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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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.