When it comes to the ABC, Nathan is right.

They are not doing the same as re-scanning 35mm film to digital for Countdown, Rock Arena, Beat Box, GTK, Hitscene, Flashez or with rage VAULT specials as they don't have access to the masters.

The problem is not all distributors do this. A number of them just run the film through a telecine chain hoping to get great results without doing things like cleaning the film first etc.

whether it's worth recording ABC HD depends totally on what resolution the ABC used when they digitised their tapes. In theory it's true that recording in HD is pointless for people recording to DVD but I would hope no one is still using that primitive and bad quality format anymore.

Is still burn to DVD from my DVD Hard Drive and record in SD as well.

The snobbery of recording to Disc is so ridiculous, I am not interested in current music videos so getting a Blue Ray Recorder and recording in HD is absolutely pointless. The quality is hardly bad quality, compared to when i was recording ion VHS with sometimes bad reception in the 90 during January's, recording onto DVD is a trillion times the improvement!

Like Nathan etc I will still with my DVD Recorder, recording in other formats is of no use to material that was recorded 40 years ago or even 30 years ago!.

And like Nathan, if it means having to record in 16.9 I'm not interested. There is already the Watermark in the black box and HD is even worse with it's HD signal and the ABC logo!

Recording to VHS with a TV and rabbit ears antenna good times!

I also like to burn to DVD prefer to have them on a physical format rather then sitting on a hard drive

You can still record in SD with a blu-ray recorder. I have a Panasonic blu-ray recorder (which I use for recording rage in 16:9, as well as other, non-rage programs), and you can set the recording settings for each program, as to what mode you record it in. It can't, though, as far as I'm aware, record rage in 4:3 - unless perhaps you ran a set-top box through it and had that set in 4:3. I use a separate, older model recorder for recording in 4:3.

I had to replace my blu-ray recorder though in mid-2019, after the previous one (after just under 4 years' use, which isn't that much - but I did use it a lot) crashed on me and became temperamental with recording. I upgraded to the triple-tuner model (meaning you can record 3 channels at once). I was worried actually that blu-ray recorders were being phased out (they probably are), e.g. JB Hi-Fi seem to have them as 'special order' on their website. I know people use SD cards, but I haven't yet looked into that.

I have gone discless since early 2017. I transfer files from DVD-RW onto external hard drives, and then re-use the DVD-RW. I still have all of my earlier DVD-R's, but have backed up most (still have a few hundred to go) of them as individual video files on external hard drives (which I then make a back-up copy of when they're full and store it off-site).

The main advantage of storing the videos as files on a hard drive (or cloud storage, if you use that, but I don't currently) is that you can access them at any time without needing to e.g. find the disc they're on. You can also generate lists of a drive's contents automatically, without needing to keep a list of what you have got manually. You also don't need to find space for hundreds of discs each year, which is what I would have had to do had I kept keeping everything on DVD-R.

My main worry with keeping things on DVD only is that the discs may become unreadable at some point. This happened to me with a batch of DVDs I used in 2009, from a 'good' brand (TDK). They were all from the same spindle of discs, but some of them were unreadable by 2013. This has not happened (that I am aware of) with other recordable DVDs I have used. The discs were stored properly, in plastic cases, and do not have scratches, dust, fingerprints etc. on them. I don't know why they stopped working.

Hard drives can also go kaput, of course. That hasn't happened to me yet, thankfully. You always should keep a back-up on a separate drive though just in case.

I have two WD Boxes as well with so many of my Countdown's on it. I use that so I don't have to get many of the Discs out and store my Discs in tubs.

When i burn my Countdown's I usually make 3 or 4 copies of each episode as i am aware that Discs or Hard Drives can fail on you at any given moment, arghhhh ....

My home setup has evolved over the years and one thing I learned is that even when purchasing the best quality blank DVDs and storing them in a cool, dark environment, they sometimes still fail.

Now I use a Synology NAS running Plex for all my media, including of course Countdown episodes!

Think of Plex as your own private Netflix server.

This video explains how it all works...

https://youtu.be/_RlxCc0M6Ko

Grant

From someone who has seen disc burning for a long time......

My tech forum, www.austech.info started its life in the late 90's as cdcopyworld.net, basically a place where people hung out and swapped traded discs.

20 years later, I would be lucky to find a disc that still works (if I could find any that is) That includes cheap and expensive brands of CD-R and DVD-R.

Hard drives have never been cheaper, 1 TB is about $69. Buy a few and have multiple backups, or use the cloud as your backup or ideally both.

Discs are pretty much a dead format, computers dont have DVD drives anymore, cars dont have CD players. People who hang on to dead technology are usually the ones who lose what they have.


And to the topic, I will always record ABC HD. Logos are nothing to remove. Recording on the HD channel gives you 1920 x 1080 with the content still using in 4:3 format. While you can only do so much with what they are transmitting, ABC HD is normally transmitted with more bandwidth than the standard channel. Less bandwidth = worse quality, more compression.

Its hard to believe the tax payer pays a billion dollars for this sub standard bandwidth when you see what some of the streaming services offer.

Everyone says that their discs have stopped working, all mine are in fine working order!

And I make several backups of DVD's of Countdown in January. I don't just make one copy, I make many copies and keep them stored very well, I also have a WD Box so I don't use the discs much and many Countdown's are on the WD Box.

Not all of us are computer savvy and can get rid of logos.

I still also use CD's and I don't have a car. Many of my CD's are worth a lot of money like Koo De Tah and Machinations CD's. I have transferred most of my CD's to ITunes but I keep my CD's and my vinyl.

I prefer physical copies of things. Everyone has their own way of doing things which is fine.

The 1982 Episode of Countdown last night had major tape damage and lines as they are old, no HD is going to correct that so SD for me is not problem. Another 1980 Episode had The Dugites skip because of tape damage which I have seen before with this clip, another thing HD can't fix.

This whole bandwidth does some of our heads in, again .... compared to the 90s recordings we have of a lot of Countdown's that had lines etc, recording in SD on a DVD player is a great improvement and I can deal with it.

I have also noticed with many Countdown Episodes, at the time their access to some videos were of poorer quality compared to some others. Fade To Grey from Visage for instance looks really old on Countdown as is rage's copy and there are many more. No HD can save them, the only thing that has saved some certain video clips that rage have and some that were played on COuntdown are official DVD releases I have where certain videos like Fade To Grey have been cleaned and remastered.

May I add, I had one WD box that actually erased all my Countdown's but that didn't matter as I have them on disc. So the discs actually were more reliable in this incident and I can continue to use them again. I think in the end many of these formats can all of a sudden stop working on you. None of them are really safe which is why I make so many multiple copies of everything.

You will be a nightmare if you have children Jason :). My wife and I have have spent 3 years trying to get rid of her (deceased) fathers record collection. 20,000+. What a nightmare. He died 3 years ago last 1st December, its only just now gone and at nowhere near its value. Record collections are possibly the worst things you can ever inherit and then have to try and move on.

I did mention you can only work with what you are given, and unfortunately it looks like the ABC stored half the episodes out in a tin shed. Nothing fixes things like that, but getting the best you can from what is there is always advisable.

Bandwidth relates to the quality of which it is transmitted. The transport stream on HD from last night shows a very disappointing under 4000 kbps. How you encode your videos makes a big difference to quality, no matter what channel you record from. If you encode them at a bitrate of 1500 and not the 4000 odd it came in, its not going to looks as good as you are compressing it to save space, ie, file size. If you are recording to a box with a hard drive, it probably doesn't give options.

I am not aware of any Countdown videos on DVD that have actually been what I would call remastered (I am pretty sure I have them all). Like everything else, they have been compressed to fit on a DVD. I have actually ripped clips from official Countdown DVD's in whats called "lossless" format to try and get the absolute best out of them that I can. Such as this for example : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2uupKeQCgM

The reason some clips look worse than others on Countdown, particularly overseas clips (very noticable) is due to different television formats. We use the PAL system and the USA use NTSC for example. The clips had to be converted so Countdown could play them and will always look worse in episodes.

Couldn't agree with you more on "Back Up, Back Up, Back Up" , its the only way you are safe from not losing things. But I will disagree with you on DVD reliability. I have lost a lot of irreplaceable stuff from the early days. Not much you can do when that happens, other than to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Disagree all you like, I have had a WD Box wipe everything as well. So nothing is safe as far as I am concerned. I have had no problems with DVD's at all but I know they can fail on you which is why I don't only do one copy. Doing one copy is a no, no, no, nooo, nooooo!

As I said I have multiple copies and I now have two WD boxes with back ups.

And as far as children, I will NEVER have any thank you.

And my vinyl is my most cherished collection next to my Countdown's....

I also know very well about NTSC, again .... some record in HD and some record in SD.

As many say here, HD doesn't look that different for 70's and 80's material and again compared to what I taped in the 90s, SD looks a zillion times better.

By the way, I wasn't talking about Countdown videos on DVD.

I was giving the example of clips such as: VIsage - Fade To Grey and say Depeche Mode - Just Can't Get Enough.

They look very scratchy and of the time in Countdown Episodes and when rage play them as stand alone clips. On Visage's and Depeche Mode DVD Compilations they look a lot fresher. So my point is on a lot of Countdown's you are getting scattered quality everywhere.

All this bitrate business goes over my head and many of us are still happy recording in SD on a DVD Recorder and in 4.3 and seem to get told that we have to do this or that. We are not all going to agree. Most people on here who have tried to record Countdown or Music videos from the 70s and 80s in HD who have compared it to SD have said there is very little difference.

I also don't have a new majorly huge TV as I hate them for 70s and 80s content, it just doesn't work, only new material looks good on them. I have a BRAVIA SONY TV from about 10 years ago and I love it.

And those that record COUNTDOWN and MUSIC VIDEOS from rage in 16.9 with that awful HD logo underneath the ABC logo which is already graffiti is all too much for me.

May I add, I have seen sooooo many videos rage play on their VAULT specials that look like they are from YouTube so they are already compressed.

May I add, when DVDs came out everyone said get rid of your VHS Tapes and in actual fact for me, I have found that VHS tape has been THE most reliable source. I don't record from VHS anymore but still have a VHS player to transfer things to DVD and because I like the look of them. But none of my 90's Countdown VHS tapes or videos I recorded in the 80s and 80s have failed on me.

The whole thing when CD's and DVD's came out of you can scratch them on the floor etc and they still will be in tact is a load of toss of course.

I just take care of things as much as possible and again I can't stress this as much as possible, if you are going to record to DVD like I still do make as mannnny copies as possible and if you can, do store them on a WD Box or an External Harddrive so you are not using the discs too much depending on how ofter you watch Countdown Episodes etc.

I can't put my Countdown's to my WD Box myself as it's too technical for me, my friend does them for me but the ones this January for instance, if he can't do them for me they are just not going to go on my WD Box as I can't do them myself. So I ahve made 3 to 4 and sometimes 5 copies of each Episode of Countdown rage have played.

Takeaway from this thread don't collect vinyl albums no matter how much happiness it brings you as it will be tiresome for the those who inherit them :relaxed:

Its entirely up to you what you do Jason. No one is telling anyone what they can and cant do. I am in my mid 50's, technology isn't something that only young people can understand. While you might not want to learn anything new, maybe some of the others do ?

I collect music videos and have many that are in mint condition compared to what is out there and many that I have improved substantially myself. Lets just say we agree to disagree.

I have collected Music videos for a very long time to and I have many in Mint condition as well.

Personally, I wish they'd bring back analogue TV. I don't like digital TV with all of the pixelation you get sometimes, making it unwatchable. I think it also gives Countdown a more-authentic vibe when you get some interference or something in the background - just like it was back in the 80s! :laughing:

Also, am I the only one here who still records rage on VHS? I don't trust digital technology. I've still got VHS tapes from 1984 that play fine. I wonder how many of your DVDs will still work in 2056! :stuck_out_tongue:

I sometimes think things would be better in analogue for me. If you have a strong signal or cable TV then digital is fine but I live in the Dandenongs east of Melbourne (not in a direct line with the TV towers) so I often cop a pixelated reception from Ch7 which seems to be my weakest reception station. I only have a 7 out of 10 signal when I try to tune it. With analogue I might have gotten a bit of ghosting or snow but I preferred that to pixelation and freezing.

I also find watching shows that weren't recorded in HD (like Countdown) are useless on the new large digital TVs as they look pixelated and poor quality there but when I watch them on my old analogue TV I get a great picture.

I stopped recording on VHS 10 years ago and will probably be forced to stop recording to DVD when they faze that format out. I still have a lot of video equipment though and find it useful quite regularly. I have at least 10 working VHS VCRs, a couple of Betas and a few U-Matics. Just in the last two months an AFL club contacted me to convert a U-Matic tape from 1978 and then a pile of Beta's from 1981-1985 arrived for transfer as well as many people no longer have these machines. The 1981-85 footage was also labelled as football but I found a near complete episode of Rock Arena on one tape from 1984 which will never get shown on Rage as it was a Beatles Special and Rage no longer play Beatles. There were also snippets of music programs or clips on those tapes such as Wrok, Nightmoves, Hey Hey etc.

Video tapes do degrade over time but you can always still get an image off it. Once a fault occurs with DVDs or digital the whole file seems to go.

I almost pity the person who has to clean up after me when I'm gone. Considering that will probably fall to whoever inherits my mess then ordering a skip probably isn't a huge issue if they can't be bothered selling it.

I have an 80s vinyl collection that numbers about 10,000 and I enjoy it and will continue to do so while I'm still on this side of the grass. I doubt it has much value financially but I enjoy it for what it is. I'm not that big a fan of downsizing everything onto HDs and living in an empty little box. I still enjoy reading the physical copies of my music magazines and have 1,000's of them from RAM, Juke, Countdown, Smash Hits, No.1 etc. I enjoy my clutter.

Truly Retro,

I LOVE your post! That is so cool that you still record on VHS!

I stopped recording on VHS in 2009 or so, I got a $1,000.00 Set Top Box towards the end of my VHS taping but recorded a few years with it for Digital and found since digital the pixelation has been nightmarish on some years. So I have always had to have a Foxtel back up.

This year I have had a GREAT run with only one pixelation last night on the first 1980 Episode, every other episode has been pixelation free.

Digital has caused nothing but a lot of trouble and too many options.

SD for me works fine as it is so clear compared to what I used to record with so it's cool with me and yes, analogue was a lot more reliable I must say.

I've been very pleased with my picture this year, no digital problems :-)

I can relate to that still like my books to be actual books not reading on a kindle which seems to be the fashion these days

Well the person who has to clean up after me, if any ...

They will have to have at least 3000 vinyls, all my Countdown discs, all the official DVDs, all my hundreds of CDs, all my VHS tapes, Countdown Club Magazines, Countdown Magazines, The Face Magazines, Stiletto Magazines, my clothes collection and everything else.


While I am living, I don't want to have all my treasured Music etc sitting on hard drives and usb sticks. I want to actually hold them, smell my vinyl and look at the art work etc. That's the whole purpose of being a collector! Nothing beats the real physical aspect of collecting, to actually OWN items.

I do find it convenient to be able especially with Countdown episodes to just choose whatever episode I want to see on my WD Hard Drive Box by not having to look for the disc and just press a button and it's there to watch and also so I don't need to wear put the Discs so they stay in tact. But again, if I don't have a tech friend to put on what I have recorded this year from Countdown then it's not a problem for me to just grab the disc and put it into the DVD Player and watch it as I make several copies of each Episode.

Unfortunately Armin, in a lot of cases it will go in a skip and be lost forever. This is why people need to pass on their collections while they are alive if they can. Particularly if they know other record collectors that may want what they have.

My father in law had kidney disease and had lots of advance warning he was dying. He could have sold all his records (maybe 20,000 all up) but chose to leave it to someone else to do. Me. Loved the bloke, but it says it all about him. Too lazy to do it himself, die and someone else will do it.

I contacted every single record collector/music shop I could find in Victoria and none were prepared to come out unless I guaranteed I would sell them to them. How can I guarantee that when I don't know what they will offer ? I wanted the lot gone in one go and indicated I would be very reasonable on price, but still nothing.

My father in law was a "nickel and dime" collector....would pay more than $2 for an album and 50 cents for a single. I would have been happy to get a $1 a record x 20,000. He didnt get his money back. And after 3 years since his death, this only concluded a couple of months ago so lots of near endless stress.

Don't think a collection is easy to sell because you see adds with people wanting to buy vinyl. They want to go through your collection, find albums that are going for $200 second hand and offer you $10 for them.

In terms of making a profit, you're much better to sell each piece individually, rather than as a bulk lot.

Sometimes I see bulk lots of records/singles/VHS tapes listed on eBay, and they always sell for a fraction of the price they could (if they sell at all; often they don't) if the items were listed individually. I once e.g. sold a bunch of 6 VHS compilations I paid $60 for combined for $300 on eBay when listing each one separately.

The trouble is, it's a LOT more effort to list and sell each item individually, then you have to sort out postage and addressing labels etc. It's more effort than it's worth, really, if items sell for only a few dollars.

I worked out that @20,000 items, selling individually, far exceeds whats left of my life at 52 years of age. If I lived to be 100 ( very unlikely :laughing: ), I would still need to sell 416 items a year....more than one a day. Which is why I refused to do it.

If my father in law had got off his **** and made efforts to sell well before he died, he would have got far more money for his collection and he knew more about it, knew some fellow collectors etc.

I think if people genuinely care for their collection, they will know when the time is right to move it on. Perhaps keep a small bit, but if you leave a huge collection for some poor ******* to deal with when you are gone its likely the person who the money is going to will get bugger all in the end. And many dealers when buying collections will send a percentage to landfill.....thats why they try and pick through and take what they know is worth money and will sell.

this got interestingly off topic lol. So getting back to HD, as i said in my first post, i don't really see the point in recording Countdown episodes on the HD channel since it only results in larger file sizes. And also the source material is far from HD, so it would be upscaled at best. I didn't notice any difference doing switching back & forth from ABC to ABC HD to compare, did anyone else?

Me too,

I love my clutter as well. But I only love organised clutter... My clutter is organised and I much prefer to read my Countdown Magazines, UK Smash Hits, RAM'S etc than seeing scans on social media. I want to smell the paper and have it in my hands.

I know this is 2 years after your post Nathan but my best friend has a Blu Ray Recorder, so I now know that you can record in SD and reading your words:

'It can't, though, as far as I'm aware, record rage in 4:3'

You are very right on, my friend tried so many ways and set it to record in 4.3 on rage and though the function is there, it doesn't not allow one to actually record in 4.3, only playback in 4.3 which defeats the purpose of a 4.3 setting if you want your final recording to be in 4.3 which you and I and others I know through my Forum still want.

At Bernie,

If you are a person who records new material which I have no interest in and you are extra fussy and get right close up to the screen, HD will look slightly clearer on a Joanna Lumley special for instance which I just saw a few minutes of minutes ago on ABC.

I recorded it in SD as a test for 'NEW MATERIAL' again ... not that I collect NEW MATERIAL as I have no interest in it and it looks a little clearer on the actual Channel on ABC HD than the recorded version, but very slightly ... again .... if you put your head right on the screen but not when you sit back. It would slightly Upscale it at best with very little difference for Retro material and if that is only what you record and keep then the comparison from SD to HD is virtually nothing from rage.

But again, because I only collect Music Videos from rage from the 70s and 80s on their VAULT Specials and of course COUNTDOWN and ROCK ARENA in January, I see absolutely no difference in picture.

And of course, for me, I record in 4.3 Pan and Scan as I don't appreciate having bars on my 70s and 80s videos and surely don't appreciate it on Countdown and Rock Arena. How people collect Countdown's with bars on each side with a logo is beyond me, it is utterly vile. Don't start me on those that record rage and Countdown with a huge black box around a miniature small square picture. Even if I wanted to record in HD for Countdown, Rock Arena and 70s and 80s videos on 'rage' VAULT Specials, recording in HD doesn't allow you to have 4.3 full picture, it forces one to have bars so the point of any slight upscale would be ruined for me by bars on the actual final recording.

Also, one's TV Settings also plays a HUGE part in Picture for Countdown Episodes and 70s and 80s Music Videos. Many people don't even go to their TV Settings and work out what looks best. On my Panasonic TV, Cinema Mode and me carefully calculating what each setting should be on with Contrast, Brightness etc plays a huge part on how a picture can look for items like Countdown, Rock Arena and rage videos from the 70s and 80s.


Like Nathan, if I am forced to record something in 16.9 because rage play an 80s video and stretch it, I can barely bare the abc logo being there and seeing HD next to it makes it even more worse, that is more graffiti. But luckily, usually in a VAULT special on rage, there are usually only two or three videos that are stretched and they are usually common videos like Vienna from Ultravox, which I already have on Ultravox and Midge Ure DVDs anyway.

Yes, this topic started getting onto Vinyl which has nothing to do with the original topic.

Vinyl forever, I shall never be downsizing. My Vinyl collection gets bigger each week, thouuusands :heart_eyes:

Thank goodness for you Armin :+1:

Everything you said is SPOT ON.

Wise man :relieved:

In terms of workflows I abandoned analogue as soon as I could. I don’t go for this fuzzy-wuzzy nonsense that analogue is better/warmer/more emotional etc. I hate ghosting, I hate tape dropouts, I hate the crappy resolution of VHS tapes and all their imperfections.

I bought my first digital TV set-top box in 2003 (HD capable too) and it cost me a fortune. That got rid of the crappy analogue TV reception part, but I still had to rely on an analogue VCR to record it. I dumped that in 2006 when digital TV tuner cards that record the raw digital TV stream direct to computer hard disk became affordable. No intervening DVD or other transcoding - the pure raw digital signal - 100% bit-for-bit copy of what was broadcast with zero degradation.

I have never looked back. I don’t miss analogue one tiny bit. I back up my hard drives every week with two redundant copies.

Half the digital channels in the UK are now on a par with low res YouTube.
The HD channels are at least decent quality, but I don't call this situation progress.
On a limited bandwidth quantity over quality now seems to be the name of the game.
But when I compare my recordings of TOTP from BBC Four SD and HD, the HD ones look significantly better than the SD ones, even though the source footage itself is of course SD.

Just to add, I thought both SD & HD broadcasts were interlaced in OZ, is that not the case?

ABC HD is certainly interlaced in Perth. I'd be highly surprised if it was different in other cities.

That's what I thought, but in an earlier post Clip Magnet says this:

"The HD channel (MPEG-4) is broadcast as progressive video not interlaced, whereas the SD channel (MPEG-2) is broadcast interlaced. So if the original material is interlaced (most old video material is) then the HD channel de-interlaces it before broadcast. This can result in what looks like blurrier motion and fuzzier stills, and actually removes some of the original motion information in the original material. I don’t like the resultant effect."

Just curious,

Those of you recording ABC HD, have Rage in particular introduced any subcoding into their broadcast? I record retro in one block, then edit later, but I’m finding and only recently that when I skip ahead, every one of these happens at the end of every video clip or similar. Say hitscene is 26 minutes, and there’s a clip before it and after it, i can cue to the end of the clip, then the end of hitscene and so on. Didn’t seem to happen until only recently so I’m wondering if the ABC transmission is now also transmitting the end markers of items from their automation system.

SD Vs HD, depends on your perspective and what you're doing with the video. SD is fine if you are making DVDs, because the SD stream is MPEG, there will be little, if any re-encoding if you are going from PVR (like a Topfield recorder) to PC to DVD. However, ABC has greatly reduced the SD bitrate over the years, I have digital recordings in SD from ten years ago that look great but these days, they just look :hankey:, as more people have HD sets, the quality of the SD feed has deteriorated.

Original broadcasts of Countdown might not have originally shot in HD, but ABCHD is broadcast in MPEG4, a newer format. It should look better, you may even find part of the transferring process at the ABC is upscaling the content digitally before it's aired on Rage.

Another argument supporting HD is if you are uploading to YouTube, YouTube gives a higher bitrate allowance to HD videos, so again, they should look much better on YouTube than uploading an SD quality MPEG2 video.

One area where SD wins against HD is DVD creation. If you are making a DVD from the HD video, you're going from about a 50 frames per second to 25 fps, so when you look at movement in your end product, it will look fuzzy, not to mention with a HD video you're scaling down the video. So SD wins if you're making DVDs.

ABC SD & HD are both 50i so it makes no difference to that aspect of DVD creation

If that's true, then you're going to lose quality creating DVDs from SD broadcasts, I haven't recorded SD for a long time, I just looked at an SD recording from 2014 and that was 25f/s.

50i is 25 full frames/sec, interlaced.
It's what analogue tv was, and it's what a lot of digital tv still is.

Apologies for mis-speaking. The HD channel is indeed broadcast interlaced. My bad.

But I have noticed that when rage gets 'new' old clips out of the ABC Archive and adds them to its own library, when they digitise them they are increasingly de-interlacing it in that process. Have a look at the Rock Arena repeat from a couple of weeks ago - it is all de-interlaced to be progressive, not left as interlaced as it was originally :hankey:

ABC has not reduced the SD bitrate. That is a false claim.

I looked at the MPEG stream data for some SD channel clips I recorded in 2006. They were peaking around 5.7-6.3 Mbps. I looked at SD channel clips recorded in the last few weeks, they were peaking around 5.9-6.6 Mbps. And I record the raw MPEG stream directly to hard disk. I do not use a DVD recorder, so no transcoding, no converting. These are the true, raw bitrates as broadcast.

Note the bitrate varies depending on the content. Fast moving content needs a higher bitrate. Very slow moving content might be as low as 2 Mbps.

The HD bitrate is much lower, around 3.5-4 Mbps, because H.264 is a much more efficient codec than MPEG-2, even though there are more pixels to encode.