Nialli's unofficial blog on Virgin Media's UK cable TV services
October 18, 2008
Freeview picture quality better than Freesat?
Interesting article here from the always-interesting Crave UK site. Ok, so it's not about HD nor Virgin Media, but for those considering Freesat as an option to get ITV HD, some food for thought.
5 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Erm, don't we on cable get the ITV feeds from freeview and not sat i.e. we get a better version of ITV1? It's still rubbish but hey. I do think C4 is noticable on satellite as the upscaled to HD pic (despite moaning) is quite a bit better.
This reminds me that as eager as I am for some more VM channels in HD, there's always the possibility they won't use a high enough bitrate and they'll actually end up looking worse than existing upscaled SD.
I'd be interested to see a list comparing resolutions, bitrates and codecs for the main channels across paid sat, freesat, freeview and of course virgin media. That's what the article sounded like it was heading for with all the details about freeview modulations but then it said was that "bit rate is much lower on the freesat version [of Channel 4]".
Twaddle. If they are crap on sky they'll be crap on virgin. There are quite a few stories about BBC HD looking "poorer" on cable than sky because cable uses MPEG-2 but this is nonsense imho.
If you want a list of bitrates check out Mr Linowsat's works. For freeview bitrates and res http://dtt.me.uk/
Cable gets the sat feeds, except of course ITV, so is supposedly identical AFAIK.
That Freeview bitrate site is interesting - presumably the red numbers in average bitrate column (below 2 megb/s when expanded) are failing some sort of quality threshold? I don't watch a lot of Freeview but if they boosted some of the bitrates on the C4 and ITV stables I'd use it more. Channel line up is pretty good these days, but the PQ on the likes of Film4 and ITV4 can be dire even on a small screen.
5 comments:
Erm, don't we on cable get the ITV feeds from freeview and not sat i.e. we get a better version of ITV1? It's still rubbish but hey. I do think C4 is noticable on satellite as the upscaled to HD pic (despite moaning) is quite a bit better.
This reminds me that as eager as I am for some more VM channels in HD, there's always the possibility they won't use a high enough bitrate and they'll actually end up looking worse than existing upscaled SD.
I'd be interested to see a list comparing resolutions, bitrates and codecs for the main channels across paid sat, freesat, freeview and of course virgin media. That's what the article sounded like it was heading for with all the details about freeview modulations but then it said was that "bit rate is much lower on the freesat version [of Channel 4]".
Twaddle. If they are crap on sky they'll be crap on virgin. There are quite a few stories about BBC HD looking "poorer" on cable than sky because cable uses MPEG-2 but this is nonsense imho.
If you want a list of bitrates check out Mr Linowsat's works. For freeview bitrates and res http://dtt.me.uk/
Cable gets the sat feeds, except of course ITV, so is supposedly identical AFAIK.
Identical for SD except of course if you have a V+ which is substantially better at upscaling :-).
That Freeview bitrate site is interesting - presumably the red numbers in average bitrate column (below 2 megb/s when expanded) are failing some sort of quality threshold?
I don't watch a lot of Freeview but if they boosted some of the bitrates on the C4 and ITV stables I'd use it more. Channel line up is pretty good these days, but the PQ on the likes of Film4 and ITV4 can be dire even on a small screen.
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