 tschmidtPremium,MVM
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| reply to Oleg
Re: Rural General Suckitude said by Oleg:everyone has digital cable or satellite anyway. As jmn1207  posted about 12% of us rely on over the air transmission.
Conversion to DTV is actually increasing number of people using over the air antennas. OTA typically has better picture quality then Cable or sat because it is not recompressed to reduce bandwidth usage. In addition in these poor economic times I'd be willing to bet some folk are going back to OTA to save money.
/tom |
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| said by tschmidt: OTA typically has better picture quality then Cable or sat because it is not recompressed to reduce bandwidth usage. That is not always true as these 2 Philadelphia, PA channels indicate. Check out the video bitrate column.
CBS isn't compressing and has only 1 digital channel to use their bandwidth.
But ABC cut up its bandwidth to squeeze in more sub channels.
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tschmidtPremium,MVM
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| said by fAcEtIOUs: That is not always true as these 2 Philadelphia, PA channels indicate. Sorry, guess I was not clear. Stations can and often do broadcast multiple sub-channels.
What I meant was programs broadcast over the air are often recompressed by Cable and Sat providers to squeeze more channels into their channel capacity reducing quality compared to what one gets with OTA.
/tom |
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 djrobx
join:2000-05-31
Valencia, CA
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| reply to fAcEtIOUs
8.6mbps MPEG-2? Yuck!
Problem is, cable or sat is going to use WPVI's 8.6mbps ABC broadcast as their source. So no matter where you go, it's going to, at best, be that same 8.6mbps crappy quality, perhaps with even more artifacts introduced if it's transcoded to MPEG-4 or pushed through a cable company compressor to guarantee WPVI doesn't change their mind and up the data rate. It's unlikely that TV providers are going to go through the trouble to get their encoding equipment installed at a point prior to being compressed for OTA transmission.
You have, however, perfectly illustrated why I cringe when people say OTA is superior because it's "uncompressed". As you've shown it may be compressed quite severely! Many cable systems just remux the same quality data onto a QAM stream.
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tschmidtPremium,MVM
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1 edit | said by djrobx: I cringe when people say OTA is superior because it's "uncompressed". Agree, most people don't realize an uncompressed 1080i or 720p raw bit stream is over a Gigabit per second. Lossy compression is used to reduce it to around 20 mbps.
Compression can be used to reduced data rate to anything desired. However, greater the level of compression the poorer the image/motion quality.
/tom |
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RayWPremium
join:2001-09-01
Layton, UT
kudos:1 | reply to tschmidt
said by tschmidt:Conversion to DTV is actually increasing number of people using over the air antennas. OTA typically has better picture quality then Cable or sat because it is not recompressed to reduce bandwidth usage. In addition in these poor economic times I'd be willing to bet some folk are going back to OTA to save money. /tom My neighbor put up an outside antenna just for that reason, much better signal than Dish or Comcast, but he kept Dish for the extra programming he gets.
We and a few of our neighbors who have gotten the boxes have seen a bit better signal on the digital modes than with the analog. But the digital modes do have some odd display formats (vertical letter box vice horizontal?), but that may just be the wife not wanting to adjust for the different modes with the control. (caveat: I do not watch TV very much, very little worth watching any more)
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| reply to tschmidt
I would switch to DTV if we could get signal. I wonder if we could get a big enough antenna to get signal 70 miles away. |
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tschmidtPremium,MVM
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| said by wcnghj:I wonder if we could get a big enough antenna to get signal 70 miles away. 70 miles may require Herculean effort, unless you or transmitter are very high.
Check out the TVfool site and see what estimated signal strength is. If estimated signal is better then about -110 dBm you have a chance. Try modeling at different heights. But putting up a tower is expensive. At that distance weather will be a factor so no matter how good the antenna you may not be able to get good signal 24/7/365.
Good Luck
/tom |
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