Dish and 1080i upscaling on 4K
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I think that was true for a while, but is now dated information.
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I have posted this in the past but I will repeat it again. I have a Sony XBR-65X900E TV. I receive locals from Columbus, Ohio by both OTA and satellite.
I have tested with my family members and no one can distinguish any differences in picture or sound between the OTA signals and the Satellite signals.
Keep in mind that WCMH (NBC) has 4 sub channels, WSYX (ABC) has 3 sub channels, WBNS (CBS) has 2 sub channels, WOSU (PBS) has 4 sub channels, WTTE (FOX) has 3 sub channels. Remember that an OTA picture will depend on how the station allocates their bandwidth among their sub channels. Dish may be getting their signal by fiber from the station which may be higher quality.
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While technically possible, it's doubtful. HD signals are flowing through the stations at about 1.5Gbps. SD is about 270Mbps. All the signals are going to an encoder which wraps everything up into the 19.39Mbps (including PSIP and other minor fillers) and ships it to the exciter which then goes to the transmitter. Yes, you can send the HD or SD signals over fiber to the LiL pickup, but I'm not sure how much that is happening. More than likely MVPDs would get a fiber feed straight out of the encoder. Even if Dis is getting the 1.5Gbps direct signal, it's going to compress it before sending across the country to their transmission locations.
Whether you or your family members eyes can distinguish a difference in quality, I assure you that the signal you receive through Dish for your locals is a compressed version. Regardless of how Dish receives the local feed, they have to compress it so it'll fit within their bandwidth limitations.
Technically, they transcode the already compressed data stream, which includes decoding/decompression from MPEG2 at X bitrate & resolution and encoding/compression to MPEG4 at Y bitrate & resolution. Both encodings/compressions are lossy to begin with, and there will be data loss going from one to the other, especially at the bitrates Dish is using.
Dish (and others) can make an MPEG4 signal look almost as good as the OTA MPEG2 signal to the untrained human eye, and often they do. However, if your OTA looks crappy to begin with (due to subchannels, etc), it makes it harder to tell the difference since the starting bitrate is low to begin with, and the resulting difference in decompressed data rates will be smaller. What tips me off is how motion is displayed, not that I am trained or perfect in my detection. MPEG2 OTA just looks smoother to me, no matter how high a bitrate the MPEG4 stream is.
Not true. SD channels on my 4k TV with its upscaling is actually more watchable than ever. I run them in zoom mode as most of them are letterboxed.
I wonder if shows like Hogan’s Heros were remastered into HD. It looks so good.
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Actually they were! It was on HD-Net back in the day...
Agreed. The SD channels are indeed more watchable on my 4k TV as well. Additionally, many SD programs, and especially those on Me TV are being shown through an anamorphic lens which has the ability to stretch the 4:3 format into something like a 14:9, hence, the smaller bars on the left and right of the screen, no zoom required. I don't know much about anamorphic lenses but it does seem to make SD much more watchable.
What they did with Hogan's Heroes was to chop a little bit off the top of the 4X3 frame and thus enlarge the picture to almost fill the width.
There were still narrow black bars on each side - no stretching was done..
There were still narrow black bars on each side - no stretching was done..
I posted somewhere here snapshots of M*A*S*H frames from my DVD set and MeTV 14x9. Slightly cropped top/bottom, and slightly stretched. Both.
How an upsized feed looks is also highly dependent on the actual TV you are using.
According to the general consensus on AVS Forum:
- Everyone upsizes 1080i feeds pretty well.
- Sony and to a lesser extent Samsung do a good job with 720p. Visio, LG and most of the other brands do a poor job with 720p.
- Nobody is really good with 480i feeds, GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage out), but Sony is considered better than most.
Of course your TV setting can also seriously affect the results.
All 4K TVs must upsize any feed to 4K before display or else it would just be a small picture in the center of your screen.
According to the general consensus on AVS Forum:
- Everyone upsizes 1080i feeds pretty well.
- Sony and to a lesser extent Samsung do a good job with 720p. Visio, LG and most of the other brands do a poor job with 720p.
- Nobody is really good with 480i feeds, GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage out), but Sony is considered better than most.
Of course your TV setting can also seriously affect the results.
All 4K TVs must upsize any feed to 4K before display or else it would just be a small picture in the center of your screen.
That is not true. If you were to view the ME TV content with the screen format set at normal, you would see large black bars and the people/images would look squished. Set the screen format to stretch and you would then see normal aspect people/images and a picture with the smaller black bars (14:9) aspect ratio. Technically as I understand it, the anamorphic lens compresses the picture horizontally while leaving the vertical alone. I suppose it isn't perfect but it's a darn sight better than zooming and stretching to fill the screen.
But it isn't a darn sight better than just leaving the 4x3 image alone and transmitting with full black bars on the side. Heck, I'd even prefer that they would do what GSN does with their 4x3 content, filling the sides with colors so that people don't complain that the picture doesn't fill their entire tv screen. I'll post some more screenshots this weekend of how butchered the MeTV transmission is. It didn't used to be that way and it was fine before. AntennaTV has recently switched to stretching their 4x3 content to full 16x9. It looks terrible and the only reasonable explanation is to cater to the idiots who don't know any better.
That is fine, just as long as they don't fill the side bars with a blurred zoomed copy of the same video from the center of the screen. I always find that technique to be annoying and distracting. Having said that, I still like what Conan O'Brien did with the side bars on an old episode of Late Night With Conan O'Brien. They had a Pac-Man game being played in the side bars.
I use the Hauppauge PVR1512. BUT, I am going from my portable hard drive, through a VIP612 receiver. Using HDMI cables. I say BUT, because I have recently seen the HDCP protection error message twice the other day just trying to playback a sports event on my VIP722. I could play another recorded event for a few seconds, stop it and go back to the sports event and then it would play. Due to having a single HDMI cable in the wall, I use a HDMI switcher and had just gone from my BluRay player back to my 722 and the 722 may have been unhappy with the handshake routine. So, a newer receiver like a Hopper may or may not be happy with a Hauppauge product. One of the Forums listed a particular HDMI splitter that would split the feed from the receiver to the tv and the PVR and avoid the HDCP issue.
