At 11:57 AM -0400 9/29/05, John Golitsis wrote: >Surely you know better than to post such claptrap. > >I'll ask you two stupidly obvious questions: What affect did the >conversion to 720p have on the 1080i image? What was the bitrate of >the HD program stream delivered by your local CBS affiliate, versus >the bitrate of the ESPN broadcast? This is not clap trap...just reality. There is no question that inter-format conversions can impact image quality. There is ALSO no question that de-interlacing is an imprecise art at best. I have the SA box set-up to pass through the actual broadcast format, as my Samsung HD display seems to do a slightly better job with the inter-format conversions. Some of the interlace artifacts I was seeing are no doubt the result of these inter-format conversions; the same was true for my first HD capable display which I only used to de-interlace analog STDV sources. This is the unfortunate reality of having an DTV standard that includes interlaced formats. But many interlace artifacts are inevitable, irregardless of the display format. Interlace is a crude compression scheme with many drawbacks, INCLUDING a significant reduction in compression efficiency, which i believe to be the problem at the heart of my earlier posting. I do not have any way to determine the bit rates of the respective sources. I DO know - from conversations with the local technical staff - that Cox cable is no longer doing interformat conversions and recompressing HD sources to deal with the limitations of the first generation SA boxes, which only supported 1080i. To the best of my knowledge, Cox now passes through the bits they get; and to the best of my knowledge the local CBS affiliate is using the entire transport stream for CBS HD broadcasts. The fact that the quality of 1080i sports broadcasts is compromised relative to 720P is not some new revelation. I have observed this in many demonstrations, at many facilities, in recent years. I have observed nasty 1080i interlace and compression artifacts in major demonstrations at NAB and in other forums over the years. The only thing that is "new" here is that I can now observe these same problems on the TV in my family room. The compression artifact i observed were very real. They were NOT caused by local image processing. They MAY have been caused by mishandling and/or processing of the compressed video during distribution. I have not observed similar problems with other 1080i programming from CBS, NBC, or Discovery networks - This is simply the reality of pushing 1080i beyond what is desirable given the application and the available bandwidth. 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.