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Comment by jpdoctor | Hacker News Reader

Relevant: Viewers are awful too.

Study: 18% of people can't tell if they're watching true HDTV content or not

http://techcrunch.com/2008/11/24/study-18-of-people-cant-tel...

Ugh, this. Comcast re-compresses some of their video streams so much that it almost looks like YouTube. The best video quality I've seen on cable has been HDNet, but many providers have dropped their channels because they can replace them with three low-quality channels.

Still, I've never talked to anyone who has noticed the difference, so I assume it's a rare gripe.

> Ugh, this. Comcast re-compresses some of their video streams so much that it almost looks like YouTube.

All the cable providers are using the same set of transmission boxes from the same vendors.

Usually, they are employing statistical compression: Take 16 channels and determine which video needs more bandwidth in real time. So if your favorite show is opposite talking heads, then it looks fine. But if you're opposite action-packed hunting in jungle scenes (lots of high-frequency content), you're gonna see it.

Except 20 or so channels on my dish network setup are nothing but direct sales garbage.

I think we're suffering because its economically more appealing to treat the TV as a sales machine instead of an entertainment machine. No wonder there's no bandwidth left over on satellite or over those fat DOCSIS connections. Carriers are too busy selling us "lose weight now" bullshit over providing the service we're actually buying.

Toss in its "Public Interest" channels which hold useless junk like religious programming and public access, we have about 50 channels of non-entertainment nonsense. Everything looks like shit because the bean counters and MBAs think Billy Grahame and "Look good in that dress for $19.99" should be in contention over the actual shows and movies I watch.

…and it's because of all the "useless junk" that they cover on those public gov't access channels that you don't have a single good choice of ISP or infomercial service.

Drop cable and lobby to end the Comcast/AT&T/Time Warner oligopoly.

On satellite there are also the dozens or hundreds of local market broadcast channels. They lobbied hard against a de facto national ABC, CBS, etc.

One of the channels in my area is now encouraging people to pester Dish to pay them per-subscriber money. Meanwhile, Dish has audio dropouts and video artifacts aplenty.

(My impression is that many of the channels you label "Public Interest" are getting a free ride because they don't charge the carrier anything but allow the carrier to increase their advertised channel count.)

The perhaps-surprising result is that OTA HD channels are probably higher bandwidth than most channels you'll receive on cable.

> are probably higher bandwidth

It's hard to compare. Yes they are higher bandwidth (15.6 Mbps or so OTA) but they are mpeg2-encoded. Many of the stat-mux cable boxes are mpg4 at a lower rate. So which is better? Depends entirely on what is being broadcast (and where in the stat-mux channels you're looking.)

MPEG-4 cable deployments in the USA are relatively small.

As long as I can see distracting digital compression artifacts on my SD television I have no intention of upgrading to an HD TV and HD cable package.

If anything, I'll drop cable altogether and go OTA.

Commercials for HDTV don't tell the whole story - unless you've got a big ass TV, you won't notice a difference, however if you do then the difference is huge: not because HD is magical fairy dust that enriches your viewing experience, but because non-HD channels become unwatchable.

Why is that a bad thing?

And then you being technical insist they need HDTV because it's better and now their DVR holds 20 hours instead of 200 and they were happier before. True story.

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