[Tig] Deadwood or HBO snafu?

[Jeff Kreines]

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Thanks to oktobor for supporting the TIG
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On Jul 2, 2006, at 10:45 AM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:


> Your cable company is likely doing head-end recompression in order  
> to fit more channels in the same size pipe and make it easier to  
> insert pop-up adds.  Their primary objective is to make more money,  
> not offer better quality to the customer.  99% of cable viewers  
> either don't have the hardware to see the difference, use hardware  
> which is severely out of whack, or would not notice the problem if  
> they saw it.
>
>

I had been appalled and horrified at the awful compression artifacts  
I was seeing (Bright House cable, formerly Time Warner), especially  
on premium digital channels, with the cable converter box I had -- an  
earlier digital box, no DVR, S-video outs -- forget the make/model).   
I was seening horrible stuff in the blacks -- even a credit roll over  
black would be filled with posterization in the blacks, appearing to  
be a case of reduced bit depth in the signal -- and dissolves were a  
horrifying experience, all of them looked like a wash of large pixels  
morphing from image to image.

But we upgraded to the Motorola DVR box, with HD, and it's a great  
improvement -- ok, the analog channels still have analog noise (why  
not make TCM a digital channel??) but all the compression artifacts  
are greatly reduced or gone.  I had assumed it was HBO's fault, but  
it appears to have just been a bad box.

Saw an HD DVD player at Best Buy yesterday, and there were lots of  
very short duration (1 frame) bunches of black pixels (very visible  
on the program material, which had a white background and lots of  
movement) reared their ugly heads -- not sure if they were  
compression related or something else.  Otherwise the picture looked  
good.

Mixed in with the other HD programming beamed to the other sets was a  
piece from the Springsteen Seeger Sessions DVD (I was ogling the  
lovely Telefunken ELA-M 251 mics, and regretting that I'd sold mine)  
that looked awful -- noisy, dirty -- I'm guessing this is not the  
case with the source material, but with how Best Buy routed it.

HD can look great, and with some of the new sets that are coming (the  
new Sony SXRDs next month will do 1080P and be cheaper than the  
current versions) it may finally catch on.

Jeff "watches HD on my 23" computer monitor sometimes" Kreines



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