HD Bitrate is under 5 Mb/s for most channels - is this correct?

[3HaloODST]

I am making no claims of proof, as that would require resources in which I am unwilling to invest. However I am offering semi-objective data, from which I can make reasonable conjectures. You are merely speculating.

One of my conjectures is Dish appears to idle their channels at a base rate, leaving a "pool" of available bits that can be dynamically allocated. At the time I studied this particular transponder, the base rate was about 25 + 3 = 28 Mbit/s. The total transponder data rate was 41.2 Mbit/s, including nulls, meaning about 13 Mbit/s was available in the pool. If Dish allocated all of this dynamically, the average video rates would have been about 1.5 Mbit/s higher per channel.

With 8 (or 10!) channels to split up the remaining 13 Mbit/s, one can see the need for caution. On this particular transponder I have seen them allocate up to about 10 Mbit/s to a single channel, although that is very, very rare and only for an instant. More typically they may go up to 7.5 Mbit/s, which they could do on 3 of the 8 HD channels at any given time.

Shaw on the other hand may be more aggressive in using their pool. With only 3-4 HD channels in a 39.3 Mbit/s stream, their compressors have it easier in terms of deciding where to allocate the bits, and harder in terms of fewer statistical opportunities to make room for peaks. But they are willing to allocate, in the case given, virtually half of their transponder to a single channel for not insignificant lengths of time.

Historically Dish has gotten more and more miserly with their HD rate allocations over the 4.5 years I have monitored them. Some here drink Dish's kool-aid and believe their compressors are getting much better, ergo they are able to maintain the same quality levels at lower bit rates. Unfortunately this is not borne out by comparing recordings made of the same source material on the same channel over the time frame. The HD PQ was not outstanding on Dish in 2007, but every year since picture softness and blurring has been steadily increasing. I don't see much hope for this trend to be reversed.

Well, while Shaw may have longer and higher peaks, keep in mind that they in fact may need longer and higher peaks, due to MPEG2 compression vs H.264.

I definitely don't like this new trend of 9-10 channels per transponder... Not one bit. 8 is bad enough, 6 would be ideal IMO, but compared to many providers most of DISH's channels look a good bit better than the competition. Hopefully, if they go with 9-10, it'll be on crappy channels like OWN...

 

[mike123abc]

Shaw on the other hand may be more aggressive in using their pool. With only 3-4 HD channels in a 39.3 Mbit/s stream, their compressors have it easier in terms of deciding where to allocate the bits, and harder in terms of fewer statistical opportunities to make room for peaks. But they are willing to allocate, in the case given, virtually half of their transponder to a single channel for not insignificant lengths of time.

Historically Dish has gotten more and more miserly with their HD rate allocations over the 4.5 years I have monitored them. Some here drink Dish's kool-aid and believe their compressors are getting much better, ergo they are able to maintain the same quality levels at lower bit rates. Unfortunately this is not borne out by comparing recordings made of the same source material on the same channel over the time frame. The HD PQ was not outstanding on Dish in 2007, but every year since picture softness and blurring has been steadily increasing. I don't see much hope for this trend to be reversed.

I noticed in your graphs that Shaw is MPEG2. They would need 1.8x or so extra bandwidth to compete with Dish's MPEG4.

I agree Dish's HD is soft and getting softer. Again as I mentioned it is the number of channels that sells not the video quality. Back when Dish had 2 MPEG 2 channels each at 19.2 on the transponder is when they had the best PQ. But, then they only had 2 HD channels... I have gone through a lot of Dish HD with 6000/811/921/622/922. They really went down hill when they went to more than 2 channels per TP.

Unfortunately I do not see improvement coming. Dish will continue to add more channels as they gain capacity. Look at all those that want full time RSNs... Not to mention any number of other channels not in HD atm.

 

[pendragon]

I noticed in your graphs that Shaw is MPEG2. They would need 1.8x or so extra bandwidth to compete with Dish's MPEG4.

I did try to compensate for this in my earlier post by doubling the H.264 numbers into pseudo "MPEG-2 equivalent rates", giving Dish some benefit of the doubt. Thus Dish's 3.2 Mbit/s becomes 6.4 Mbit/s for comparison against Shaw's 10.8 Mbit/s. My direct frame comparisons on identical material suggest Dish's equivalent rate is actually below 5.7 Mbit/s.

I've given up hope for any improvement with Dish HD, and at the rate they are going they may soon convince me to pull the plug. For some time Shaw appeared to emphasize quality over quantity with only 3 HD MPEG-2 channels per transponder (equivalent to 5-6 H.264 channels on a transponder). However they are now toying with 4 channels on some transponders. I can only hope their eventual transition to H.264 may provide temporary relief.

MP3 and the Internet proved most people are gullible enough to trade quality sound reproduction for convenience, quantity and price. DBS and cable providers seem to think they can beat the Internet in its own game. We'll see how long that lasts.

 

[3HaloODST]

I did try to compensate for this in my earlier post by doubling the H.264 numbers into pseudo "MPEG-2 equivalent rates", giving Dish some benefit of the doubt. Thus Dish's 3.2 Mbit/s becomes 6.4 Mbit/s for comparison against Shaw's 10.8 Mbit/s. My direct frame comparisons on identical material suggest Dish's equivalent rate is actually below 5.7 Mbit/s.

I've given up hope for any improvement with Dish HD, and at the rate they are going they may soon convince me to pull the plug. For some time Shaw appeared to emphasize quality over quantity with only 3 HD MPEG-2 channels per transponder (equivalent to 5-6 H.264 channels on a transponder). However they are now toying with 4 channels on some transponders. I can only hope their eventual transition to H.264 may provide temporary relief.

MP3 and the Internet proved most people are gullible enough to trade quality sound reproduction for convenience, quantity and price. DBS and cable providers seem to think they can beat the Internet in its own game. We'll see how long that lasts.

Your 3.2Mbps figure does not ring true for every HD channel at all. Checking out the bitrates of a single channel is not indicative of the bitrate of all channels. For example, my recent recording of The Office was 1 hour, 3 minutes long and produced a file size of 3780 MB. 3780 / 63 / 60 * 8 = 8Mbps ABR. That would be equivalent to approx. 16 Mbps MPEG2. My recent recording of The Lost World: Jurassic Park was 3 hours 1 minute long with a file size of 7601 MB. 7601 / 181 / 60 * 8 = 5.59 Mbps ABR. Head Rush 1:04 2504 MB 5.22Mbps ABR. Early Today 20 minutes 1146 MB 7.64 Mbps ABR. Captains Courageous 1:34 2853 MB 4.04 Mbps ABR. So it wildly depends on the channel and the program.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

I don't know if this will help or not, but I'll post it. After the uplink activity that happened this week...

From DBSTalk.com:

Good news ... bad news ...

The bad news ... DISH now has three (of 19) transponders on Western Arc that have 9 HD channels on them (not counting mirrors). (There are six 9 HD channel transponders on Eastern Arc and one 10 HD transponder.)

The good news ... on both arcs DISH has removed non-sports channels from the transponders that carry part-time RSNs. This may be a step toward lighting up 24/7 RSNs - or adding more "capacity" so more than 12 channels can be aired at the same time.

Uplink Activity for the Week of 5-16-11 - DBSTalk.Com

I. Have been reporting for weeks that they are clearing off space for rsns. Expect more hd rsn channels to be online by June 15th.

Sent from my iPad using The SatelliteGuys app!

 

[ClarkGable]

While I like the HD picture quality on Dish, I prefer to watch the same program OTA because it seems to be a bit better.

 

[mike123abc]

While I like the HD picture quality on Dish, I prefer to watch the same program OTA because it seems to be a bit better.

Your OTA signal will always be better than Dish's signal. There is always some quality loss when a signal is converted from one format to another, even if Dish did not try to compress it.

 

[MikeD-C05]

Your OTA signal will always be better than Dish's signal. There is always some quality loss when a signal is converted from one format to another, even if Dish did not try to compress it.

That is what I like about the up coming 813 receiver and 110 receiving units. The ability to connect 110s to your main receiver , that you can then connect ota tuners to each 110 box and one to the 813 itself , giving you up to 4 ota channels that can be recorded from at the same time. I would prefer to record off of my ota channels for all my locals,because they do look more clearer and sharper. I presently use my two ota tuners with my 722k to record my local CBS ota in true 1080i and my local ABC ota in 720p. I use the satellite versions of NBC and FOX and CW because they look okay in HD . My ota NBC is being done in 720p by the same ABC station as a sub channel , so the sat version looks better in 1080i . The main reason I "moved" and stay there , is that CW and PBS are both in hd in Houston locals market. My real hometown just has the big 4 nets in hd and NO CW at all and no PBS in hd.

 

[TheKrell]

The ability to connect 110s to your main receiver , that you can then connect ota tuners to each 110 box and one to the 813 itself , giving you up to 4 ota channels that can be recorded from at the same time.

Are we sure about this "USB tuner on the 110" idea? Making it record as well as play implies a substantial backchannel for the 110. For all I know, it has no backchannel at all. Dish might just run stripped-down 110 slaves to the 813, and a UHF remote that communicates all the way back to the 813 instead.

 

[DefDude]

I don't need graphs and charts to see the difference from when dish first started HD and now. I have the same TV "Sony crt" that I had then and the picture quality now is much worse, anyone remember the "bug" channel?
More channels = less quality !

 

[MikeD-C05]

Are we sure about this "USB tuner on the 110" idea? Making it record as well as play implies a substantial backchannel for the 110. For all I know, it has no backchannel at all. Dish might just run stripped-down 110 slaves to the 813, and a UHF remote that communicates all the way back to the 813 instead.

Refer to the thread about the 813 receiver itself and read again: post #9 from Scott G. himself. He says that as far as he knew, all ota tuners would have no limits and they would have full dvr features. ** I just re read some of the thread and Scott said you should be able to record off of 5 tuners at a time. So 3 sat and 2 ota. But he also said you could connect external hard drives to all the 110 boxes and share the content. So that means you could have three 110 boxes with external hard drives + maybe one on the 813 itself. But what I wonder is how does it know which external hard drive to send shows to?

 

[toto]

For those complaing about bitrate. I would be more likely complain about video/audio quality. As technology atvances, I'm not sure the 2 are as connected as one might assume. My example would be VUDUs excellent streaming quality at
1080p (even sequential 3D) at 4.75 to 6 Megabits/sec.

 

[whatchel1]

Refer to the thread about the 813 receiver itself and read again: post #9 from Scott G. himself. He says that as far as he knew, all ota tuners would have no limits and they would have full dvr features. ** I just re read some of the thread and Scott said you should be able to record off of 5 tuners at a time. So 3 sat and 2 ota. But he also said you could connect external hard drives to all the 110 boxes and share the content. So that means you could have three 110 boxes with external hard drives + maybe one on the 813 itself. But what I wonder is how does it know which external hard drive to send shows to?

I would think that each ext HDD will have a unique ID for the 813.

 

[JM42]

from Scott G. himself. He says that as far as he knew, all ota tuners would have no limits and they would have full dvr features...

No offense to Scott, but TheKrell does have a point - we don't know anything for sure. I can hear the complaints now when the XIPs come out that we were "promised" features X,Y, or Z that don't make it into the final product. We have only been given a preview of what they hope to deliver.

I 'm sure Scott is acurately reporting what he was told. I'm sure the people that told Scott that were sincere in their belief in what the final product will be. But the final tally of production, support and marketing concerns may (probably will) change the shipping product.

OTA seems a little troublesome because of the increased bandwidth needs. I can easily see them restricting OTA DVR functions to tuners attached the 813. The round trip bandwidth of a single OTA tuner attached to a 110 and recorded on the 813 would be as high as 38mbps. That is enough to start being concerned about the available bandwidth.

 

[primetimeguy]

For those complaing about bitrate. I would be more likely complain about video/audio quality. As technology atvances, I'm not sure the 2 are as connected as one might assume. My example would be VUDUs excellent streaming quality at
1080p (even sequential 3D) at 4.75 to 6 Megabits/sec.

1080/24p requires less bandwidth than 1080/60i so they have that advantage.

 

[mike123abc]

Remember with every Dish product many promises of features are made. Some never get done. I have my doubts that they will have an OTA tuner on all the 110s. I suspect it will be limited to 2 tuners on the 813. With 3 SAT and 2 OTA tuners that will be more than any Dish box to date. There are only so many streams an inexpensive (yes it has to be a reasonable price to manufacture) box can handle. 5 recording and 4 watching at the same time is a fair bit of work, not to mention if it works with another 813 and 3 more 110s. It in theory have to handle 5 recording and 8 watching (assuming all the 110s and the other 813 want to watch something on its drive at the same time). Who knows what the real limit will be.

I just do not see it being able to handle OTA tuners on all the 110s unless the 110s have the ability to be like a 211 and have local disk and recording capabilities. Not just EHD on 110s.

 

[MikeD-C05]

I also read in the Xip thread that you could, if you wanted to, connect two 813s to the same house and then up to 2 more 110s to each corresponding 813 box. So that means you could record 10 things at a time: 6 sat tuners and 4 ota tuners = 10. That would be more than sufficient to be able to record everything you want on during primetime , and never miss anything. So after re-reading the whole 22 pages of thread , I think that you can hook an ota dual tuner via usb to the 813 , then connect an external hard drive to each 110 box as well. So that is a lot of storage space for archiving. I think the whole idea about connecting ota to each 110 box was a misconstrued idea that many of us , me included , got from some of the posts first put out after the team summit release. I think it makes more sense to connect one ota dual tuner via usb to the 813 than to each 110 box. Five shows at a time should be enough for anybody who likes network tv:Abc/Cbs/Cw/Fox/Nbc.

 

[whatchel1]

I also read in the Xip thread that you could, if you wanted to, connect two 813s to the same house and then up to 2 more 110s to each corresponding 813 box. So that means you could record 10 things at a time: 6 sat tuners and 4 ota tuners = 10. That would be more than sufficient to be able to record everything you want on during primetime , and never miss anything. So after re-reading the whole 22 pages of thread , I think that you can hook an ota dual tuner via usb to the 813 , then connect an external hard drive to each 110 box as well. So that is a lot of storage space for archiving. I think the whole idea about connecting ota to each 110 box was a misconstrued idea that many of us , me included , got from some of the posts first put out after the team summit release. I think it makes more sense to connect one ota dual tuner via usb to the 813 than to each 110 box. Five shows at a time should be enough for anybody who likes network tv:Abc/Cbs/Cw/Fox/Nbc.

PBS?

 

[MikeD-C05]

PBS?

I don't consider PBS an National network like the big 4. But if you wanted it you could add two 813 receivers and their corresponding 110 units and be able to record 10 shows at a time= 6 sat 4 ota.

 

[whatchel1]

I don't consider PBS an National network like the big 4. But if you wanted it you could add two 813 receivers and their corresponding 110 units and be able to record 10 shows at a time= 6 sat 4 ota.

Well that is what many think but you may want to read what I just found. It's an edit from Wikipedia and I was surprised by the statement about PBS.

"Television in the United States has long been dominated by the Big Three television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, but Fox, launched in 1986, has gained prominence and is now considered as part of the "Big Four". The Big Three provide a significant amount of programming to each of their affiliates, including news, prime-time, daytime and sports programming, but still have periods each day when each affiliate can air local programming, such as local news or syndicated programmes. Since the creation of Fox, the number of American television networks has grown, but the amount of programming they provide is often much less: for example, The CW Television Network only broadcasts for ten hours each week, leaving its affiliates free to broadcast a large amount of syndicated programming. Other networks are dedicated to specialist programmes, such as religious broadcasting or services in languages other than English, especially in Spanish.

The largest television network in the United States, however, is the Public Broadcasting Service, a not-for-profit, publicly owned service. In comparison to the commercial networks, there is no central programming arm or unified schedule, meaning that each PBS affiliate has a significant amount of freedom to schedule programmes as it sees fit."