[opendtv] Re: TV Technology: Why ATSC 3.0? Opportunity!
- From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2016 09:53:52 -0500
On Dec 28, 2016, at 9:21 AM, McDonald, J Douglas <jdmcdona@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Do you really believe "2K (1080P) with HDR and WCG is where content will
move over the next decade"?
Homestly?
For broadcasters? Absolutely.
There is no incentive to offer more, except perhaps for some high value
episodic shows; even here they will be mastered in 4K and released at lower
resolutions as appropriate. You might see some of these show released for
streaming in 4K.
But more important there simply is no need to deliver 4K, frankly for almost
all consumer applications. You don’t need that much resolution for screens
smaller than 100” diagonal. The displays may well be 4K, but they will upsample
good 2K just fine.
Consider that cable at the moment seems to be, at best, a 1080i stream
prefiltered before
transmission down to about 1080 (with a really bad Kell factor) x 1200 and
using perhaps 5Mbps,
and OTA ATSC seems to be almost as bad (i.e. two "HD" and two "SD" channels
in one ATSC 19 Mbps)
channel. At "usual" our Comcast "HD" channels (e.g. look at Fox News) seem to
be 360x640 with really
really bad MPEG artifacts (i.e. dark areas seem to change only 4 times per
second, no time interpolation at all!).
Yup. The hype for 4K does not match the reality of what is being distributed.
Note that I am not saying everything will be 2K with HDR and WCG; I am saying
that this is likely to be the BEST that will be distributed to the masses by
broadcasters and the MVPDs.
Those bad channels, like Fox News and many others, are just as watchable on
my 1954 COLOR TV
(i.e. with only 250,000 or so color triads) as on my top notch plain 55 inch
HD Sony. And they would be
even better on a 1951 COLOR TV using the CBS field sequential system (yes,
I've seen those, including myself live on one,
and almost bought one last summer.)
Yup. I was amazed how good analog cable looked just before it was shut down
here in Gainesville. They downsampled the HD, even letterboxed many channels
and they looked VERY good. A classic example of why it is not the resolution,
but the quality of the delivered samples that matters. Digital compression
throws away picture detail and replaces it with correlated noise, then worse…
Or they pre-filter all the detail away before it reaches the encoder.
I'd be happy with REAL 720o or 1080i at high bit rate. At least its better
than 1951 color TV.
720P is still the best format for 60 frame content available to ATSC
broadcasters. Interlace is almost dead..we really need to stick the fork in it
and say its done! What is very instructive is how good the 480P stuff that is
being streamed today looks. The reason is simple - They give it enough
bandwidth to deliver high quality samples (i.e. they do not over compress0>
You folks are now talking about the cloud-cuckoo land of "standards that are
actually 'filled up'
with information" rather than reality.
At first I thought you were telling us that 2K was not enough; that 4K would
become the new reality. Then I realized you were just acknowledging the reality
that the old media is strictly after the lowest common denominator..
Regards
Craig
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