Analog vs Digital TV

[J. Baker]

Here are my thoughts on this...

SDTV and HDTV sounds great. And it looks good when viewed through an antenna. But, in my area anyway, SDTV looks like crap when viewed through the cable provider, such as comcast. The picture looks much better with the older analog signal. While the HDTV video looks good through the cable provider, it still has that compressed effect. Which kills the quality if finer detail.

So I'm assuming my cable provider is recompressing the signal. Because like I said, over-the-air looks alot better. Does anyone else notice this?

I just don't feel that I would want to continue paying my cable provider if the older analog signal is going to look better then digital, coming this February.

Please post your thoughts and maybe some of you are getting better quality from your provider.

[edDV]

Here are my thoughts on this...

SDTV and HDTV sounds great. And it looks good when viewed through an antenna. But, in my area anyway, SDTV looks like crap when viewed through the cable provider, such as comcast. The picture looks much better with the older analog signal. While the HDTV video looks good through the cable provider, it still has that compressed effect. Which kills the quality if finer detail.

So I'm assuming my cable provider is recompressing the signal. Because like I said, over-the-air looks alot better. Does anyone else notice this?

I just don't feel that I would want to continue paying my cable provider if the older analog signal is going to look better then digital, coming this February.

Please post your thoughts and maybe some of you are getting better quality from your provider.

Cable quality depends a lot on local conditions. But yes 6MHz analog NTSC can look better on a good comb filter TV than ten 524x480 SD MPeg2 channsls sharing 6MHz (about 2-4 Mb/s vbr each). Satellite is worse.

Likewise HD over the air arrives at ~12 to 19Mb/s depending on the station while cable delivers 10-18Mb/s depending on whether they stuff two or three HD channels into a 6MHz RF channel.

With that said, what are your choices after Feb17? All cable will be digital fed from TV stations and the digital to analog conversion will be done by the cable provider. There will be no analog broadcasting,so where do you plan to get your analog?

I've got a fiber to last mile new construction cable system here and the quality is much better than the old pre upgrade system. Also better than the Satellite I've seen.

[videobread]

The Feb 17th switch over may be delayed:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2009/01/08/DI2009010803285.html

Also:

You might want to consider FTA (free to air TV).

http://forums.dsstester.com/vbb/archive/index.php/

[mattr]

I am from australia, and I have a rooftop antenna for OTA television. I also have an SD digital cable service (in australia we use the DVB standard for those who don't know) with a provider called foxtel.

All OTA digital tv here is encoded using mpeg 2. The only digital broadcasts that are in H.264 are the 5 Foxtel HD channels that cost AUD 20 per month. There are probably 50 standard definition channels that we get and a few of them are widescreen channels. In my opinion, OTA SDTV beats cable SDTV any day. I have had mixed results in terms of the quality for the HDTV OTA channels, but it all depends on the source footage. There is and shouldn't be any need for anyone to rely on cable/satellite pay television unless they are in an area where they can not get OTA television. It is fact that in america that pay tv channels are heavily compressed so they can fit in all sorts of channels. I have seen Foxtel HD and it looks pretty good, but there are only five of these channels compared to say 50 for a directv etc. in my experience you will get a better quality HD broadcast off OTA tv.

[guns1inger]

Another Aussie and I agree that our HD OTA is pretty good, on most channels. 3 out of the 5 broadcast 1080i, generally with 2 channel AC3 audio at 448, although sometimes it is 5.1. One of the channels broadcasts at 720p with 2 channel 448 AC3 audio. The last channel, SBS, broadcasts at 576p, which for some stupid reason our pollie's agreed to call HD. The quality of the broadcasts is generally high, given good source material. Bitrates are often around 12 Mbps for 720p and 15Mbps+ for 1080p.

SD doesn't fair as well, with bitrates often in the 4.5 - 5.5 range, although prime time shows might get mid 6 - 7Mbps. The different is noticeable.

Sport seems to suffer the most, with live broadcasts of AFL football looking awful on SD, and passable on HD. I put most of this down to the poor compression at the camera and recording level, not the broadcast itself, as properly encoded movies and television shows generally do not exhibit the same problems. The Olympics was one of the worst examples of HD broadcasting ever, and I feel sorry for anyone who fell for the barrage of advertising in the lead up to coax them to buy HD to watch it. The quality was woeful, with many of the costumes in the opening and closing ceremonies reduces to a pixel blur, and many of the evens, especially swimming, being unwatchable because of the distracting artifacts.

Would I go back to analogue OTA - not on your life. The difference is chalk and cheese. And given analogue gets the same over compressed camera feeds from sporting events as digital does, they get the same artifacts as they hit the stream before they are broadcast out to the masses.

[edDV]

Sorry I missed that you were from Australia. You've got more time to enjoy analog OTA and cable.

The rush is on here to get rid of analog OTA next month and off cable by 2012.

[edDV]

The Olympics was one of the worst examples of HD broadcasting ever, and I feel sorry for anyone who fell for the barrage of advertising in the lead up to coax them to buy HD to watch it. The quality was woeful, with many of the costumes in the opening and closing ceremonies reduces to a pixel blur, and many of the evens, especially swimming, being unwatchable because of the distracting artifacts.

I'm surprised by this since it all orignated in 1080i at PAL frame rates. We suffed frame rate conversion here but overall the quality was quite good. NBC carried it on five channels (two in HD).

[guns1inger]

Unfortunately all I have now is SD DVD footage, but we watched a lot of it live and recorded it on the DVDR for the kids to watch later. Anything with a lot of movement just turned into pixel soup. I don't know where the quality died - it could have been compressed in the satellite feed, or re-compressed here before going out, but at it's worst the best way to describe it was like watching 1080 youtube videos.

[edDV]

I've got several DVDR's of original TS clips.

[guns1inger]

These were recorded through the DVDR from the HD STB, so they were already downscaled to SD at that point. I should have grabbed some of the live feeds on the PC instead so I could post them, but too late now.