The Secret of HDTV
Submitted by Shelley on Sun, 07/27/2008 - 14:33
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Popular Mechanics has an excellent article of the dirty little secret of HDTV: that there are no true standards or specifications in place defining what exactly is "high definition TV". Because of this, the article's writer, Glenn Derene, writes, the quality of broadcast we get from providers, varies. Considerably.
For instance, compression techniques can differ, with fast action shows needing more updates than "talking head" shows. Compression can degrade with the faster shows, than the ones that are more "static", and with fewer moving parts. This explains to me why the news shows are the best looking shows on my HDTV.
Comments
Yeah, I remember griping about this to one of the TiVo engineers. I said TV technology has come so far with high end devices like HD plasma and LCD TVs, and now the only signals you can feed to them are heavily compressed. And with the TiVo, the device recompresses the compressed signal, leading to more compression artifacts and degraded image quality. The only way around this was the DirecTiVo, which recorded the compressed DirecTV signal without recompression. But that unit is now discontinued. I'm not sure but I think the HDTiVo can record without recompression.
The only full pristine, uncompressed video ever delivered to consumers was on the old discontinued LaserDisc systems. But the studios hated LaserDiscs because they were essentially a perfect master for pirates to dupe. So they switched to a compressed format: DVDs. Now here's another dirty little secret. DVDs are heavily compressed too. And there's no standard for DVDs either. You can get a heavily compressed DVD, or a lightly compressed one, and the picture quality will be quite different.
My new TiVo HD hooked up to Verizon FiOS digital cable doesn't recompress signals; it records exactly what comes down the line. And Verizon doesn't compress the signals it receives from broadcasters; the fact that they're using fiber to the home means they've got bandwidth to burn. Not to say that the video is uncompressed, but at least it's only compressed once. The resulting video looks pretty good. It's not like being in the studio, but nothing ever is. It's a damned site better than anything else I've seem from the likes of Comcast or Cablevision.
Agree on it being better.
To be honest, I'm still awed by the picture I get from my local stations via my HD tuner. I think when we've been used to seeing analog, any HD, even compressed, looks really good.
In a year or so, we'll be jaded, wanting more. More.