8 New HD RSN Channels Added 7/11

Wait until Goaliebob sees this...

I'd hate to see him go through all that time fighting overseas and then have a heart attack from excitement.
 
Comcast Chicago HD? That sounds nice, but I bet it isn't at the 61.5?W orbital location, is it?
 
New compression algorythms.
Sorry, but no.

The Discovery quadruplets appear to broadcast 4:3 SD content at a crop that leaves small black bars on either side. Maybe 15:9. Looks to me to be a straight crop and not stretched. The crop also appears to be dynamic; I've seen it jump around to different ratios during commercial breaks. It looks like it could be doing a straight 16:9 crop on 4:3 commercials filmed with black bars on the top and bottom (phony HD). I saw some commercials at full 16:9 that sure didn't look HD.

One thing I don't understand is why older shows like Mythbusters -- which has been shown on Discovery SD with black bars on the top and bottom for years -- are being broadcast with the small black sidebars instead of in full 16:9 (especially if they are using some sort of dynamic crop).

I guess we'll cut them some slack in their first few days. ;) Especially since what they do show in HD is almost all stuff we haven't seen in HD before, on HD Theater or elsewhere. If I'm not mistaken, it's the biggest single simultaneous rollout of related networks into HD that we've seen so far (other than the Voom networks, which don't have to deal upconverting SD into as they don't broadcast any.) And I guess HBO's upcoming HD launch will be bigger as well.
 
WHAT!? MPEG4 doesn't govern the aspect ratio. Even MPEG4 480i SD works just fine.

Not to get techie but there is a flag built into MPEG4 just as MPEG2 does that tells a player what aspect ratio to use. AFAIK as yet it has never been used. Those that encode their own vids can set it. But there is no guarantee that any player will honor it much less look for it. Then again, I have never had or used a standalone mpeg4 player, so maybe those do.
 
Mine seem fine

Why do the new HD channels not fill the whole screen most of the time? It's not 4x3 and it's not 16x9 either.

I have an ATT Homezone HD (622HZ) receiver and all the Voom HDs fill the screen. Changing the boxe's Aspect Ratio while watching them does nothing. I do get bands at the bottom and top on some movies but I think that is do them being Letterboxed Wide Screen content. I have a Samsung FP-T5084 1080p that does a very good job of automatically formatting whatever is thrown at it. I've read the 622HZ and VIP722 use a newer chip for MPEG4 that may make a difference.
 
Isn't it time to unpin or rename this thread. They even added one additional HD RSN since this was put up.
 

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