[opendtv] Re: Finally anamorphically compressed 480i

  • From: "John Shutt" <shuttj@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2011 09:25:12 -0500

Not so incredible to me. The broadcast world (in the US anyway) is so locked into 480i being 4:3 only that it is almost impossible to make a 480i 16:9 channel work through the entire broadcast chain and keep track of all the aspect ratio conversions necessary. Yes, there is AFD, but that standard was so late in the game that most legacy material is not flagged at all, and so much gear is still not AFD compliant or will even pass most of the VANC that it often gets lost anyway.
One option we were looking at for our station was to broadcast a second HD program stream as a 480p60 16:9 stream, but finding a 1080i30 to 480p60 downconverter was fruitless. The next best thing was to downconvert to an anamorphic 480i30 16:9 stream, which is what you may be experiencing. The entire broadcast chain would be handled in HD (1080i30) right up to the emission encoder, where it would be converted to 480i30 16:9 (incorrectly but commonly called 'anamorphic.') 

John
----- Original Message ----- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2011 6:40 PM
Subject: [opendtv] Re: Finally anamorphically compressed 480i



Craig Birkmaier wrote:


Well, today for the first time ever, I got to see real anamorphic
16:9 SDTV, at very long last. Both of the Euronews streams are now
transmitted that way.


First time ever? Really?

Do you have a DVD player?


I meant from OTA TV. First time ever. Seems incredible.


We can only speculate why some channels are incorrectly compressed.
Could be that this is the way they receive the feeds and they don't
have an easy way to decompress, scale and recompress to do it right.
Good point. The streams come from all over the place, so perhaps the station is just passing them straight through. 


As for hotels, they probably don't get any of this stuff as it is
likely they have cable and most of these sub channels are not
carried...
This particular MHz Networks station is apparently being carried on at least some of the local cable systems. Others have told me they can get all those odd streams on their cable. 

Bert


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