one can indeed look better than the other, and vice versa. 720p has always been considered better for fast action scenes while 1080i for slower scenes. Since I have both a 720p set and a 1080i set, my perception matches this statement.

Ken

[Ghostwriter]

Boy the more I read the less I know...Can someone get me a darn image and show it in all three formats we are talking about??? That I think would solve all this BS. But so far this has been the most accurate example provided so far in a per second basis. This obviously does not take compression/bitrate into account.

True 1080i 1920x1080i: 1920x540x60 = 62,208,000 pixels/sec
720p 1280x720p: 1280x720x60 = 55,296,000 pixels/sec
HD-Lite 1280x1080i: 1280x540x60 = 41,472,000 pixels/sec
DVD 720x480i: 720x240x60 = 10,368,000 pixels/sec


True 1080i: 6X DVD quality
720p: 5.33X DVD quality
HD-Lite: 4X DVD quality

[Skyburn]

Regarding this article I referenced above: http://ezinearticles.com/?720p-Vs-1080i-HDTV&id=91443

I like the way it explains things...it's really simple, and I think most of us would agree it's probably as true as it gets:


"To answer the question, it's important to understand the difference between 720p vs 1080i. A 720p signal is made up of 720 horizontal lines. Each frame is displayed in its entirety on-screen for 1/30th of a second. This is know as progressive scan (hence the 'p')The quality is like watching 30 photographic images a second on TV. A 1080i signal comprises 1080 horizontal lines but all the lines are not displayed on-screen simultaneously. Instead, they are interlaced (hence the 'i'), ie every other lines is displayed for 1/60th of a second and then the alternate lines are displayed for 1/60th of a second. So, the frame rate is still 30 frames per second, but each frame is split into two fields, which your brain then puts together subconsciously.

Most of the time interlacing works fine, but for fast moving images, such as sports like baseball and hockey it can cause problems which manifest themselves as a 'stepping' effect on-screen. Progressive scan signals don't have this problem and so are better suited to sports."

[LtMunst]

Boy the more I read the less I know...Can someone get me a darn image and show it in all three formats we are talking about??? That I think would solve all this BS. But so far this has been the most accurate example provided so far in a per second basis. This obviously does not take compression/bitrate into account.


HD-Lite 1280x1080i: 1280x540x60 = 41,472,000 pixels/sec


True 1080i: 6X DVD quality
720p: 5.33X DVD quality
HD-Lite: 4X DVD quality

Still misunderstanding the interlace process. Better to use Rogueone's pixel counts.
Again, 1080i is NOT 540.

[Skyburn]

Skyburn, I tried, but right off the bat the guy somewhat goofed up. His 2 images are being compared at 60fps, not 30 fps. in order to be "fair and balanced" (nod to FoxNews), he would need to do that little representation over 4 such frames, not 2. Notice his first 1080i image is odd lines, and his second frame is even lines, yet the ball in the image has moved. that example is a physical impossibility. Those are frames 1 and 4 of consecutive images over 2/30th's a second time.

I know -- I don't understand what the hell he was trying to show with those graphics; they don't make sense to me. It's like he's trying to show "flicker", but is making it look like there's loss of key parts of the image...I don't get it.

[scottchez]

With HD DVD and Blue ray on the way doing FULL HD I bet places like Blockbusters and Netflix are happy about the HD LIte.

Someday they will be able to rent the FULL HD QUality movies that we cant watch on Dish or Direct TV any more.

[Skyburn]

Still misunderstanding the interlace process. Better to use Rogueone's pixel counts.
Again, 1080i is NOT 540.

When referring to pixels/second, this is correct (nobody here yet has called 1080i 540p!):

1280x1080x30 = 41,472,000 pixels/second
as does 1280x540x60 = 41,472,000 pixels/second

I would argue the second equation is more informative, because it shows that each set of 540 lines is being drawn each 1/60th of a second versus 1080 lines being drawn over 1/30th of a second. Semantics, semantics...

[LtMunst]

With HD DVD and Blue ray on the way doing FULL HD...



Great, then we can argue over which of those formats is better. :)

[LtMunst]

When referring to pixels/second, this is correct (nobody here yet has called 1080i 540p!):

1280x1080x30 = 41,472,000 pixels/second
as does 1280x540x60 = 41,472,000 pixels/second

I would argue the second equation is more informative, because it shows that each set of 540 lines is being drawn each 1/60th of a second versus 1080 lines being drawn over 1/30th of a second. Semantics, semantics...

But the bottom line is your brain sees 1080 distinct lines, not 540.

[Rogueone]

There is a big difference in assuming everything is 1080i (which I don't) and artificially limiting everything to 1280x1080i, which this thread seems to imply. If dish does indeed modify all hd content to 1280x1080i then, that is when I find another provider.

Ken

yes that would be a problem. but i do believe the comment about 1280x1080 was only in refernce to Voom channels. And I would expect this to be a temporary issue until more birds are available and/or mpeg4 comes around.

I would expect some less quality issues at this point in time, what why the mandatory digital date getting close and everyone needing more bandwidth but not having it. I'd figure in 5 years when more equipment is out there, we'll be seeing more channels in the proper formats and with better rates. If you have 2 birds now, and put up 1 more per year, then in 5 years you'd have 7 birds. At some point you have enough bandwidth to start improving quality without losing channel quantity :)


"To answer the question, it's important to understand the difference between 720p vs 1080i. A 720p signal is made up of 720 horizontal lines. Each frame is displayed in its entirety on-screen for 1/30th of a second. This is know as progressive scan (hence the 'p')The quality is like watching 30 photographic images a second on TV. A 1080i signal comprises 1080 horizontal lines but all the lines are not displayed on-screen simultaneously. Instead, they are interlaced (hence the 'i'), ie every other lines is displayed for 1/60th of a second and then the alternate lines are displayed for 1/60th of a second. So, the frame rate is still 30 frames per second, but each frame is split into two fields, which your brain then puts together subconsciously.

Most of the time interlacing works fine, but for fast moving images, such as sports like baseball and hockey it can cause problems which manifest themselves as a 'stepping' effect on-screen. Progressive scan signals don't have this problem and so are better suited to sports."

again, he is mostly correct. 720p will always have a full 720 lines on the screen. But with 1080i, and i've had a problem wrapping my mind around this in the past, so I understand the difficulty, it's the 'fact' of how the human eye works that allows the 'eye' to see 1080 lit lines even though only 540 are lit at any 1/60th in time. The eyeball is still seeing 1,080 lines since it can not process fast enough to only see 540. As to this blurring affect, anyone seen that problem while watching the NFL on CBS in 1080i or Nascar on NBC? I can't say I've ever seen it. It's probably like the problem with LCD projectors of old and the problem some people had with the speed of the color wheel. It takes a certain person's eye which isn't operating at normal parameters to see the issue, and i suspect the same is true of this 1080i smearing issue.

All I know is, football never looked so good as it does in HD on either Fox, ESPN or CBS. Something else ot think about is, how much HD do we watch that is pure action versus still? Drama's, sitcoms, etc on TV would be classified as slow motion, so 1080i should look better. sports is fast action, but take baseball for example. how much of the time is there 'action'? and how much of the screen is displaying the 'action'? no matter what, you aren't gonna see the issue on the pitched ball, it's just too damned small. You'd likely have to stick your nose against the screen to see it ;) This just reminds me so much of the old arguements for faster and faster video cards for computer gaming. Was you card that could do a certain game at 100fps better than mine that did it at 65fps? Well, sure, with an artificial benchmark that can test how fast the demo in question could be replayed, you could time the difference. But at 100fps, the screen movement is beyond the ability for a human to comprehend. those benchmarks are like playing a movie at 4x normal speed. It's not realistic. And I think the point here is we just want the best possible HD we can get, and we need to let D* know we are ok with a few less channels if we can have better PQ.

[Ghostwriter]

LtMunst, I understand the entire interlaced concept, although I do think that is an accurate pixel count per second. The only flaw I see in RogueOnes thinking is the 30fps. I personally have no way of know if the 720P broadcast say is being sent at 60fps or 30fps as he beleives it is.

One thing is for certain, of the three formats mentioned 1280x1080 is the only one that is not a 16:9 ratio, which in my limited knowledge is HD.

[Rogueone]

Great, then we can argue over which of those formats is better. :)
nothing to discuss. regardless of which is better, just like the Betamax/VHS wars, this one will be decided by which has the best adoption. And simply put, BluRay has already won, barring a major move by MS.

So how can I claim this? Well, for someone like me, who enjoys gaming on the PC more than the xbox/ps2, and who is very interested in the xbox360/ps3 for it's HD gaming on my 65" tv, but only 1 of them, the HD DVD question is huge. MS decided to not give the x360 HD DVD capability, unless it happens to run the MS version like T2 uses (which wouldn't be bad if discs were available in that format). But Sony will have Bluray on the PS3, and people like me, with no technical reasons to pick the x360 over the ps3 like there were for xbox over ps2, I'll grudgingly buy a ps3.

the caveat would be if MS comes out with an upgraded x360 by summer which included HD DVD, which is the format MS claims to be supporting. All the HD DVD backers should be screaming at MS to upgrade all the boxes right now, otherwise they'll lose quickly. Well, unless Bluray people charge $30-40 a disc and the HD-DVD group keeps theirs at $15 to 20. assuming equal disc prices, Bluray is way out front right now, which seems to be bad from the perspective it requires a new way of creating the discs, so manufacturing will cost more for a while because of the needed changes.

[LtMunst]

LtMunst, I understand the entire interlaced concept, although I do think that is an accurate pixel count per second. The only flaw I see in RogueOnes thinking is the 30fps. I personally have no way of know if the 720P broadcast say is being sent at 60fps or 30fps as he beleives it is.

One thing is for certain, of the three formats mentioned 1280x1080 is the only one that is not a 16:9 ratio, which in my limited knowledge is HD.

There are no broadcasts sent at 60fps (30 is as high as you'll see). The movies on MonstersHD would typically be 24fps.

As far as aspect ratio, it is true that 1280x1080 is not 16:9. It would be upconverted/downconverted to 1920x1080 or 1280x720 by your TV. There would be some loss of detail going up to 1920x1080. There should be no loss converting to 1280x720 (depending on the quality of the scaler).

[Rogueone]

LtMunst, I understand the entire interlaced concept, although I do think that is an accurate pixel count per second. The only flaw I see in RogueOnes thinking is the 30fps. I personally have no way of know if the 720P broadcast say is being sent at 60fps or 30fps as he beleives it is.

One thing is for certain, of the three formats mentioned 1280x1080 is the only one that is not a 16:9 ratio, which in my limited knowledge is HD.

I'm gonna search around to see if I can find anything about the fps of 720p, but as to the ratio question, 1280x1080i is 16:9.

How you ask? Well, obviously none of our TV's can reproduce that resolution natively, but all that would happen is half of the same the happens now. IF I have a 720p tv, the 1280 stays put, and the Dish box does a 2:3 downconvert to 720 lines. For a 1080i TV, it would 3:2 upconvert the 1280 portion to 1920. odd thing is, it's sorta the perfect compromise. half of the signal is correct for each format, and half has to be converted. so now, is that better than just doing everything at 720p, in actual practice? hmm Seems dish's options are drop everything to 720p which is less pixels per frame, or use this hodge podge mode for a little more pixel potential.

the one that has always bugged me is HBO and Showtime HD. why do they not look much better if any than dvd in progressiive? :)

[normang]

Asi I think I've mentioned before in this thread and the resolution or pixel religious are ignoring, no one with rare exceptions perhaps has a HD TV that supports True HD (1920x1080).

Many sets in the past few years either never mentioned their resolution as a spec, or those that do usually fall into these categories, 1280 x 768 or 1366 x 768, some spec at 1024 x 768, not sure whether you want to call that HD of some sort or EDTV. Some displays are lower and claim they support HD signals.

While there are some new sets coming out that are reportedly 1080p, its sort of a digital trick to accomplish it. As far as I am aware without more digging, only very spendy high end plasma displays support 1920x1080 true HD, most don't and I suspect that most of you here don't have a set that supports 1920x1080...

[Stewart Vernon]

Or, they'll appease the complaining masses by switching everything to 1920X1080i while at the same time cranking up the compression. The picture may look like crap, but since it's 1920x1080i, it's TRUE HD.

It has been so difficult sometimes to get past the resolution discussion... that we haven't had time to tackle the most important parts, as you point out and a few others have posted about as well...

This resolution discussion really pales in comparison to the level of compression (MPEG2 currently can be configured in many different ways to varying degrees of picture quality) as well as the bitrate they transmit.

High compression, low bitrate, or both combined will make a far bigger difference in the picture we see than does the resolution/pixels discussion.

To an extent it is like magician slight of hand... get us arguing over the resolution, and forget about the bitrates and compression.

Though I have tried a few times to at least footnote my posts with a mention of this... it falls through the cracks as we discuss the amount of pixels.

One advantage to Dish using 1280x1080i, as I mentioned in another post... is its ability to give a higher resolution picture than 720p but with less bandwidth requirements! So they could actually cut back on the amount of MPEG2 compression and/or turn up the bitrate to give us a higher quality picture than they could if they went down to 720p... which ultimately is what I suspect they are trying to do with their tweaking.

[Stewart Vernon]

What's truly best is in the eye of the beholder.

1. If your display isn't the same pixel layout as your source, your receiver/monitor is going to have to do some on-the-fly scaling (henceforth called squishing). Detail will be lost to interpolation. The pixel arrangement of all but the top-line "full spec" LCD and micro displays is typically not a nice round fraction of 1920x1080. Those with micro display projectors featuring electronic keystone compensation are further exacerbating the squishing process.

Two good points here as well!

Some of us like different things anyway...

And, the resolution limit of your display matters. Some LCD displays, at least the early ones, weren't even 720p completely... so some lines were dropped there... but most of the LCDs and DLPs that I've seen, except some really expensive ones, don't have high enough resolution to display full 1080i anyway... so for those people, everything would get downconverted to 720p anyway.

For those people, technically speaking at least, any downconversion probably looks worse than a true 720p sourced signal... and I suspect the differences we have been discussing mostly are a relative wash for their TVs.

The few of us who have 1080i capable sets... are in the minority of the folks who could notice... and even then, it is subject to perception as to how each of our brains process what we see.

[Stewart Vernon]

Most of the time interlacing works fine, but for fast moving images, such as sports like baseball and hockey it can cause problems which manifest themselves as a 'stepping' effect on-screen. Progressive scan signals don't have this problem and so are better suited to sports."

I don't know actually who dubbed progressive better for sports than interlaced... while I concede, for myself anyway, progressive is better at the same resolution... I'd rather have more resolution in interlaced than progressive at a lower resolution.

The whole reason we even have 1080i, is because to jump from 720p to 1080p took a lot more bandwidth and processing power than the powers-that-be could invest at the time... so 1080i was a nice way to get better quality images using not too much more bandwidth then 720p... and taking advantage of the fact that the human eye doesn't know any better.

For those who would claim 1080i is not suitable for sports... I would first point to CBS NFL and NCAA football, NCAA basketball, HDNet basketball & football, and even Nascar for examples of fast motion that look just fine and better than 720p on other stations' similar sports broadcasts.

For those that will still argue they can "see" something... they should think about film... and knowing that movies are 24-30 frames per second... and traditionally sports was filmed before videotape... and think of any movie they went to see at the theatre... and they should ask themselves if they had any problems viewing those images at the framerates given.

Film has a higher resolution than the current 1920x1080 standard, though I forget exactly what it is at a moment... so watching a movie at a theater at 30 or less frames per second is like watching better than 1080i on their TV.

[jsb_hburg]

And you can wish and dream all day, bur your not going to convince me that 1280 x 720p is better than 1280 x 1080i, it doesn't work no matter how you try and slice it..

Why should I bother? I left D* because of its HD Lite service years ago.

1280 x 1080i is not a native HD resolution for widescreen HDTVs. No one should accept 1280 x 1080i as HD.

[Rogueone]

Asi I think I've mentioned before in this thread and the resolution or pixel religious are ignoring, no one with rare exceptions perhaps has a HD TV that supports True HD (1920x1080).

Many sets in the past few years either never mentioned their resolution as a spec, or those that do usually fall into these categories, 1280 x 768 or 1366 x 768, some spec at 1024 x 768, not sure whether you want to call that HD of some sort or EDTV. Some displays are lower and claim they support HD signals.

While there are some new sets coming out that are reportedly 1080p, its sort of a digital trick to accomplish it. As far as I am aware without more digging, only very spendy high end plasma displays support 1920x1080 true HD, most don't and I suspect that most of you here don't have a set that supports 1920x1080...

norman, I have to wonder why you would say only a high end plasma set suppors 1080i? most, if not all, crt projection tv's (hd versions that is) I've seen support 1080i while not supporting 720p, and only LCD, DLP, and Plasma are restricted to 720p. as best i can tell, even the cheap crt projection sets run at 1080i, and none that I can find seem to run at 720p, which makes sense for a crt based system since it's a lot more expensive to make a crt run progressive than interlaced (see the cost of units called monitors rather than tv's. the monitor versions are up to twice as expensive as the same size tv unit since they can display computer resolutions).

so unless i'm way off, pretty much anybody can buy any crt projection set and get 1080i. anyone know any different on that issue?

[ClaudeR]

Even the DISH branded 34" CRT direct view TV is 1920x1080. I have also seen LCDs capable of 1080p. More dots = better.

[BFG]

woah woah woah. The Dish 34" CRT is not 1920x1080. It receives that signal but it only has a line rez of 800 and the most lines any CRT has is a sony with 1400.

I have a 26" CRT and a 43" DLP. The DLP out is 720p progressive and my CRT is 800 lines interelaced. I actually like the picture quality on my CRT because CRTs have a better contrast ratio and the smaller screen size and little reduction in line resolution actually ends up with a better picture than the DLP because you don't have to put up with all the digital artifacts and banding that the DLP shows.

[Rogueone]

a 26" crt isn't an HD set then if it only has 800 lines, that sounds like an EDTV set. Projection TV crt's are based on the crt's used in high end 3 gun projectors used on corporate conference rooms etc. I used to install such 3 guns, and they handle resolutions over 2000x2000 in most cases, are designed to display the graphics output from sgi boxes, which no lcd or plasma i know of can do because of the 2200 or so horizontal lines needed. sgi boxes have horizontal scan rates exceeding 100kHz as well. they are mosters unlike anything I'd ever seen until I had to converge them on the 3gung projectors :)

granted a 9" crt based projector is better, but a 7" seems capable of doing 1080i, based on looking at the one I have upstairs right now ;)

oh, and nothing of reasonable price does actual 1080p right now. maybe the 73" crt projectors, but I'd have to reseach that . a lot of LCD units i've seen mention being able to do 1080 stuff, but they all only have a 720p glass, so it's not physically possible for them to do 1080. they do a downconversion of the signal to 720p, they don't actually display 1080p

[James Long]

The 18 formats required of ATSC tuners:
1080/24p (x1920, Square/16:9)
1080/30p (x1920, Square/16:9)
1080/30i (x1920, Square/16:9) 1080i HDTV
720/24p (x1280, Square/16:9) \
720/30p (x1280, Square/6:9) 720p HDTV
720/60p (x1280, Square/6:9) /
480/24p (x 704, 16:9) \
480/30p (x 704, 16:9) 480p EDTV
480/60p (x 704, 16:9) /
480/30i (x 704, 16:9) | EDTV Pass-through

480/24p (x 704, 4:3) \
480/30p (x 704, 4:3) 480p EDTV
480/60p (x 704, 4:3) /
480/30i (x 704, 4:3) | EDTV Pass-through
480/24p (x 640, Square/4:3) \
480/30p (x 640, Square/4:3) 480p EDTV
480/60p (x 640, Square/4:3) /
480/30i (x 640, Square/4:3) | EDTV Pass-through

To be considered "HDTV" the set must be capable of:
810i or 540p in 16:9 viewable area
Monitors less than 480p or NTSC output tuners are "SDTV"

People don't normally mention the frame rates. "720p" could be 24, 30 or 60 frames per second. Want a nice 27.6 megapixel per second HD? Try 720/30p.

It doesn't seem that many of the options are in use. That 1080/24p would make a good movie format.

JL

[saweetnesstrev]

1920/1080p 60 fps is good too

[Stewart Vernon]

norman, I have to wonder why you would say only a high end plasma set suppors 1080i? most, if not all, crt projection tv's (hd versions that is) I've seen support 1080i while not supporting 720p, and only LCD, DLP, and Plasma are restricted to 720p. as best i can tell, even the cheap crt projection sets run at 1080i, and none that I can find seem to run at 720p, which makes sense for a crt based system since it's a lot more expensive to make a crt run progressive than interlaced (see the cost of units called monitors rather than tv's. the monitor versions are up to twice as expensive as the same size tv unit since they can display computer resolutions).

so unless i'm way off, pretty much anybody can buy any crt projection set and get 1080i. anyone know any different on that issue?

I don't know for sure that it is a 100% accurate statement, but most CRT Projection TVs I have seen are 1080i native. I bought a 65" CRT projection monitor, so mine actually does either 1080i or 720p. I wish I could feed it that way, but my Dish receiver forces me to choose one resolution or the other, so I choose the 1080i and am upconverting all the 720p stuff... I'd rather have a Dish receiver that output 480i/p, 720p, and 1080i pass-through as whatever the original signal is... but not an option for that right now.

My father recently bought a 1080i CRT projection TV... but not a monitor... His is 1080i native, and automatically upconverts everything else to 1080i... so his is different than mine but both do display the 1080i. I forget what the specs state on the resolution capabilities but both are above the 1080i line requirement.

For the rest of what you said, every LCD and DLP set I've seen says 720p native. I have recently seen some large screens claim to be 1080p native... but as I'm not in the market for a new TV and they are expensive anyway... I haven't researched myself to see if they actually native 1080 or not. That's one of the reasons my father opted for CRT projection like mine.

Plasmas seem to be going away, but I don't recall ever seeing one that claimed it was 1080 native either, but I could have been snoozing.

[Stewart Vernon]

People don't normally mention the frame rates. "720p" could be 24, 30 or 60 frames per second. Want a nice 27.6 megapixel per second HD? Try 720/30p.

Good point as well... I've been taking it on faith in the comparisons so far of comparing 720p at 60 fps to 1080i at 30 fps... but for all we know we are getting 30 fps 720p anyway, which skews the comparisons even more in favor of 1080i.

[ClaudeR]

woah woah woah. The Dish 34" CRT is not 1920x1080. It receives that signal but it only has a line rez of 800 and the most lines any CRT has is a sony with 1400.

Really? Sorry about that. I'll double check the specs when I get back from travel. I know it's a rebadged RCA - It was a great deal from Dish.

[normang]

norman, I have to wonder why you would say only a high end plasma set suppors 1080i? most, if not all, crt projection tv's (hd versions that is) I've seen support 1080i while not supporting 720p, and only LCD, DLP, and Plasma are restricted to 720p. as best i can tell, even the cheap crt projection sets run at 1080i, and none that I can find seem to run at 720p, which makes sense for a crt based system since it's a lot more expensive to make a crt run progressive than interlaced (see the cost of units called monitors rather than tv's. the monitor versions are up to twice as expensive as the same size tv unit since they can display computer resolutions). So unless i'm way off, pretty much anybody can buy any crt projection set and get 1080i. anyone know any different on that issue?

I never said that these sets would not support a 1080i signal, I just said that most sets are not 1920x1080i in resolution.. All these sets are doing some level of conversion.

[normang]

I don't know for sure that it is a 100% accurate statement, but most CRT Projection TVs I have seen are 1080i native. I bought a 65" CRT projection monitor, so mine actually does either 1080i or 720p. I wish I could feed it that way, but my Dish receiver forces me to choose one resolution or the other, so I choose the 1080i and am upconverting all the 720p stuff... I'd rather have a Dish receiver that output 480i/p, 720p, and 1080i pass-through as whatever the original signal is... but not an option for that right now.

My father recently bought a 1080i CRT projection TV... but not a monitor... His is 1080i native, and automatically upconverts everything else to 1080i... so his is different than mine but both do display the 1080i. I forget what the specs state on the resolution capabilities but both are above the 1080i line requirement.

For the rest of what you said, every LCD and DLP set I've seen says 720p native. I have recently seen some large screens claim to be 1080p native... but as I'm not in the market for a new TV and they are expensive anyway... I haven't researched myself to see if they actually native 1080 or not. That's one of the reasons my father opted for CRT projection like mine.

Plasmas seem to be going away, but I don't recall ever seeing one that claimed it was 1080 native either, but I could have been snoozing.

HDMe...What my contension is that most sets do not support 1920x1080i as a native resolution, I've looked at CRT sets that support 1080i, including mine and resolution is not mentioned in the specs as they are now with DLP or LCD and Plasma.

I believe that most sets are doing some level of conversion.

There are a number of Plasma sets out there, they still cost more then DLP or LCD in most cases, and while there are some technological advantages to Plasma, better blacks, brighter perhaps, better contrast, the biggest shortcomings of Plasma are burn-in, displaying dimming after a fair number of hours of use for their cost.

[Ghostwriter]

I beg to differ ion the 34" Monitor offered by DIsh, I am almost 100% certain that it is 1080i capable. I will try to hunt down a link for that.

[Stewart Vernon]

HDMe...What my contension is that most sets do not support 1920x1080i as a native resolution, I've looked at CRT sets that support 1080i, including mine and resolution is not mentioned in the specs as they are now with DLP or LCD and Plasma.

I believe that most sets are doing some level of conversion.

There are a number of Plasma sets out there, they still cost more then DLP or LCD in most cases, and while there are some technological advantages to Plasma, better blacks, brighter perhaps, better contrast, the biggest shortcomings of Plasma are burn-in, displaying dimming after a fair number of hours of use for their cost.

For whatever reason, CRT projection seems to be going the way of the dinosaur... which is a shame, because most of the LCDs, DLPs, and Plasmas left are fixed at no better than 720p resolution, which means they would be upconverting anything else.

Unless the recently announced mega-expensive sets actually do support 1080i or 1080p... the CRT projection sets were the only ones to do so thus far that I am aware of.

Keep in mind that many of us have 20" computer CRTs on our desk that support much higher resolutions than that... whereas the best 17" LCD computer monitor I have doesn't support higher than 1024x768.

So it may be accurate to say that most sets don't do 1080 natively, since most folks aren't getting CRT projection... but I don't know the sales numbers well enough. Once again somehow people got talked out of getting the CRT projection sets, and talked into buying in many cases inferior lower-fixed-resolution LCD, DLP, and Plasma.

In the future, these technologies may be the thing to have... but not quite yet, in my opinion.

[Jon Spackman]

Tell me one Tv that is 1080p native? Wobulation and pixel shift does not mean it is 1080p! I have heard that some true 1080p sets are coming in early 2006, but now in late 2005 none are available. The "1080p" sets that they sell are getting the claimed 1080 progressive by moving pixels from one spot to a second spot for each 1/30 of a sec. So having 1080i, then a shifted or wobulated second spot of 1080i for another 1/30th of a second is not the same as having 1080 lines display at the same time.......

Either way, dish bump us back to 1920 x 1080i as soon as possible. Thanks!

[Stewart Vernon]

Tell me one Tv that is 1080p native? Wobulation and pixel shift does not mean it is 1080p! I have heard that some true 1080p sets are coming in early 2006, but now in late 2005 none are available. The "1080p" sets that they sell are getting the claimed 1080 progressive by moving pixels from one spot to a second spot for each 1/30 of a sec. So having 1080i, then a shifted or wobulated second spot of 1080i for another 1/30th of a second is not the same as having 1080 lines display at the same time.......

Either way, dish bump us back to 1920 x 1080i as soon as possible. Thanks!

I don't know of any 1080p sets myself, but have seen a few advertised. I don't know if they truly are 1080p or not... but I know they are advertised more expensive than other sets so I would hope they are for the price!

But I don't know of any 1080p for sure right now... and the only 1080i ones I am aware of seem to be slowly dropping off the sales charts.

[LtMunst]

Why should I bother? I left D* because of its HD Lite service years ago.

1280 x 1080i is not a native HD resolution for widescreen HDTVs. No one should accept 1280 x 1080i as HD.


Why is it not HD? Please, instead of continuing the HDlite chant, backup your assertion with a logical argument. My TV is 1280x720p native. Does that mean that a 1920x1080i signal will not be HD on my set?

D*'s HDlite is due to compression plain and simple. It has NOTHING to do with line resolution.

[Gary Murrell]

Why is it not HD? Please, instead of continuing the HDlite chant, backup your assertion with a logical argument. My TV is 1280x720p native. Does that mean that a 1920x1080i signal will not be HD on my set?

D*'s HDlite is due to compression plain and simple. It has NOTHING to do with line resolution.

Totally untrue

Directv's HD is all 1280x1080i and has higher bitrates than some of Dish's HD channels that are true 1920x1080i

Discovery HD Theater on Dish looks great and smokes anything on Directv, even though it's bitrate is around 13-14 Mbps, but it's resolution is untouched

the whole HD-Lite thing is resolution, plain and simple, compare still shots on nature shows(they need very little bitrate) between Dish and Directv
the true 1920x1080i on Dish in this instance totally smokes Directv(which looks soft/mushy and undetailed in comparison to Dish)

Resolution needs addressing first and then Bitrate

you don't need true 1080p sets to see the difference, I could spot in in 2 sec. on a 1280x720p tv

I can tell if HD is being down rezzed into HD-Lite when viewing HD downconverted to 480i thru composite/svideo from my 6000, it is a complete butchering of the signal and can be spotted on ANY and ALL displays from 480i to 1080p and everything in between

-Gary

[LtMunst]

Resolution needs addressing first and then Bitrate

-Gary


I pray Dish does not read this nonsense. If they do we are totally screwed! :nono2:

So the party line is that we don't care about compression, just feed us 1920 lines?


Gary- You keep trying to say D* has higher bitrates than E*. It really is your theory that D* purposely is using more bandwidth than E* but decides to harm the picture by switching to lower res? Come on! D* is trying to save bandwidth and the only way that is possible is by reducing bitrates.


It's ALL about the compression people! If we browbeat Dish into giving us a higher line resolution while sacrificing bandwidth, we will be making a grevious error.

[LtMunst]

compare still shots on nature shows(they need very little bitrate) between Dish and Directv
the true 1920x1080i on Dish in this instance totally smokes Directv(which looks soft/mushy and undetailed in comparison to Dish)

-Gary


Stills shots are harmed just as much by compression as motion is. Anyone who deals in Digital Photos or JPEGS knows this.

[Skyburn]

I don't know of any 1080p sets myself, but have seen a few advertised. I don't know if they truly are 1080p or not... but I know they are advertised more expensive than other sets so I would hope they are for the price!

But I don't know of any 1080p for sure right now... and the only 1080i ones I am aware of seem to be slowly dropping off the sales charts.

I believe Samsung claims that the native resolution on this unit:

http://www.samsung.com/Products/TV/DLPTV/HLR6178WXXAA.asp

is 1920x1080p.

[Stewart Vernon]

Stills shots are harmed just as much by compression as motion is. Anyone who deals in Digital Photos or JPEGS knows this.

100% agreement here!

Have you ever accidentally opened a JPG and saved it again and saw what that does? Nasty!

I see the exact same effects in MPEG as I do in JPG... which is to be expected since they use similar algorithms in the way they discard or average the bits.

I see the MPEG glitches on my OTA from ABC a lot, especially on their logos during MNF and that bothers me more than some of the other stuff we've been talking about.

I wish we didn't have to use MPEG at all, but I know the current technology just doesn't support that so we are stuck with some amount of compression... but I hope for as little as possible. Then I wish for the high bitrates.

If they are smart, and I assume at least some Dish folks are smart... they can pair up some channels that require higher bitrates with ones that can survive with less... and leave them "floating" to some degree so that the channels that need the bitrates can grab them when necessary. Still images can deal with lower bitrates better than moving images... and right now there's a little of both... and I suspect Animania can get by with less bandwidth too being a cartoon channel.

Not advocating overcompressing and starving bandwidth... but if they are stressed for it, and need to put 3 HD per transponder... some smart pairing might make things less noticable.

[Stewart Vernon]

I pray Dish does not read this nonsense. If they do we are totally screwed! :nono2:

I said this a while back too... part of why I was trying to help with the explanations... My biggest fear is that Dish will "fix" the wrong problem and we will be worse off rather than better. We might get 1920x1080 but with more compression or less bitrate... rather than slightly less resolution at higher bitrate and less compression.

With all the "temporal resolution" discussions... I'm surprised no one has tried to factor in the MPEG compression and bitrate starving to figure out what the real resolution we actually get from 1920x1080i is when the overcompress and starve it!

I bet that would be a much more significant set of numbers.

[JohnH]

Non-Compressed FUZZ is still FUZZ.

I would like to see 1920 X 1080i in 4:2:2 color. It ain't going to happen though.

NASCAR is backhauled in that format though.

[BoisePaul]

compare still shots on nature shows(they need very little bitrate) between Dish and Directv


Huh? MPEG2 cares little about stills vs. motion. MPEG2 does compression on each frame, not the stream of frames. Think of MPEG2 as a series of JPEG's, where each frame is a seperate image and is compressed seperately. Each frame can be identical or have 100% different pixels from the previous and it will not impact the amount of compression used.

Now if this were MPEG4 where the entire stream is compressed based on averaging not only between differences in pixels within a single frame but also on averaging between frames within a stream, then the motion vs. stills argument is valid. MPEG4 can use much higher compression (and much less bandwidth) when showing a static image than can be used when showing a fast-action motion shot.

The stream-based compression scheme is the reason that real-time MPEG4 compression is difficult to do in real-time and the reason that DISH is not agressively pursuing its use. However, unless you have some equipment that the rest of us do not, and are receiving some programming that the rest of us are not, I fail to see how you can qualify that compression has little effect on still images.

[Rogueone]

HDMe...What my contension is that most sets do not support 1920x1080i as a native resolution, I've looked at CRT sets that support 1080i, including mine and resolution is not mentioned in the specs as they are now with DLP or LCD and Plasma.

I believe that most sets are doing some level of conversion.

There are a number of Plasma sets out there, they still cost more then DLP or LCD in most cases, and while there are some technological advantages to Plasma, better blacks, brighter perhaps, better contrast, the biggest shortcomings of Plasma are burn-in, displaying dimming after a fair number of hours of use for their cost.
dang it, lost what I'd typed already, der.

anyway, Norman, I had typed that I disagee in part with your ascersion most sets are not 1080i capable. Today, in stores, they all are pushing LCD, DLP, and Plasma units which are much smaller and lighter than the older CRT technology projection units. None of these, until this year, could offer 1080i/p. CRT's have always been capable of 1080i, and even my 2001 Mitsu is a native 1080i unit. CRT's do not need "resolution" numbers the way the others do, as all 3 are phyiscally restricted by the number of pixel lighting units in their displays. Each of the 3 new techs have to light each pixel individually, electronically. CRT's just have a coating of colored phosphurs applied to the inside of the tube, covered by a 'mask' with a bunch of tiny holes which allow the beam to only light up specific red/green/blue based on which beam is hitting the whole at that moment(for normal crt's. 3 gun projection sets just converge the 3 colors on the screen of course). This mask determines the final possible resolution, but since there are no real limitations beyond how precise you can apply the colored phosphurs, there is no difficulty with making CRT's which well exceed 2000 lines. I used to install corporate grade 3gun projectors in 1995 that could display SGI graphics, and nothing any of us likely has ever tried to display is as high a resolution as an SGI computer outputs. only CRT's can do it as far as I've seen.

As for the plasma going away HD, unlikely. Here's a little announcement (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051202/tc_nm/matsu****a_plasma_dc_4)I noticed last week from Matsu****a (Panasonic) on their plans to increase plasma production. Plasma and LCD are definitely going to be battling over the flat panel market for a while, but plasma should win in the end for normal TV purposes as it is suppose to have better contrast and color. DLP, that is likely going to be the winner for projection, and likely what we'll all be upgrading to in the near furture, or once we have a source for 1080p

I had a nice long explanation of why currently there aren't LCD/Plasma/DLP's aboue 720p right now, and I'm not going to try to remember it all :) Basically, just like how in the CPU/GPU world, Intel, AMD, nVidia, and ATI are always reducing the size of the wafer for their chips to reduce heat and increase speeds, LCD, Plasma, and DLP are having to develop the processes which will eventually allow them to offer us 1080 products. In the CPU/GPU world, they have recently started trying to make 55nm wafers. Currently, 90nm is the smallest/best. 2 years ago it was 135 if I recall. 2 years ago, 90 was being developed, and it's yield of usable to defective wafers was very low. Today, it's likely in the realm of 90-95% usable. I've read in the past, that when these smaller wafers are first put into production, yields of only 50 to 60% are typical, sometimes lower, which is why supply is always so limited for Intel's newest chips or Nvidia/ATI's top of the line screamer. It takes months to perfect the process and get the yield of the top performers to say 80%.

Going back in time, CPU's used to all be different. A different speed meant a different chip. This was the 486 days. around the time of the first Pentiums, it was realized that chips could be speed rated and yields made more cost effective. Intel would design and produce say a 450 MHz cpu, but yields of wafers passing the 450 tests would be 25-30%. So what to do with the 70% of failed chips? Well, could they possibly work at 300MHz? It turned out the answer was yes. That in the early production of all new chips, only a small portion are ever able to pass the intended design speeds, but the majority of the rest were still functional, but only at slower speeds. This is where products like the Celeron line of CPU's came from. They were fully Pentium cores, which had failed the Pentium testing. Either they could not operate at 450 MHz, but would work at 300, or maybe 1 of the 2 banks of 128kb cache didn't work. So the Celeron 300a was born, which was nothing but a Pentium 450 running with only 1 cache bank operational. Many users, like me, bought 300a's and overclocked them back to the P450 speeds. I still have one working for my kids, it's been running at 450 since 1998.

So, for our purposes, it has to be remembered that these manufacturers need to produce panels with yields likely exceeding 75%. Due to the nature of LCD and Plasma, resolution ratiing won't work. If the bad pixels are in the middle of the unti, it'll be bad for any resoltion. To date, the process for makting 1080 LCD and Plasma simply isn't cost effective, hence the units with those technologies are closer to $20,000 than $2,000. Given a few more years, they will be better with the 1080 stuff, and we'll likely start seeing 1080p stuff from them.

As for DLP, I saved it for last, because I just discovered something I hadn't known about DLP. For those not aware, TI, Texas Instruments, invented DLP and makes the chips. They are, right now, offering real, actual 1080p sets. Listing of sets (http://www.dlp.com/home_entertainment/home_entertainment_search_results.asp) DLP is a bunch of mirrors, reflecting light to or away from, the screen. DLP is limited only by the number of mirrors it can pack into it's reflector area, and well, it seems they have, as of this year, made it to 1920x1080 mirrors, with P function instead of i function like a crt uses. Now, you won't see any flat panel displays using DLP, it only works as a projector format, but I can easily see this becoming the dominant projection offering in a few years, if the makers continue to push it. And with the likes of Mitsubishi hitching their wagons to it, I'd say it's a good bet to do well.

I hadn't known until I checked TI's site they had 1080 DLP yet, I thought they were still at the 720 level :) But all of this is only to point out that, 2 years ago, most HD offerings were crt based projection sets, capable of 1080i. today, most offerings are LCD/Plasma/DLP, limited to 720, because of cost/manufacturing limitation reasons. After this current ramp up in production to meet the imposed "all tv's must be digital" deal from the gov't, we'll not only see costs of all 3 of these new techs drop, but we'll see all 3 eventually offering 1080 products, and I'm going to guess they will all be P based, as there isn't a technical reason for them to run I as there were with CRT's. Interlaced was created in large put due to the limitations of early CRT's, and I don't see any reason these makers would subject digial technologies to an artificial restriction like interlacing. There are no more electron beams or phospurs to worry about in these new techs :)

All of that is to say, I don't agree that most sets don't support 1080i. Until probably this year, I'd be a little surprised if most HD sets sold haven't been CRT based. Now, when i walk into Circuit City or best Buy, it's the new 3some everywhere, and crt is hard to find. A year ago, it was still at least half and half as I recall. So I do see this trend as the death knell for CRT, as I would expect LCD TV's of say 20" to be under $300 in 2 to 3 years, making the $150 20" CRT less attractive for most people. Heck, it might even happen by next year. One of the articles mentioned LCD/Plasma sets are overstocked 30 to 50%, and production is being increased, which only means prices will be dropping fast in the coming months. thinking about it as well, of the 4 or 5 people I know personally with HD, all have crt projectors (and 1 also has a real home theatre with a lcd projector creating a 13'x7' image, with 14 speakers and 4 subs :) that room is all about watching dvd's, and the occassional football game)

[Rogueone]

I said this a while back too... part of why I was trying to help with the explanations... My biggest fear is that Dish will "fix" the wrong problem and we will be worse off rather than better. We might get 1920x1080 but with more compression or less bitrate... rather than slightly less resolution at higher bitrate and less compression.

With all the "temporal resolution" discussions... I'm surprised no one has tried to factor in the MPEG compression and bitrate starving to figure out what the real resolution we actually get from 1920x1080i is when the overcompress and starve it!

I bet that would be a much more significant set of numbers.

If I had any clue on that one I'd do some math, but I haven't bothered. Most everything i watch in HD is OTA anyway, not enough good stuff on hbo/showtime. too bad they don't carry the starz or other premium HD channels :) too many movies come out not on hbo/showtime so i don't get to see them in hd :(

[JohnH]

Huh? MPEG2 cares little about stills vs. motion. MPEG2 does compression on each frame, not the stream of frames. Think of MPEG2 as a series of JPEG's, where each frame is a seperate image and is compressed seperately. Each frame can be identical or have 100% different pixels from the previous and it will not impact the amount of compression used.


Apparently you have not heard about I frames, P frames and B frames.

[LtMunst]

Apparently you have not heard about I frames, P frames and B frames.

So, are are saying that compression does not affect still PQ? :sure:

[JohnH]

So, are are saying that compression does not affect still PQ? :sure:

I am not. The method.

[LtMunst]

Boy, I can't wait to get me some of that 8 Mbs 1920x1080i! It's going to be fantastic! :p

With enough compression, E* can get 4, 5, maybe even 6 wonderfully compressed 1920x1080s per transponder. Oh, Sweet Heaven. :lol:

[BoisePaul]

Apparently you have not heard about I frames, P frames and B frames.

I guess generalizing to keep things simpler (for me as much as anyone else) probably wasn't the best way to go here, but it does lead into a few interesting points to ponder regarding compression versus downconversion.

Since we're dealing with a medium in which look-ahead is difficult, I'd tend to think that B frames would be less useful than with random-access data sources. How does a receiver reconstruct a frame based on data from a subsequent frame that has not yet been received? Are the frames grouped into packets in which at least n I frames will be contained? I could see that working so that a complete image could be constructed from each packet if that's how it works.

It seems that the savings of P frames over I frames is at best 50%, which is significant, but how useful is it? I'm not sure how error correction is used, but without sufficient I frames I would think that it would be difficult to construct the image based solely on P frames, especially if you're dealing with stills in which not much change is relayed by the P frames. So, in the DBS environment, are the savings from using heavy compression on still/semi-still images that significant when you have to look at error correction and frame reconstruction when frame data is missing? Can that all be handled by the lower layer encoder such that you don't have to consider errors when looking at compression?

Moreso, could enough bandwidth be saved through intra-frame compression rather than compression within each frame to negate the need to down-rez the actual video, or would each frame need to be compressed to a point where PQ is worse than the downconversion would have caused? Hopefully the gain from P (and maybe B) frames is enough that PQ wouldn't need to suffer, but somehow I doubt it. For anything with significant motion it's not really that applicable since much can change from frame to frame.

Any digital video engineers here who have some thoughts?

[kstevens]

HDMe...What my contension is that most sets do not support 1920x1080i as a native resolution, I've looked at CRT sets that support 1080i, including mine and resolution is not mentioned in the specs as they are now with DLP or LCD and Plasma.

I believe that most sets are doing some level of conversion.

There are a number of Plasma sets out there, they still cost more then DLP or LCD in most cases, and while there are some technological advantages to Plasma, better blacks, brighter perhaps, better contrast, the biggest shortcomings of Plasma are burn-in, displaying dimming after a fair number of hours of use for their cost.

That may have been true in the past, but most of the projection lcd , large plasmas (and even 42 inche plasmas as was just announced) now support native 1920x1080 starting 2005. My toshiba supports it and so does a whole slew of others.

Ken

[LtMunst]

That may have been true in the past, but most of the projection lcd , large plasmas (and even 42 inche plasmas as was just announced) now support native 1920x1080 starting 2005. My toshiba supports it and so does a whole slew of others.

Ken


My Panny LCD Projection has 1080i stamped on the front. You have to look real hard in the manual to find that the Native is actually 1280x720p. I'm betting alot of the HDTVs out there (like mine) are passing themselves off as true 1080 when they are not. Sure, they'll accept a 1080i signal, but it will display in 720p. I love my Panny but this is borderline deceptive advertising.

[topom]

Tell me one Tv that is 1080p native? Wobulation and pixel shift does not mean it is 1080p! I have heard that some true 1080p sets are coming in early 2006, but now in late 2005 none are available. The "1080p" sets that they sell are getting the claimed 1080 progressive by moving pixels from one spot to a second spot for each 1/30 of a sec.


This is simply not the case. There are now LCD (Sharp in particular), DLP (Samsung in particular), and Sony's new SXRD technology to choose from for true 1080p capability. There just aren't any sources of true 1080p to enjoy on them yet.

[kstevens]

Tell me one Tv that is 1080p native? Wobulation and pixel shift does not mean it is 1080p! I have heard that some true 1080p sets are coming in early 2006, but now in late 2005 none are available. The "1080p" sets that they sell are getting the claimed 1080 progressive by moving pixels from one spot to a second spot for each 1/30 of a sec.


This is simply not the case. There are now LCD (Sharp in particular), DLP (Samsung in particular), and Sony's new SXRD technology to choose from for true 1080p capability. There just aren't any sources of true 1080p to enjoy on them yet.


Unless toshiba is lying, their new MX line 52/62/72mx195 and 72hm195 are native 1080p. Sony has a couple set's available that are 1080p and so does HP. HP even advertises their news sets can accept a 1080p signal, while the others upconvert everything to 1080p but not accept a 1080p signal.

Ken

[Rogueone]

the TI DLP website mentions a DLP chip being offered that is 1080p. It's put into tv's frfom mitsu, hitachi, and samsung I think currently. Essentially, any DLP TV is basically the same, the DLP portion comes from TI, and what differs is how the company making the set does color correction and the like. From what I saw this afternoon, the 1080p DLP sets run just over $4000, which the older 720p DLP's of the same size image (60-65") are down around $2500-2700.

it still looks like we're a couiple years from 720p entry level sets under $1000 and like 35" or something. And 1080 sets under $3000 are likely a year away if they are 4000 now. of course, depending on turnout of some of these new plants, maybe even this summer the supply gets so high compared to demand that prices will drop to where demand will pickup
and maybe we see sun $3000 1080 sets over 60" in late summer?

I'm not sure what you mean by wobulation and pixel shift, but for a technology like DLP, all they need is to be able to sync up 1,920 x 1,080 mirrors and run them in progressive versus interlaced, which there is no reason to run it in interlaced, since there are no phospur issues to be concerned with. with a technology like that, there's no reason they could increase the display function beyond 60fps to 120fps. it's purely mechanical. As long as the mirrors can move than quickly, no reason they couldn't run it faster if they felt like it :) don't know if it would be of any benefit beyond marketing though

[Jon Spackman]

rogueone- Man you have no idea what your talking about. Read up on how they are getting the so called 1080p out of these newest dlps then post here. Wobulation is where they take a 1080i frame and move it half a pixel over and display the same 1080i frame again. That is not 1080p its 1080i blurry and shown twice in a different spot. Yes it looks a little better to our eye, but its surely not 1080p.


As for sharps 1080p lcds. Have you seen them? They look terrible. I installed a 45 1080p lcd and damn that thing was sad. Even with a directv H10 feeding HD to it it still looked soft and disappointing. if that is their idea of 1080p then ill pass it sucks!

[bytre]

CRT projectors don't support a full 1920x1080, even if they are 1080i units. Lots of devices will take a 1080i input and scale it - a CRT projector doesn't have to scale it, but usually the CRTs themselves aren't precise enough to resolve that many lines.

Throw up a chart and see what it can resolve. A typical CRT projector with 7" tubes can do around 600 or 700, and only with the larger 9" (or 12") tubes can you approach 1080.

[Ant50]

Take a look...1080p..I saw this tv locally at BB for $1800 and it had a nice picture. What do you guys think

It's a Westinghouse LVM-37w1..was'nt able to post url but it's on their site.

http://www.westinghousedigital.com/pc-26-3-37-lcd-video-monitor.aspx

[Stewart Vernon]

CRT projectors don't support a full 1920x1080, even if they are 1080i units. Lots of devices will take a 1080i input and scale it - a CRT projector doesn't have to scale it, but usually the CRTs themselves aren't precise enough to resolve that many lines.

CRTs were the first to support higher resolutions. I have a monitor on my desktop that does higher than 1920x1080 and it is a 20" monitor from over 5 years ago...

It has been cheaper and easier to do the higher resolutions in CRT and CRT projection because of the lack of need for a fixed resolution scheme like how LCD, DLP, and Plasma technologies are implemented.

[harsh]

There should be no loss converting to 1280x720 (depending on the quality of the scaler).It is precisely loss that is occurring when squishing from 1080 lines to 720 lines. Further, because the ratio isn't nice and even, each row gets a different proportion of the rows that occupy about the same area in the source material.

To demonstrate what is happening, load a detailed image into your favorite image processing program (or sophisticated viewer) and scale it vertically to 2/3 of the original height (leave the horizontal alone to illustrate the point). If you want to see the difference side-by-side, scale it back up and flip back and forth.

If you're disinclined, I've attached a pair of images of this message. The first one is a screen capture and the second has been resampled to 2/3 and back to square. The quality falls off pretty fast as you can see. Notice also that the scaled image is almost twice the bulk as the original! I chose high contrast text to illustrate my point. Video tends to be less contrasty and not quite as impacted by the blurring.

[harsh]

I beg to differ ion the 34" Monitor offered by DIsh, I am almost 100% certain that it is 1080i capable. I will try to hunt down a link for that.I own one and it shows a zoomed in version of the 1080i output of my 921. It also doesn't sync up properly with the 720p mode. 480p looks best on the HD34 in conjunction with the 921.

[harsh]

Tell me one Tv that is 1080p native? Wobulation and pixel shift does not mean it is 1080p! I have heard that some true 1080p sets are coming in early 2006, but now in late 2005 none are available.The Sony Grand Wega 1080p and the three JVC 1080p models that have been out for a month or so (at my local Video Only) all claim native 1080p LCoS. There are also some 1080p DLP models in stores now and the big Sharp LCDs are due soon. No 1080p plasmas in the cards.

[harsh]

That may have been true in the past, but most of the projection lcd , large plasmas (and even 42 inche plasmas as was just announced) now support native 1920x1080 starting 2005. My toshiba supports it and so does a whole slew of others.You must distinguish between being able to display a mode natively and being able to convert source material to the native mode.

Toshiba's big plasma is 1366x768 native. Toshiba's 62" DLP is 1280x720.

[harsh]

Apparently you have not heard about I frames, P frames and B frames.Some like to think that motion JPEG is the same thing as MPEG2, but as you point out, it is not.

[James Long]

Harsh,
I assumed you resized vertically as well as horizontally in your example?

Here's another test. The child in the picture appears three times ... once is the "original" - a digital photo cropped and resized to 350x350. The second face is filtered 67% horizontally - the vertical is left alone - and then stretched back to 350x350. The third face is reduced both horizontally and vertically to about the same number of pixels that the 67% width reduction saved - then stretched back to 350x350.

All things being equal it seems better to squish the picture in both directions than to just cheat the picture horizontally IF it were a single still picture (which by its nature is progressive and not interlaced). All things are not equal.

JL

BTW: If you like, you can assume that this is the child's reaction to seeing squished HDTV. :lol:

[harsh]

There are now LCD (Sharp in particular), DLP (Samsung in particular), and Sony's new SXRD technology to choose from for true 1080p capability. There just aren't any sources of true 1080p to enjoy on them yet.I think you'll find that Sony's "new" SXRD technology bears a remarkable resemblance to JVC's good ol' LCoS invention. I'm not sure Sharp is actually shipping the "Full Spec HD" LCD yet.

[harsh]

Unless toshiba is lying, their new MX line 52/62/72mx195 and 72hm195 are native 1080p.Here's a quote from the description of the rendering engine of the MX series, the HD2+:

HD2+ is the next generation of the HD2 DLP™ Chip. This is a .8" chip with 1280 x 720 mirrors that creates a 720p high definition picture.

Clearly it is not native 1080p.

[harsh]

Harsh,
I assumed you resized vertically as well as horizontally in your example?You assumed incorrectly. As stated, I scaled only vertically.

Also, to remove the issues associated with JPEG compression, I recommend that you offer your examples in a lossless format like PNG to avoid additional artifacting. I got away with using GIF as my images were largely greyscale.

[James Long]

You assumed incorrectly. As stated, I scaled only vertically.The halo effect on your example is more reminicent of an image that has been scaled proportionally. Since E* is scaling only horizontally you might want to go that route.I got away with using GIF as my images were largely greyscale.It has also made your test unrepeatable. I tried the 67% reduction on the "original" and it went totally unreadable.

JL

[Rogueone]

rogueone- Man you have no idea what your talking about. Read up on how they are getting the so called 1080p out of these newest dlps then post here. Wobulation is where they take a 1080i frame and move it half a pixel over and display the same 1080i frame again. That is not 1080p its 1080i blurry and shown twice in a different spot. Yes it looks a little better to our eye, but its surely not 1080p.


As for sharps 1080p lcds. Have you seen them? They look terrible. I installed a 45 1080p lcd and damn that thing was sad. Even with a directv H10 feeding HD to it it still looked soft and disappointing. if that is their idea of 1080p then ill pass it sucks!
Just because they have to slide the image for 1080p doesn't mean the device isn't operating as native 1080p. Since the image being fed is going to be at best a 1080i, you would have to show each frame twice if your displaying device was running in 1080p mode. 1080p is a 60fps method while 1080i is a 30fps method, so if I understand this wobulation you talk about, it's simply the fact you have no choice but to display each frame twice in succession while waiting for the next frame to arrive. That's not pretending to be 1080p, that's taking into account there isn't a 1080p signal to feed the TV. The only 1080p source readily available, that I know of would be a disc like the T2 special edition with the MS HD compression which you have to playback in Media Player on a computer to get the 1080p output. Put that on the DLP unit, and I bet it runs native 1080p.

then only point to 1080p sets is future capability right now, and maybe HD DVD/bluray. with no source to display natively, it would always need to compromise a little, though 1080i shouldn't be anything but marginally different, if everything works correctly and was engineered right :)

Hmm, just found this article which mentions wobulation, and it has nothing to do with a 1080p DLP. It was an idea to improve 720p DLP sets by HP


A DMD contains as many as two million microscopic mirrors, and each mirror corresponds to one pixel of the finished picture. The aluminum mirrors are sixteen microns square and weigh only a few millionths of a gram. Each one is attached to a yoke and a hinge that moves the mirrors to the on and off positions.
A DMD can support a maximum of 1,280 by 720 pixels, but some high-definition images require 1,920 by 1,080 pixels. Hewlett-Packard has developed a technique called wobulation, which allows each mirror to create two of the image’s pixels, improving the resolution. It should be available to consumers in late 2006. [ref (http://www.popsci.com/popsci/bown/2004/homeentertainment/article/0,22221,767810,00.html)]


so obviously this article, and the idea of wobulation, come about before the 1080p DLP chip was released. why use wobulation to compensate for the lack of 1080 capability unless 1080 wasn't available at the time the idea was conceived?

oh, and here is what HP says about wobulation

DLP (Digital Light Processing), a low-cost leader in big-screen HDTV technology, uses a chip with thousands of micromirrors to display pictures. But there’s a limit to how small the mirrors can become and still produce a good image. Texas Instruments, which makes the DLP chips, maxed out with its 1,280-by-720 array, short of the highest-quality HD resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels. So HP created Wobulation, a technique that takes advantage of the fact that TI’s new DLP mirrors can oscillate every 1/120 of a second to create a series of overlapping pixels, which the eye melds together. The result is two visible pixels for each physical mirror, or a true 1,920-by-1,080 picture. Available late next year

So, considering TI has come out with a chip which is 1920x1080 mirrors, I'd say the ide of wobulation has been defeated before it saw the light of day :)

[Ghostwriter]

Sorry did I miss something earlier? Where does it say TI can up with a 1920x1080 mirror?

[kstevens]

You must distinguish between being able to display a mode natively and being able to convert source material to the native mode.

Toshiba's big plasma is 1366x768 native. Toshiba's 62" DLP is 1280x720.

Toshiba's 2004/5 62 inch is 720p and their 2005/6 62hm195 is 720p. Their 2005/6 mx line is 1080 as well as their 2005/6 72hm195. I have the 72hm195 and it is 1080. They were just released in the last couple of months.


Ken

[kstevens]

Here's a quote from the description of the rendering engine of the MX series, the HD2+:



Clearly it is not native 1080p.

Wrong again. You need to stop passing fud...
Here is the url to their spec sheet:

http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/tacpassets-images/models/72hm195/docs/72hm195_spec.pdf

Here is their spec sheet for the 72mx195

http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/televisions/product.asp?model=72MX195

their 62mx195
http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/tacpassets-images/models/62MX195/docs/62MX195_spec.pdf

their 56mx195
http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/tacpassets-images/models/56MX195/docs/56MX195_spec.pdf

All state talen x engine 1080p.....

Ken

[LtMunst]

Some like to think that motion JPEG is the same thing as MPEG2, but as you point out, it is not.

I think the whole point of the motion vs still MPEG has been missed. It is true that for a given compression level, motion will require higher bitrates than still video. What is also true, though, is that for 2 identical still videos the one with the higher compression will not look as good.

[LtMunst]

It is precisely loss that is occurring when squishing from 1080 lines to 720 lines. Further, because the ratio isn't nice and even, each row gets a different proportion of the rows that occupy about the same area in the source material.

To demonstrate what is happening, load a detailed image into your favorite image processing program (or sophisticated viewer) and scale it vertically to 2/3 of the original height (leave the horizontal alone to illustrate the point). If you want to see the difference side-by-side, scale it back up and flip back and forth.

If you're disinclined, I've attached a pair of images of this message. The first one is a screen capture and the second has been resampled to 2/3 and back to square. The quality falls off pretty fast as you can see. Notice also that the scaled image is almost twice the bulk as the original! I chose high contrast text to illustrate my point. Video tends to be less contrasty and not quite as impacted by the blurring.


Your experiment is flawed. The loss you are seeing did not occur when you scaled down. The loss was when you then scaled back up. Off course there is loss when you downconverted and then re-upconverted. Also, the scalers used in HDTV sets are much more sophisticated than the simple squish down, stretch up formulas used in most photo editors.

Anyway, again the point was missed. Yes, there is loss of resolution going from 1280x1080i to 1280x720p just as there is with 1920x1080i to 1280x720p. With a good scaler though, both conversions should yield a PQ equal to an original 1280x720p signal. The reverse, of course, is not true. Any upscaling will result in some PQ loss no matter how good the scaler.

[harsh]

Since E* is scaling only horizontally you might want to go that route.As the claim was that a change in vertical resolution wasn't going to sacrifice anything, I tested vertical resampling. This is hopefully what a good scaler would do. The effects of horizontal resampling would be similar. Of course you then couple that with the scaling of your receiver and or monitor and you've got quite a compromise.It has also made your test unrepeatable. I tried the 67% reduction on the "original" and it went totally unreadable.Did you scale or resample? I didn't mention it, but I used Lanczos resampling.

As the text is only two "colors", it should survive GIF. The emoticons may suffer somewhat having only 250 or so colors left in the palette. My goal was to show how bad it could be and I think that my before and after demonstrates it.

The true test would be to start with a 1920x1080 image and squish it to the broadcast size and then squish it to your display resolution, but there is a limit on how large the attachments can be.

[harsh]

Wrong again. You need to stop passing fud...

All state talen x engine 1080p.....Here's a link to the spec page for the 62mx195. Click on the TALEN link at the top of the video category:

http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/televisions/product.asp?model=62HMX95

I'm not casting FUD, only reporting what they "say". As the claim was that they were fibbing, this suggests that they are telling the truth in the spec sheet, but misleading in the the naming of the technology.

[rbyers]

That may have been true in the past, but most of the projection lcd , large plasmas (and even 42 inche plasmas as was just announced) now support native 1920x1080 starting 2005. My toshiba supports it and so does a whole slew of others.

Ken

I would beg to differ. There are few 42" LCD flat panels and most of them are 1366 x 768. I haven't seen a 42" plasma with more than 1024 by 720. In fact, the general discussion at 42" is between HD and ED sets - where many people cannot see the difference (in quality sets) at normal viewing distances. I'm in the market for a 42" flat panel and have been watching the forums, BB, CC, etc for the best that I can get. The only available 1920X1080 sets have been 37" - mostly from 2nd tier mfgs. Now, there may be some killer sets at outrageous cost, but I'm looking for quality sets from the usual suspects ... Panasonic, Sony, etc.

I am influenced by resolution specs and this has kept me from purchasing. Although, when I do go into the showrooms at look at various sets at 42", I cannot see much difference between the various offerings ... in spite of the pixel differences. There are far more differences in black levels and viewability under various lighting conditions. I currently own a 34" Panny HD CRT and a 30" HD LCD.

I think that this discussion has morphed into one that is better suited for the various hardware forums on AVS.

[harsh]

I think the whole point of the motion vs still MPEG has been missed. It is true that for a given compression level, motion will require higher bitrates than still video.I would ask if there is any point in discussing how JPEG and MPEG2 treat static material. The technology used is MPEG2, not MJPEG.

The point of the reply was that the technology used is not successive compressed frames (MJPEG) as explained, but delta compression which is more complex but allows you to capture more information if the change from frame to frame is not radical.What is also true, though, is that for 2 identical still videos the one with the higher compression will not look as good.Decidedly true given a single compression algorithm, but irrelevant to television.

[LtMunst]

Decidedly true given a single compression algorithm, but irrelevant to television.


It is not irrelevant to television. This particular argument was started when someone argued that the poor PQ of D*s nature channel stills compared to E* were not related to compression. Again, compression reduces PQ across the board, motion or no motion.

[harsh]

Your experiment is flawed. The loss you are seeing did not occur when you scaled down. The loss was when you then scaled back up.I resampled in both directions. This was necessary to provide a side-by-side comparison. The downsampled version suffered significantly.Also, the scalers used in HDTV sets are much more sophisticated than the simple squish down, stretch up formulas used in most photo editors.By my previous definition, squishing is the process that HDTV scalers use. It is a necessarily straightforward resampling.Anyway, again the point was missed. Yes, there is loss of resolution going from1280x1080i to 1280x720p just as there is with 1920x1080i to 1280x720p. With a good scaler though, both conversions should yield a PQ equal to an original 1280x720p signal.I disagree. Scalers, no matter how good, are not alchemy devices. They work quickly by sampling which is a lossy technique. If you use a lossy technique, you're almost certainly going to lose something.

[LtMunst]

I resampled in both directions. This was necessary to provide a side-by-side comparison. The downsampled version suffered significantly.

Of course it suffered. ALL upscalings suffer. When you downscale a pic, though, there should not be any loss of quality (the picture will be smaller obviously). Now blow the picture back up (what you did) and the PQ will start to suck. Yes, there are losses of bits when you downscale. This does not mean loss of quality for the smaller view size.

[Rogueone]

Sorry did I miss something earlier? Where does it say TI can up with a 1920x1080 mirror?
They're here (http://www.dlp.com/home_entertainment/home_entertainment_product_search.asp) this is the DLP.com site from TI. It would seem they came out with a new chip that is 1080p in the last couple of months. I would caution those getting hung up on what Toshiba names their various sets and how that means the whole series is either 1080 or 720, to not get hung up on the series in question, as it may not mean anything.

For example, Mitsubishi has a lot of 62-65" sets, numbered like WD-65525/625/675 or somthing like that. I found 2 62" models while I was searching, one is a 720p model, around $2500, the other is the new 1080p model around $4100. And I didn't find any of the 1080p models under $4000 (over 60"), so likely that is a good indicator to check. If you find a set around $3000 for a normal store (not online like at onecall) then it is likely the 720p model.

and the function 'wobulation' that has been mentioned before, seems to be a null issue at this point. According to HP's website, they came up with the idea to improve 720p pictures so they could be more like 1080p pictures. they intended this to be ready by late 2006. I can't see much point in continuing that since 1080p chips are now available from TI. It'll be interesting to see if HP still comes out with wobulation next year. (if any others picked up on this idea and are using it, I haven't found it, and would be surprised. why would HP need until late 2006 if another had it working now?)

[kstevens]

Here's a link to the spec page for the 62mx195. Click on the TALEN link at the top of the video category:

http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/televisions/product.asp?model=62HMX95

I'm not casting FUD, only reporting what they "say". As the claim was that they were fibbing, this suggests that they are telling the truth in the spec sheet, but misleading in the the naming of the technology.


That is the 62 HMX 95. This is a different set entirely. The series my specs point to are the ## MX 195 series and the 72HM195 series. Get your sets right......


Ken

[kstevens]

I would beg to differ. There are few 42" LCD flat panels and most of them are 1366 x 768. I haven't seen a 42" plasma with more than 1024 by 720. In fact, the general discussion at 42" is between HD and ED sets - where many people cannot see the difference (in quality sets) at normal viewing distances. I'm in the market for a 42" flat panel and have been watching the forums, BB, CC, etc for the best that I can get. The only available 1920X1080 sets have been 37" - mostly from 2nd tier mfgs. Now, there may be some killer sets at outrageous cost, but I'm looking for quality sets from the usual suspects ... Panasonic, Sony, etc.

I am influenced by resolution specs and this has kept me from purchasing. Although, when I do go into the showrooms at look at various sets at 42", I cannot see much difference between the various offerings ... in spite of the pixel differences. There are far more differences in black levels and viewability under various lighting conditions. I currently own a 34" Panny HD CRT and a 30" HD LCD.

I think that this discussion has morphed into one that is better suited for the various hardware forums on AVS.

There was an announcement yesterday tha a couple of companies were able to produce a 42" plasma at 1080. Here is the url (translated from Japanese).

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fedevice.fujitsu.com%2Ffhp %2Fnews%2F051207.html&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

Ken

[harsh]

That is the 62 HMX 95. This is a different set entirely. The series my specs point to are the ## MX 195 series and the 72HM195 series. Get your sets right......Ack! My bad. The reason that I presented the material that I did was that, unlike the spec pages you offered, my link actually spoke to the number of mirrors on the chip.

Like Texas Instruments, Toshiba is being careful not to state that the 1080p chip is actually a wobulated 1MP device (as compared with other dedicated 2MP LCD and LCoS technologies). I have been unable to find anything on the Toshiba web site that clearly states how 1080p relates to 1920x1080. Apparently, that is by design. In any event, a precisely wobulated TI 1080p chip should produce an apparent resolution of 1920x1080. My viewing of a 65" model didn't show clear pixel boundaries (and that's probably not a bad thing).

[kstevens]

Ack! My bad. The reason that I presented the material that I did was that, unlike the spec pages you offered, my link actually spoke to the number of mirrors on the chip.

Like Texas Instruments, Toshiba is being careful not to state that the 1080p chip is actually a wobulated 1MP device (as compared with other dedicated 2MP LCD and LCoS technologies). I have been unable to find anything on the Toshiba web site that clearly states how 1080p relates to 1920x1080. Apparently, that is by design. In any event, a precisely wobulated TI 1080p chip should produce an apparent resolution of 1920x1080. My viewing of a 65" model didn't show clear pixel boundaries (and that's probably not a bad thing).

Well, I just got HD going on my set finally. The picture is gorgeous in high definition mode. Whether they use wobble technology or not, I can't complain about the picture.

Ken

[Rogueone]

ok, finally found something that mentioned how the new DLP 1080p works. It's a 960x1080 mirror arrangement, with each of the horizontals lighting 2 pixels. still haven't found anything that explains the process and how it is determined what hits those 2 pixels, but depending on how this is implemented, it could be possible for this to have no quality difference than having 1920 mirrors.

Oh, and I came across a thread on avforums talking about the "accepted" HD broadcast formats, and 1080p was mentioned as being valid only at 30hz, which means it's only better than 1080p for the instances of the motion blur problem, and it doesn't sound like 60fps is going to be an option anytime soon :(

[Ghostwriter]

Well we have gotten a little off topic IMO. All I know is that the quality is downright terrible now. PQ wise, pixelation, audio drop outs, freezing. The Voom channels are officially unwatchable.

[Stewart Vernon]

Well we have gotten a little off topic IMO. All I know is that the quality is downright terrible now. PQ wise, pixelation, audio drop outs, freezing. The Voom channels are officially unwatchable.

Actually... as of today I am seeing pixellation not just on the Voom channels... I'm seeing pixellation and freezing on HDNet and HDNet Movies . On HDNet and HDNet Movies it was happening at regular intervals too, like about every 3-4 minutes almost like clockwork!

I was going to start another thread and ask if I was the only one seeing it... Voom, HDNet, HDNet Movies... All the while this was happening, I would turn to ESPNHD and not notice the problem... but for all I know if I left it there for a bit maybe I would see on there and TNTHD as well.

Anyone else having these problems this evening? For me it is happening pixellation fairly regularly, like several minute intervals pixelation and/or freezing. with HDNet/Movies it would freeze, then pixelate and then be ok for a few minutes then repeat the cycle.

[gdarwin]

Anyone else having these problems this evening? For me it is happening pixellation fairly regularly, like several minute intervals pixelation and/or freezing. with HDNet/Movies it would freeze, then pixelate and then be ok for a few minutes then repeat the cycle.

Yes! and I have allready called in to to complain... Both Voom and HDNET...:mad:

[William Millar]

I am having trouble with HD net freezing up as well.





Bill

[JohnC]

Well we have gotten a little off topic IMO. All I know is that the quality is downright terrible now. PQ wise, pixelation, audio drop outs, freezing. The Voom channels are officially unwatchable.

I had the same problem with the Voom movie channels. Just watched them for a few minutes and they were terrible! However, CBS east HD and TNT HD were perfect. It seems that E* has a lot of space for HD with Rainbow 1 and the unused AMC-16 at 85, but they are not adding HD and are dropping the quality. Was hoping that E* would add some national HD channels, distant HD networks, and local HD, but they are always in "serious discussions" while D* has added HD distant nets, local HD for Atlanta and many other cities, and ESPN2 HD recently.


I received a $450 offer on Thursday to ditch E* and move to Comcast. They have made a lot of improvements recently in my area. It seems like I am getting forced off E*. I am an old E* customer who spends over $110 a month with E*, but do not qualify to lease a 942 and probably will not be allowed to lease a 211, so I'm still using a 6000. I can get much better offers from Comcast and D* and am getting more convinced that E* is not the service to be with for HD! If Monday night's Charlie Chat is like the other ones for the past 2 years, I'm probably moving on!

[Rogueone]

Interesting. I was watching HDNet for about 30 minutes tonight, and noticed 2 or 3 freezes. I thought it was just my signal dropping. So maybe it wasn't huh? I'll have to keep tabs on the others over the weekend

[Stewart Vernon]

Interesting. I was watching HDNet for about 30 minutes tonight, and noticed 2 or 3 freezes. I thought it was just my signal dropping. So maybe it wasn't huh? I'll have to keep tabs on the others over the weekend

The first couple of times it was amusing... I was watching Greg the Bunny at 8pm and it would freeze when people had strange expressions on their face... and it was amusing... but when it kept happening about every 3-4 minutes, it got old... so I flipped around a bit.

So far, still doing it on Voom and HDNet/Movies but no problems on TNTHD, Discovery, or ESPNHD.

Since Voom is on 61.5 (and 129) and HDNet is on 110, it makes me curious what they could be doing testing or otherwise that would involve all of these channels at the same time. Other channels known to be on 110 don't seem to be having the same breakups and freezing. I don't have the CBSHD so I can't say, and I haven't bothered to check the Demo channel.

I *hope* this isn't a result of Dish trying to respond to the "gimme resolution" complaints by tinkering with the bitrates and seeing how low they can go... but it does make me wonder.

The Charlie Chat could be interesting come Monday!

[boylehome]

Since Voom is on 61.5 (and 129) and HDNet is on 110, it makes me curious what they could be doing testing or otherwise that would involve all of these channels at the same time. Other channels known to be on 110 don't seem to be having the same breakups and freezing. I don't have the CBSHD so I can't say, and I haven't bothered to check the Demo channel.
Good chance that they are doing something with the HD upgrade. Might be tweaking things for the upcoming Super 8VSK or whatever it is supposed to be. Maybe they are getting ready to give us the additional VOOM and doing some fine tuning (thinking positive:) )

[rbyers]

There was an announcement yesterday tha a couple of companies were able to produce a 42" plasma at 1080. Here is the url (translated from Japanese).

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fedevice.fujitsu.com%2Ffhp %2Fnews%2F051207.html&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

Ken

I presume that you think this is something that I can actually go out and buy?

You've got to be kidding. They weren't even serious enough about this to do a good English translation. Look, I understand your point, but you don't need to become desperate to prove it.

My points were and are:

1. There are very few sets that you can actually purchase that truly support 1920x1080.

2. Most of the sets that folks ooh and ahh over when viewing HD are providing far less than 1920x1080. You don't need 1920x1080 to get good HD. And, unless you're watching your set from a foot away, your eyes can't resolve the max resolution anyway. The human eye can only resolve 1/60th of a degree of arc. That's why a lot of guys think that their ED sets are just as good as HD sets.

Bob

[kstevens]

I presume that you think this is something that I can actually go out and buy?

You've got to be kidding. They weren't even serious enough about this to do a good English translation. Look, I understand your point, but you don't need to become desperate to prove it.

My points were and are:

1. There are very few sets that you can actually purchase that truly support 1920x1080.

2. Most of the sets that folks ooh and ahh over when viewing HD are providing far less than 1920x1080. You don't need 1920x1080 to get good HD. And, unless you're watching your set from a foot away, your eyes can't resolve the max resolution anyway. The human eye can only resolve 1/60th of a degree of arc. That's why a lot of guys think that their ED sets are just as good as HD sets.

Bob

How do you confuse "announced" with "go out and buy", but since they do have the sets up and running, I would expect them to be on the market within the year. Also, they didn't do the translation, it was done by googles translation engine, maybe you don't have the ability to look at a url and see that. If that is the case, I definitely don't put much credence in your technical opinion. My set is full 1920x1080p. I have at least 4 friends with similar sets. They are easeir to buy now than ever before if you are willing to pay around 4000 for them. Maybe I just live in a high tech geek area.

Ken

[LtMunst]

I *hope* this isn't a result of Dish trying to respond to the "gimme resolution" complaints by tinkering with the bitrates and seeing how low they can go... but it does make me wonder.

The Charlie Chat could be interesting come Monday!


Probably not. This starting happening on Monsters before the complaint threads popped up. It probably does have something to do with Dish's tinkering with the resolutions, though.


-Dish.. Please stop messing around! This is the season when the family comes over and we sit down, drink and watch old B Scifi and Horror. I would like to show off my MonstersHD. Not happening now.

[jrb531]

Well we have gotten a little off topic IMO. All I know is that the quality is downright terrible now. PQ wise, pixelation, audio drop outs, freezing. The Voom channels are officially unwatchable.


Well I cancelled "all" my HD channels. Had a bit of trouble with Dish. They kept wanting to switch me to tech support (was talking to India I'm sure) and I had to keep telling them that there was nothing wrong with my equipment yadda yadda.

Told them I would consider returning if/when Dish put the "HD" back into HD.

What is a real shame here is that, IMHO, many of the Voom chaanels are total crap and most people only watch the Rave's or Monster or Equador's. If they dropped the crap channels they could up the quality of the good stuff. No matter how little the bandwidth is for that stupid HD cartoon channel it's an utter and total waste IMHO.

Either way I had to request to speak to a supervisor in order to have the $5 change fee waived. As I told the CS rep, the way I figure it, Dish ruined the HD channels and I am only cancelling them because they are no longer HD. Heck, DVD's are much better quality now and those are most certainly not HD in my eyes :)

-JB

[Alan R. Pope]

we have to ask ourselves do we want quality hdtv or quantity hdtv.?? i would like both, but for now untill the systems get up to speed i will settle for more hdtv channels, at lower resolution. dish knows the people want full resolution so lets give them a chance to get things going. i believe next year will be the greatest for hdtv. KEEP ON VOOMIN

[kstevens]

And how do you know that once they go down this path, they will ever return?


Ken

[Alan R. Pope]

Keep The "faith", And Pray Harder. Keep On Voomin!

[steelhorse]

Tonight I was trying to watch the Chris Isaak Special on Rave. It was unwatchable because of the video and audio dropouts. This is the worst I have seen. I have clear sky and top signal. I did email dish to see what their reaction would be. I really hope they fix this.

[chipvideo]

All the voom channels for me are getting droupouts. Checked my signal and am getting 80 so it is dish messing around.

[Ghostwriter]

I hope E* doesn't go down the road of the more channels but less quality. Give me a few top quality HD channels. Don't give me more channels that look like top quality SD channels, that defeats the purpose of HD.