 | reply to tschmidt
Re: Rural General Suckitude 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 join:2000-11-12 Milford, NH kudos:5 Reviews:
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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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| 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 join:2000-11-12 Milford, NH kudos:5 Reviews:
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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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