[opendtv] Re: News: If There's a High-Definition TV in Your Future, Wait Till

At 5:10 PM -0400 8/28/07, Manfredi, Albert E wrote:

Craig Birkmaier wrote:


 I never said anything about 480i... We all know that
 Interlace sucks.


Point being, the only reason to obsess about *not* going to HDTV, which
seems to be your long standing quest, is to avoid having to go to
anything beyond MPEG-2 MP at ML. Once you get beyond that restriction,
it becomes a big "who cares" whether you use 480p, 576p, 720p. These
are, very simply, marginal improvements in image quality, and they all
require MPEG-2 MP at HL decoders.
Actually this depends on the source frame rate. USING MP@ML you can encode either 720 x 480 at 60i or 30P, and you do not need to filter the 30P for an interlaced display. You could also increase the horizontal resolution of 24P source to about 900 samples per line and still live with the 10.368 million sample per second limit for MP@ML.
I tried to create a new profile for MPEG-2 when I was attending the MPEG meetings, but I could not afford to keep playing this "game" as a consultant. The "Progressive Profile" would have had a peak sample rate of 30 million samples per second and would have allowed some very good EDTV formats to fill the huge gap between MP@ML and MP@HL. That being said, you can do these intermediate resolution formats using MP@HL too. But the CE industry does not want to go there, because they are selling big numbers, even if the delivered quality falls far short of the potential. Hence the absurdity of selling a 40 inch 1080P display. 



The term "HD" might make it sound like there's some sort of huge step
improvement between 576p and 720p, but the simple numbers, 576 and 720,
are a much better indication of what's going on than some arbitrary HD
designation.
Agreed. What REALLY exists is a resolution continuum if we keep all other factors equal. The number of samples should scale with the display requirements so that we always see a high quality (sharp) picture, IF the souce is optimized for that display resolution. The other reality is that any display must also present sources that are both of higher and lower resolution than the native display resolution. Lower resolution sources will be a bit softer, and for higher resolution sources there will be detail that may not make it through to the display and on to the viewer. 



In short, I don't understand why it's so important to you to say you
don't need HD. Those guys with MP at ML decoders can't play anyway. And
those with the HL decoders couldn't possibly care less.
You're missing the point Bert. I am NOT saying that we don't need HD. There are many applications that can use the added resolution. Movies just happen to be one where the extra resolution is not generally used or needed. I am saying that most people do not need one of the HD disc formats because they will not see the extra detail. And the majority of people will see sharper pictures than NTSC, but they will not have displays large enough to enjoy the designed HD viewing experience ( i.e. covering ~30 degrees of the field of view with a sharp picture). 

For HD, size matters.

Regards
Craig


----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:
- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org 
- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word 
unsubscribe in the subject line.

Other related posts: