freeview is crap?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Got a box yesterday, and yes, all worked perfectly DESPITE the istructions, and Tony Sayers antenna recommendations and advice carried over seamlessly from analog to digital...

..But shock horor! The picture is SHARPER ON ANALOGUE. Ok I thought, shopping channel is low bandwidth, so lets try Ch4.

Nope. Still lower qualiy than analogue.

What about beeb 1? Nope. Lower quality than analogue.

And we are going to be forced to have this crap?

I mean,VHF was miles better than AM. 625 UHF was miles better than 405 VHF.

Why this downgrade?

We have HDTV that will do better resolution than anything broadcats, why are we lowering teh broadcast standards?

WHO do you write to, to complain..

[Dave Plowman (News)]

The available video bandwidth *is* greater on Freeview. However, if the source material isn't producing anything that can make use of it, then you can't posssibly see it.

If your picture is consistently 'sharper' on analogue, and you're feeding the Freeview box into the set RGB, then your set is 'ringing' - it's set to peak up HF. May be called sharpness or similar. This control has no effect on an RGB signal. Set it to normal and then do a comparison.

If you're feeding the box via the aerial input, forget any possible improvement.

[Bob Eager]

Same bandwidth, more channels, less information. Ask Mr Shannon! Or I am sure Mary will say: "You can't get owt for nowt"!

Actually, our picture has improved, but that may be the antenna upgrade I was forced to install....! The BBC mux is patchy here in East Kent, though, and we lose signal occasionally.

[Lee]

Our tv has this "feature" and IMO it makes the analogue picture look worse rather than better. At least it can be turned off on this model ;) Seems to be a common feature though, so I suppose people must like it.

Lee

[Huge]

Because the vast majority want quantity over quality. Hence more channels per multiplex rather than more quality per channel, the same on DAB and the overwhelming popularity of MP3 - it might be fine for listening in dire environments (the car, Tube, etc.) on crappy equipment (in ear headphones) but it's a crummy way of storing music.

I would say that Ch.5 is *way* superior on FV than analogue where we are and well worth the £10 I paid for the Digibox. (A s/h Nokia.)

[Tim S]

Yeah.

In west kent: had the arial re-aligned (but not remounted externally, as recommended) to a transmitter 1.5 miles away (low power relay).

Can get BBC mux perfectly (and most others), but ITV mux is utterly knackered. One other thing that I've noticed, playing through a PC TV card is that practically every channel seems to have a different idea of aspect ratio. That's showing up because beeing a tightwad, I'm using xine under linux, so it's not doing much in the way of auto correction that a freeview box would.

The great thing about digital is that one can apply variable amounts of compression to optimise the use of available bandwidth.

The crap thing about digital is that one can apply variable amounts of compression..."

So, coutesy of commercial interests and lax regulation of quality, I can now receive 1/2 dozen additional good channels of variable transmission quality and another dozen channels of absolute trite, devoid of quality in both content and transmission.

Only bothered so I could get UK History and BBC3.

Timbo

[logized]

Have you checked the TV scart socket is set to RGB?- if not, then it is probably using composite input which is not good.

I agree that the quality has never been brilliant (it was much worse in the days when ONDigital tried to cram in too many channels) It has improved a bit since the BBC insisted on increasing the channel bandwidth for the Freeview launch - but it is still a compromise to have as many channels as possible in a limited bandwidth. It could be improved when eventually analogue is switched-off (this could provide bandwidth for some HDTV channels) but realistically, they will probably just sell-off the channels to phone companies etc.

Dave

[Owain]

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote | ..But shock horor! The picture is SHARPER ON ANALOGUE. Ok I thought, | shopping channel is low bandwidth, so lets try Ch4. | Nope. Still lower qualiy than analogue. | What about beeb 1? | Nope. Lower quality than analogue.

Of course it is.

| And we are going to be forced to have this crap?

Yes.

| I mean,VHF was miles better than AM. 625 UHF was miles better than 405 VHF. | Why this downgrade?

The lower the bitrate for each channel, the more channels you can get on a multiplex. The more channels on a multiplex, the more money the multiplex owner can get.

If you think DTT is bad, look at (listen to) DAB. Radio 4 in *mono* FFS.

| We have HDTV that will do better resolution than anything broadcats, why | are we lowering teh broadcast standards? | | WHO do you write to, to complain..

Ofcom. Like they'll do anything. They will tell you about how More Choice For The Consumer is a Good Thing, and how they regulate the broadcast industry with a Light Touch. With an election coming up, you don't think the Govt are going to risk upsetting the media and have the Sun tell its readers (?) to vote Tory do you...

See you over in uk.tech.digital-tv

Owain

[Bob Eager]

The best comedy channel is price-drop.tv ...!

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Yes. But then many don't know what they're looking at. It might have some uses on a set too far away from the optimum viewing distance, though.

On one of my sets, the sharpness control is variable, and is still ringing in the mid way position where all the other controls are 'normal'. Setting it to minimum cures things.

[tony sayer]

In article , The Natural Philosopher writes

Welcome to the world of digital broadcast:(

Well the UK world that is..other countries seem to do it better. Nothing wrong with digital transmission, just the way they chick away the bits:(

Cos they can and it saves them money and they can cram more channels in the same space and make more moolah.

OFCOM.. But it'll be a waste of time as the big broadcasters call the shots with OFCOM in one way or another;((

[tony sayer]

In article , Dave Plowman (News) writes

Poor old Dave lives in a very dodgy area for analogue reception and I doubt he has seen analogue TV at its best. If he had I very much doubt he'd be telling us how good digital is.

And its not that much to do with sharpness perceived or otherwise. The actual colour rendering is quite bad most of the time. There being about three grades of colour that pass for skin tones:...(

[raden]

Ah, but Shannon's law got broken didn't it

(by someone I shared digs with years ago)

[bof]

In message , raden writes

It did?

Who, when and how???

[Derek *]

FWIR horizontal resolution was rather better on 405 than 625. Vert. resolution on 625 Lines was OTT compared to Horiz.

They do tend to go inexorably downwards.

I suppose when you are corresponding with your Aunt Agatha you keep sending her 25 A4 sheets per second even if nothing has changed, indeed, even if they are *blank*, because it makes the message more accurate?

That's the equivalent of what an analogue TV transmitter is doing.

Alternatively you could simply write to Aunt Agatha as and when needed and tell her what has changed (IE budgie died).

That's more/less the equivalent of what a digital transmission is doing.

Of course this can be done in a high quality way or it can be rubbish.

On the contrary around here they say

"Eat all, sup all, pay nowt. See all, hear all, say nowt. An' if thee ever has to do owt for nowt always do it for thee sen"

Good.

DG

[raden]

In message , bof writes

20 years ago by a certain Graham Davies

He now lives in the States and makes a lot of money

[JJ]

Digital has at least the potential to be a quantum step up in quality. Remember that even in it's bandwidth-starved state at present, it's still a component signal avoiding all the horrible nasties of PAL composite.

I wonder how many digital viewers actually use the composite output from the freeview box......?!

JJ

[Mike]

($Argument on) No it isn't ! The MPEG compression algorithm applies a 2D band-pass function to the data set before compression. This alone is less than the analogue bandwidth even before the bit reduction schemes are applied ! ($Argument off)

Of course there are other effects such as analogue noise which are worse on analogue but bandwidth isn't one of them.

It's a repeat of CDs where 16 bit samples were used even though everybody knew 22.5 bits were needed.

I for one am dreading the analogue switchoff.

[Mike]

That many ? :-)

How ? The MPEG signal has a more quantised colour palette with less reach to the extremes (the pre-1993 Ferrari GP colour, the red dress in hotel foyer in "Pretty Woman" and uniforms in "Star Trek 6" always used to be tests of how good your algorithm wasn't !)

Well I've tried it for one. Simply cannot watch it.

[Mike]

Not that guy in the mid 80s with the 68000 box who claimed to store gigabytes in a small memory using 3D vectors.