Hi all

I appreciate WIN here in Canberra providing some shows on HD channel. HOwever there seems to be so much pixellation, expecially during fast pans, and also a strange 'shuddering' on some zoom out/vertical pans.

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed this? Doesn't seem so bad on WIN's 'normal' channel (8)

At least the sound, on some HD movies, is Dolby 5.1 on channel 80!!! THough a few weeks ago even that was terrible


cheers

S

It's not just you I'm getting the same problems as well. One of the disadvantages of having a 47' Full HD screen is that a poor quality picture just gets magnified. Hope there's some techs out there that have a better understanding of the sort of equipment regional stations are using and can give us an idea as to why these small regional stations are broadcasting such a poor quality signal. S as you said at least they seem to have gotten on top of the audio problems they were having. Often they'd come back from a break and the soundtrack would be just the rear surrounds.

I think WIN HD runs at 11Mbps* for 1440x1080i, really, it should probably be 13Mbps minimum.

*this is so they can use the one signal everywhere as the link to Tasmania is limited to 19Mbps for them including the SD Channel, which might be 7Mbps

I guess this is where I stamp my feet and cry out that High-Def in Australian regional areas is Third World. The million dollar question is of course, when are these regional stations going to be brought up to a standard that can be deemed acceptable?

probably can't expect that to happen as all commercial networks in metro areas will be starting SD Multichannels next year, i.e. have 2 unique SD Channels and a HD Channel like ABC and SBS and the regional networks will probably be pushed by viewers to show the 2nd SD Channel, what may end up happening is 2 SD Channels each at 5.5Mbps with MPEG 2ch audio and a HD Channel at maybe 10.5Mbps with AC3 sound (DD Audio) with 5.1 capability at 448Kbps though regional networks may only use 2ch DD at 256Kbps.

So in other words, us metro people could soon be feeling the pain that you're already feeling, hopefully the broadcasting will work in such a way where it's either 2 SD Channels being Broadcast or 1 SD Channel and 1 HD Channel, i.e. 2nd SD Channel and HD Channel timeshare, if that's not the case, hopefully they opt for 720p for HD and not go back to 576p, otherwise HD may as well not exist.

Jeez I'm beginning to see why so many of the Pay TV crowd often make that flippant remark that FTA TV in Australia is dead. If the regional networks take on an extra SD channel knowing our luck it may well exacerbate the problem. When you find yourself swapping back to the SD feed because it's actually better than the HD feed you know your living in the dark-ages. On a serious note perhaps capping the HD feed to 720p as opposed to a pixilated 1080i signal may go someway to alleviating the problem with WINHD. I've noticed that all the HD torrents of TV shows from America that you can pull off the net are all 720p files so I'm guessing that in the States the networks have perhaps realised 720p for the moment is the best compromise.

Is this correct? I have a full HD plasma and it displays "dot-by-dot" on this channel. My plasma only does this for 1920x1080i/p signals.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the Win HD loop looks great. However, I'm not sure if I can recall a movie on Win HD that looked great. Certainly nothing that looked as nice as Toy Story 2 last night on Prime HD.

pi

The HD demo loop looks great because on the large part its made up of slow pans and still shots. I think you may find that not only is WIN's HD fairly low bit rate (although 7 QLD's HD bitrate is comparable and it looked far better when I was watching) the bit rate of the content WIN receives from 9, not necessarily because of 9 probably a WIN $$$ issue, is also low. Two low bitrate compression runs does not produce good results.

Looxury!
At least you have 5.1.
Since they (WIN) moved operations for STW (Perth) to Wollongong we no longer have 5.1 HD.