All posts by Christopher Webber
Below are all of Christopher Webber's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
Cheers for the reply,
I can confirm cycling loos as bad on the monitor as it does on the main TV (I watched the Criterium De Dauphine highlights a few weeks back on the main TV and it was the same.
The picture break-up I mentioned is due to the broadcaster pictures and not my feed from Tacolneston, sorry for the confusion.
I have tried to stream from the ITV Player, but that is the most rubbish piece of software on the Internet, it constantly crashes after enduring 8 minutes of adverts and then has to reset meaning another 8 minutes of adverts and then it may finally stream, before inevitably crashing with an 'oops, something went wrong' - so I gave up on it.
Regarding next years retune, I am confused, Brian stated that no channels would be lost, but how can no channels be lost if com7 and com8 will no longer be available if the other muxes do not change to T2 coding, I guess I am showing my lack of technical knowledge again.
com7 serves BBC News HD & BBC 4 HD, so does that mean they will no longer be available after next year?
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Wednesday 28 June 2017 3:42PM
Thanks for your reply, Yes I am watching on a LCD monitor as the wife likes to watch her soaps on the TV.
I am using our old DVB-T set-top box connected via HDMI.
ITV4 usually looks fine, but with the cycling I do still think it is unwatchable, due to the speed of the cyclists, the high range of colours and contrast, it is especially noticeable around the riders and their wheels, there is 100% visible pixelation (spelling lol) which makes it distracting, especially when compared to watching Triathlon highlights on BBC2 HD.
I did some research and ITV4's average bit rate is a paltry 2.1Mbps with a maximum bit rate of 7Mbps and 192kbps audio
Source:
http://www.astra2sat.com/…tes/
As you can see from the table, even the HD on Freeview is just an average of 3Mbps with a maximum of 17Mbps and 128-160kbps AC3, from the table most of the SD channels are very poor bit rates and the 544x576 channels are atrocious imho. No better than a 480p web-stream
I was watching Bruce's Play Your Cards Right earlier on Challenge (544x576 @ 1.6Mbps avg) and as it's a high action gameshow with lots of lights an whooping audience you could see some artifacts and pixelation from the high motion etc.
I understand when they go to T2 it will mean h.264 which is much more efficient, but I am worried the broadcasters will continue to use 544x576 and also end up cramming more and more channels in to the reaming 6 muxes meaning that there will not be much of an increase in PQ.
I am sure I read OFFCOM are also thinking of removing the minimum PQ for the main channels, could we end up seeing BBC1 SD & ITV SD dropping to 544x57 @ 1.4Mbps? I bloody hope not
I do of course know that no broadcaster uses 1080p in the UK, it's all 1080i (but the BBC do sometimes broadcast 1080p 25 in a 1080i wrapper) The BBC drama Casualty for example is 1080p 25 :)