It's Official! NBC HD Sports Pic Quality "SUCKS"

[DefDude]

Last night I watched the Saints game that was on Cox Sports Television-"CST". CST :: Cox Sports Television It was on my local NBC station, the picture was great. Tonight I'm watching the Vikings and 49's game from "NBC" on the same local and the picture just sucks. When ever they show a player running, especially in a close up shot, the picture just disintegrates. I've posted about this before and there was discussion about it could be the local NBC station, but now I know it's NBC's problem. All of their sports have this problem. I was wondering if anybody knows for sure why they have this problem? When they go to commercial or to the studio, the picture is perfect, so it must have to do with their up link from the games themselves. CBS also has the same problem. Fox, ABC, ESPN and NFL Network all look good. Its just NBC and CBS which are 1080i that have this issue, ABC, ESPN, and Fox are 720P. When any games from NBC and CBS are on NFL Network, they don't have this problem, I know I've recorded from both channels and the difference is very apparent. I get my HD locals from Dish, OTA and from Cox cable and the NBC picture sucks on them all, so what is going on? The picture just looks weak!

 

[space86]

NBC has old HD equipment in their control rooms

 

[whatchel1]

Uplinker

Last night I watched the Saints game that was on Cox Sports Television-"CST". CST :: Cox Sports Television It was on my local NBC station, the picture was great. Tonight I'm watching the Vikings and 49's game from "NBC" on the same local and the picture just sucks. When ever they show a player running, especially in a close up shot, the picture just disintegrates. I've posted about this before and there was discussion about it could be the local NBC station, but now I know it's NBC's problem. All of their sports have this problem. I was wondering if anybody knows for sure why they have this problem? When they go to commercial or to the studio, the picture is perfect, so it must have to do with their up link from the games themselves. CBS also has the same problem. Fox, ABC, ESPN and NFL Network all look good. Its just NBC and CBS which are 1080i that have this issue, ABC, ESPN, and Fox are 720P. When any games from NBC and CBS are on NFL Network, they don't have this problem, I know I've recorded from both channels and the difference is very apparent. I get my HD locals from Dish, OTA and from Cox cable and the NBC picture sucks on them all, so what is going on? The picture just looks weak!

It's the company that's doing the uplinking from the site. I could be several different things. So it's hard to say why.

 

[tigerfan33]

NBC has past CBS in the pq dept. in Birmingham.
Didn't NBC change their equipment a few years ago??

 

[whatchel1]

In the stations

NBC has past CBS in the pq dept. in Birmingham.
Didn't NBC change their equipment a few years ago??

they changed out the equipment for the OTA stations just last year. As far as the receive end from uplinks I can't say for sure.

 

[DefDude]

A picture is worth a thousand words

Favre is not even moving ! The Saints pic is for comparison. Both on pause. Not great pics, but you get the idea. Same local channel.

 

[GoWulfpack919]

Looks fine to me here.

 

[tigerfan33]

May have a sub channel draining the pq?

 

[cditty]

Looks good on NBC for me right now.

 

[DefDude]

Here's some players close up running????

Red is really bad.

 

[DefDude]

May have a sub channel draining the pq?

Like I said it's the same channel as last night.

 

[cditty]

It's definitely not NBC national. Because of your comment, I am looking for problems and finding nothing. I'm watching on a LiL, as well... Not a raw OTA feed. The particular channel I am watching is WVLA 33 from Baton Rouge, LA

 

[DefDude]

Maybe CST is a 720P feed, that could explain it.

 

[gqmagic]

It has to be your area, in mine it looks great Dish ota, and on my sets ota

 

[DefDude]

Mine looks great too except when they have a close up shot of someone running. the wide shot look's good, the close ups look good , it's the close up fast pans that break down. Here's a close up of a non moving shot. the camera is adding a little screen door effect, it's clearer in person.

 

[cditty]

I could see what you were talking about if I walked up to my TV (like 1-3 feet from the 46" Screen). I couldn't see it at all when I was my normal 10 feet away.

 

[coltfan]

I live in Illinois and this was one of the main reasons I left Comcast for Dish. Comcast techs came out half a dozen times to try to fix the problem. It's the same as you described...mostly action shots and red colors are the worst. Picture just looked horrible. I thought maybe Comcast compressed the NBC signal more than the others. However, I still notice the problem on Dish, although not as pronounced. But NBC is far worse than the other channels.

 

[DishSubLA]

While watching the XGames on ESPN, I noticed some pixel and breakup. It was annoying, and I was thinking it might be Dish. After watching for several minutes, it was clear to me that the problem was with ONE camera. The problems could have easily been blamed on Dish or DirecTV or cable.

The point is that, as this thread makes clear, a lot of the problems with HD PQ can just as likely be with the source: a bad camera, switcher problems, the signal run from the event handled by the phone company and its equipment and switches to the uplink, the uplink itself, the turn-around signal, then the downlink signal to the network, then the uplink signal from the network, then the sat used for the up and downlink.

I really do think that I have seen some bad PQ and HD pixelating that many on this board blame on Dish, but are the fault of the program producer.

For what it is worth, contrary to what many think, ATSC OTA is NOT perfection. Our local KABC can suffer from some compression artifacts on the main HD channel because the are cramming in the Living Well channel in HD at 7.2. KNBC has had some glitchy periods of some surprising compressing artifacts when there is fast movement; 4.2 and 4.4 are in use and look awful. This is all from viewing DIRECTY from the antenna to the TV. One hopes the locals have the best encoders, but even then, MPEG 2 isn't very forgiving if locals are multiplexing.

 

[bgee]

Watching the game, I noticed that the picture quality was not consistent between all their cameras. There was a noticeable loss of picture quality when they did replays from one of the field cameras.

 

[Barry Erick]

NBC has old HD equipment in their control rooms

No, they do not. (The local station may be doing something)This comes from some trucks they use that are NOT HD and get upconverted. Not all trucks have been made HD as yet and they get eaten up quick. NBC does several games at one time and the primary game gets the HD, always. The regional games come next and can get crap. It'll get better with time.
Until a year ago CBS only did the main game in HD and the rest were sent in SD. Now that they've installed a HD plant at TV stations, CBS has solved that problem.

If the local station has more than one channel (11.1, 11.2, 11.3 for instance) they can play with bandwidth to make one channel look better than the other. In this case, you can check what is on the other sub channels and if one has very good video with action, that one has the bandwidth. What is described in this thread is a bandwidth issue. It is throttled back somewhere, most likely the local station.