December 27, 2009
BBC HD Sky vs Virgin
I've heard that the Sky and Freesat BBC HD picture quality is far worst than the so-so BBC HD PQ on Virgin - can anyone verify this? Whilst I find the picture a shadow of its former self, it doesn't sound anywhere near as bad as the descriptions being reported on the BBC HD blogs.
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I had Sky HD for a year but for financial reasons I cancelled and got Virgin instead. BBC HD imho looks much better on Sky.
I have found nothing to substantiate the claim that the VM feed is separate from the satelite feed.
During a protracted issue around audio drop-outs, Andy Quested once spoke of a separate feed but it was not clear (to me at least) if he was referring to audio only. I asked him the question outright on 30/10/09 but he never replied to me.
There are those posting on the BBC Blog site now stating this as fact but unless I missed something in his week-long blog posts recently, this has yet to be confirmed.
It would appear, however, that the Freesat/Sky viewers do seem to be more vocal about PQ problems and some of the screenshots uploaded do look far worse than I have experienced. I'd be very interested to know the real situation from AndyQ...
Sky/Freesat - MPEG4
Virgin Media - MPEG2
It would make sense that the BBC provide 2 seperate feeds (one per Codec), as they could then control the PQ per Codec.
It's always concerned me that BBC may just be outputting MPEG4, and VM is then re-coding it to MPEG2: this then makes VM responsible for PQ as well as BBC.
However, I have no proof that they have seperate feeds or not. This is just technical speculation.
BikeNutt: That's the reason for this post - the screenshots posted on the BBC blog from disgruntled Sky customers are far worse than what I'm seeing on the channel. Sure, it's not as sharp as other HD channels or even itself earlier in the year, but I'm not seeing artefacts and blurring like they're reporting
A poster named tagmclaren said the following on the BBC HD blog...
"I am sure Andy has stated this in a previous blog somewhere, that Virgin is fed seperately with an HDSDI feed. Virgin then perform mpeg2 encoding themselves."
And Andy Quested confirmed...
"BBC HD of Virgin. Several blogs ago (and even pre this series) I said we don't do the encoding for the Virgin platform. The signal from the playout and continuity area goes straight to an inject point somewhere in the bottom of Television Centre and (I assume) off to Virgin's distribution centre. The Virgin distributed HD signal MPEG2 at around 17Mbs and has been for sometime. In fact I believe there has only been one encoder change since the test channel launched. MPEG2 is a mature codec so updates (hard and soft) don't come along very often."
If anybody wants to do some comparison tests between BBC HD on Virgin and Freesat, I know someone who can get uncompressed recordings off his V+ box. Anybody see anything on tomorrow's schedule that's likely to suffer any of the supposed problems? If so, we can schedule recordings and post comparison screenshots.
@Erich. Thanks. Was that actually AndyQ stating that or someone paraphrasing him
? Do you have a link?
Thanks.
Straight from Quested himself. Post #86 on this page.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2009/12/the_hitchhikers_guide_to_encod_4.html
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