Start.ca → Re: [TV] Sports are borderline unwatchable

The sports channels seem to be 720p60

Issue was identified with channel 403 and 407 where the de-interlacing wasn't applied at all at the time. Having just finished migrating 100+ channels these two were an honest mistake. This issue was fixed yesterday and should no longer see a problem.

Thanks Gabe, glad the issue was identified and rectified, and the transparency is very much appreciated.

ahh ya i double checked roccas post he said they were moved to 720/60p he said they were still waiting for hardware to upgrade sound to 5.1 and and video to 1080p. he said 2-3 months in june so guess by sept maybe.

Gabe can you remind us what these 100+ were migrated to?

The 100+ channels were moved to our new transcoding platform.

Transcoding is when you take signals from the networks in MPEG2/4 unicast, and change them into HLS/MP4 which is the format that the STB's, phones, tablets, etc use - ie it breaks the source stream into multiple video quality formats (for different resolution devices/internet capabilities), deinterlaces any interlaced content and a few other things, like audio, close captioning, etc.

While we're currently only using this hardware for 720p, it's enabled us to move high action video to 60 frames per second, and once we've completed some other capacity upgrades on our streaming platform (ie the pieces that take this content and deliver it to each customer), then we'll be able to move channels to 1080p as well as launch 5.1 audio. The new platform also has a bunch of other backend improvements in terms of scalability, reliability, fail-over, maintenance, etc, that will improve the overall experience for customers as well.

Please check channel 136 CHCH for the same issue. Watching a recorded movie I can clearly see a low frame rate as though every other frame is missing. I can't tell at the moment about live tv because there's no camera panning.
Thanks

Checked 136 and don't see any issue with configuration. Remember that most movies, especially older ones - are recorded at 24fps. So it's quite possible that whatever program was playing at the time wouldn't see the benefit of 60fps.

there is pretty much only been 13 movies ever made that use more then 24fps. not sure on tv shows but i doubt may use it. outside gaming and sports 60fps really no one cares all that much for it to become a big deal. even with gaming it was only a few years ago when people really started to care about there frame rates looks at back in the days of nes and snes there was games that ran at such low or choppy frame rates and no one ever really cared all that much.

Checking other channels, I think some channels are still 30 fps and not 60fps, so it's not just movies at 24 fps. On channel 352 CNN, the text crawl on the bottom of the screen is not smooth (not stuttering, just not perfectly smooth) and panning motion is not smooth, but the crawl on channel 351 CTV News is perfectly smooth.