[Sussex] BBC2's working lunch next week

[Mark Harrison (Groups)]

Chris Jones wrote:

>Hi
>
>On Sun, February 6, 2005 23:09, Mark Harrison (Groups) said:
>  
>
>>An an excercise for the reader, compare the digital encoding quality of
>>Sky broadcasts compared to a local HDD rip of an analogue broadcast.
>>    
>>
>
>analogue? tsk ;)
>
>If you can get decent digital terrestrial reception, get yourself a fifty
>quid Hauppauge DVB-T card and install vdr. I had a tivo for a few years
>and vdr is almost better now and still developing quickly.
>  
>

The use of "analogue" as an example was deliberately chosen to emphasise 
the point.

The point I was trying to make is that just because something is 
broadcast digitally, doesn't mean that it's "better quality". Sky in 
particular have used the available bandwidth to squeeze in extra 
channels (like one-hour-delayed versions of prime stations) rather than 
use the bandwidth to provide a high-quality experience.

This is also true of OnDigital, though they are a lot better than 
ITVDigital used to be. (ie - they have fewer channels, each allocated 
more bandwidth).

Just because you are directly capturing a digital stream doesn't mean 
that you aren't suffering from compression. It just means that someone 
else has done the compression on an unknown platform, to an unknown set 
of optimisation criteria.... or worse, in the case of Sky, to a _known_ 
set of optimasation criteria that happen to be not what you want :-)

Mark