There is a dirty little secret that has not been discussed by a number of HD television programming providers that they do not transmit a full HD picture at 1920 pixels x 1080i to a compressed signal of 1440 x 1080i or even lower at 1280 x 1080i. Both Directv and Dish Network have lowered the standard. I don't know about cable providers. But with more channels offered in HD and limits on the available bandwidth it goes to reason that they might also compromise the picture quality. Having FIOS I can state that some channels do have reduced picture quality particularly the Lifetime channels. HDNet typically has some of the best quality pictures of all the channels. Over the air broadcast is not compressed. Your thoughts?
No all of those shows were filmed in 480i standard definition. However, a number of films do transition well to HD. The commercials aren't even typically in HD and most are filmed in HD today.
You are misinformed about DirecTV. It does not use HD Lite anymore. Bandwidth for each channel is different.
Verizon has actually come out and said they don't compress or down-rez any channels (that they just pass along what they are given) so do you have a source for your information that Verizon FIOS is transmitting material at sub-HD resolutions? Also stating that over the air broadcast is not compressed is completely wrong. Any transport stream can be compressed and there are quite a few channels that carry subchannels and to conserve bandwidth for other subchannels they compress their main HD channel. Look at PBS for example.
I don't moderate this forum. It's not my area of expertise. I did find the following article in Wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Lite The article states that DISH cut down the resolution from 1920 to 1440 pixels. It appears DirecTV when they introduced the MPEG-4 compression made changes and are broadcasting in 1920 pixels.
May have been overcompression on DISH's part, but Monday's ESPN2 game really lacked that HD "pop" ! To my eye, it looked only slightly better than a 576i game.
The Mod is 1000 percent right, the other idiots who are quoting wiki and google (cause the internet is never wrong) have obviously not checked out Espn2 soccer EPL, terrible, downright terrible, my eyes are going or ESPN has ruined their once great HD
Thought the same thing watching my recording of the ManU-Tottenham game yesterday. Like it was just 16x9 widescreen or something. Really lousy picture. Maybe it was a source issue from the site?
The 4-letter outfit is notorious for putting 16:9 SD video on its HD channels. The FIFA U-20 World Cup Final on ESPNU HD looked like "mush", with compression artifacts everywhere (including the score/clock bug.) == The only viewers who want the UEFA CL to return to the 4-letter outfit are those ESPN3.com freeloaders who live in college dorms.
The entire U20 world cup was a SD signal upscaled for HD transmission and it looked terrible. Just horrible. Some of the best transmissions are for example the Late and Tonight Shows. The Tonight Show has a great picture. ESPN HD quality varies. A lot is quite poor as is FoxSC.
People are confusing two different terms. Compressing the signal and decreasing the resolution are two different things. All digital video is compressed, with cable companies using MPEG2 for the most part, while DirecTV and Dish Network use MPEG4. MPEG4 uses less bandwidth than MPEG2 for the same picture quality. Dish Network uses "HD Lite" while DirecTV did away with HD Lite a few years ago. Look up FIOS and QAM to see why Verizon FIOS has great picture quality. On the flipside, Verizon is at capacity for HD channels.
Well, ironically (since I was complaining about the picture quality), I'd still like UEFA CL to return to ESPN b/c I don't have access to FSC-HD thanks to Comcrap and living in an apartment that doesn't face the right direction.