hdtv snobs... i dont understand this.

[imported_ST]

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001
I don't call 480p "crap", but it definitely looks inferior to 720p/1080i 😉

caveat that with native 480p vs native 720p...where i live (bay area, ca) some hdtv ota will rebroadcast 480i signal in 720p format (but with bars) which practically look the same. I think this confuses a lot of the mass into thinking they are getting true 720p/1080i picture, but in reality it's just a cheap cost saving measure by the stations to start conforming to federal requirements to rebroadcast in hdtv.

 

[hans007]

Originally posted by: Sonikku
For the record, DVD is actually mastered in 480i. If you're displaying it in 480p, your player is simply taking a 480i source and scaling it up to 480p. The source itself is not progressive.

i thought it was 480p but then dvd players had to do reverse pulldown to get it to output in 480p instead of the usual 480i .

my digital cable is just regular digital cable over composite so it looks like crap.

i was just comparing an xbox360 at 480p vs 720p on say a computer and i really cant tell much.

 

[TSS]

HDTV, wuts that? im sorry, im dutch, its like non existant here. even if you buy one that supports all that fancy stuff, every broadcast is still in good ol' PAL, and will be untill something like 2007/2008. besides i like spending less then 600 bucks for a TV. or 300 for that matter. so your all snobs. 😛

PAL, its your buddy! 😛

back to seriousness now, it wont matter much if your looking at a opera concert. but it would should and will matter if your racing down a highway at terrifying speeds and taking sharp corners. same with ghosting and such. i imagine it'll matter during a soccer/football game since most of the time you'll looking from a high angle and you'll want all the detail you can get. however, most people can live without detail on the enxt episode of "jackass". in the end it all comes down to the programs your watching/games you play.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: Ronin

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001
I don't call 480p "crap", but it definitely looks inferior to 720p/1080i 😉

No doubt. There's a distinquishable difference between 480 and the rest. I can't wait until HD programming becomes the standard, rather than the randomness it is now.

Random...that's a good way to describe it. You can usually count on most primetime shows (edit: primetime non-reality shows, but who cares since reality TV is crap 😛) being in HD, everything else is a crapshoot.

Originally posted by: ST

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001
I don't call 480p "crap", but it definitely looks inferior to 720p/1080i 😉

caveat that with native 480p vs native 720p...where i live (bay area, ca) some hdtv ota will rebroadcast 480i signal in 720p format (but with bars) which practically look the same. I think this confuses a lot of the mass into thinking they are getting true 720p/1080i picture, but in reality it's just a cheap cost saving measure by the stations to start conforming to federal requirements to rebroadcast in hdtv.

Well yeah, I didn't mean stations that broadcast in 720p/1080i around the clock and just run their upconverted SD programming for most of the day (which is the case for basically all network television stations). Upscaled 4:3 480i programming is watchable, but that's about all you can say about it. 😛

 

[Ronin]

Originally posted by: hans007
my digital cable is just regular digital cable over composite so it looks like crap.

Your cable sucks, then 😛

 

[Ronin]

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001

Originally posted by: Ronin

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001
I don't call 480p "crap", but it definitely looks inferior to 720p/1080i 😉

No doubt. There's a distinquishable difference between 480 and the rest. I can't wait until HD programming becomes the standard, rather than the randomness it is now.

Random...that's a good way to describe it. You can usually count on most primetime shows (edit: primetime non-reality shows, but who cares since reality TV is crap 😛) being in HD, everything else is a crapshoot.

My biggest complaint? The WB broadcasts in HD, and my provider hasn't picked it up....I watch a lot of shows PT on the WB, and watching them NOT in HD really grates on me. :|

 

[NeezyDeezy]

WB HD is a free broadcast, get a ota tuner - the HD quality is better than digital HD if your signal strength is good because of the way OTA HD is compressed for broadcast

I'm using OTA and haven't looked back.

 

[Ronin]

Pardon my ignorance, but an OTA tuner? And how does that change the fact that I don't have an actual HD channel listed for the WB?

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: Ronin

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001

Originally posted by: Ronin

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001
I don't call 480p "crap", but it definitely looks inferior to 720p/1080i 😉

No doubt. There's a distinquishable difference between 480 and the rest. I can't wait until HD programming becomes the standard, rather than the randomness it is now.

Random...that's a good way to describe it. You can usually count on most primetime shows (edit: primetime non-reality shows, but who cares since reality TV is crap 😛) being in HD, everything else is a crapshoot.

My biggest complaint? The WB broadcasts in HD, and my provider hasn't picked it up....I watch a lot of shows PT on the WB, and watching them NOT in HD really grates on me. :|

Heh, I don't watch anything on the WB really, but the situation in my college town is pretty good...they just added a FOX-HD (from another city) to the cable lineup last month, and this station has a deal with WB such that they send them their HD programming for storage on a server and playback/rebroadcast later in the evening (after the FOX stuff is done). The only thing is that WB is 1080i and FOX is 720p so they have to deinterlace and downconvert the video, but it still looks pretty decent. There's a decent number of shows on in HD every night on that channel with the combination of the two networks 😛

 

[NeezyDeezy]

Originally posted by: Ronin
Pardon my ignorance, but an OTA tuner? And how does that change the fact that I don't have an actual HD channel listed for the WB?

antennaweb.org, see what is actually available - whether or not your cable company lists it is irrelevant

 

[AthlonPowers]

Standard DVD players are 480i - always have been, always will be.

Progressive scan DVD players deinterlace the 480i to 480p. Many of the new $100+ players (and some below) perform upconversion to 720 or 1080i. This is just interpolation between the real pixels to "enhance" the picture, with varied results.

Telecine is not related to deinterlacing, although in many respects, the two often come together. Telecine allows film-based sources (typically movies, 24fps) to be faithfully reproduced on video displays (~60fps in US). The original source is encoded at 60 fields per second in such a way that a player or display that can recognize it can decode it and reconstruct the original 24 frames per second (reverse pulldown). Reverse pulldown is common on DVD players these days, and there are some HDTVs hitting the market that can pulldown a 1080i signal. This will be important for film-based HD source material in the future, but since most broadcast HDTV programming is video-based (60 fields per second), it's not so useful right now.

Finally, just to complicate matters, many fixed-pixel HDTVs have been accused of not doing a proper job of deinterlacing a 1080i source, basically displaying a line-double of a single field. Obviously, this might be slightly better than 480p (it's essentially 540p) but it does not reproduce the level of detail of real 1080i.

 

[hans007]

Originally posted by: NeezyDeezy

Originally posted by: Ronin
Pardon my ignorance, but an OTA tuner? And how does that change the fact that I don't have an actual HD channel listed for the WB?

antennaweb.org, see what is actually available - whether or not your cable company lists it is irrelevant

OTA , over the air. its like HD over rabbit ears.

you can buy a box at radio shack for like $90 i think

 

[Ronin]

That's just....amazing. Guess the ears aren't antiquated just yet, eh? LOL

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: dguy6789

Originally posted by: rbV5

Originally posted by: dguy6789
Some clarification of hdtv standards.

The names are specific and absolute, there is no various types of 480p and whatnot.

480i=640X480 with interlacing
480P=640X480 with progressive scan
720P=1280X720 with progressive scan
1080i=1920X1080 with interlacing
1080P=1920X1080 with progressive scan.

Actually, there are 18 described ATSC formats compared to a single NTSC format. Check this chart for reference. Link

Well it looks like the only difference between all of those and what I mentioned is that they mention framerate while mine does not. The discussion in this thread appears to need no framerate related information, so the information I provided should prove to be more than satisfactory.

Well you did say there were no various types of 480p and whatnot, and clearly 480p can be 704x480 or 640x480 and also 704x480 with a 16:9 AR (without considering framerate)

 

[kylebisme]

Originally posted by: jiffylube1024

Originally posted by: Cheesetogo
I notice a huge difference between 480p tv and 720p hd, but for some reason I have trouble telling 480p dvd from 720p. Also whats strange is that 640x480 in a computer game looks like crap to me, but 1280x960 seems much better.

Probably because DVD is only 720X480 (16:9) or 852X480 (2.35:1) to begin with. DVD upconversion is a nice feature to accomodate laggy upconverters on fixed pixel displays (eg DLP's, etc) but it can't increase the resolution that DVD is stored in.

Nah, DVDs are all 720x480 interlaced recordings at either 16:9 or 4:3, and the black bars for letterboxing to 2.35:1 and such eat up some of that resolution. 842x480 is what makes for square pixels with 16:9 at 480 lines, but DVDs are all still only 720x480.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: PrayForDeath

Originally posted by: xtknight
I can hardly notice anything watching Jay Leno or Conan 'O Brien in 480p vs. 720p.

480p
720p

Night and day to me.

That's funny. 480p doesn't look anywhere remotely that bad when I view it fullscreen on my 19" LCD. It looks very clear. The ones you posted are definitely night and day. Doesn't analog TV look better than that 480 jpg? It's hard to tell. 😕 Where's all that static coming from? Are you sure that's an SDTV image??

I guess it depends on the decoder. I'm using a Samsung SIR-T451 external HDTV tuner set to 480p, and my LCD is even scaling it up to 1280x1024 over VGA and it still looks quite a bit better than that. Well, in complex scenes it can be grim at times but for noncomplex ones I can't really tell a difference.

 

[Ronin]

Kate's sexy either way. 😀

 

[James3shin]

i concur, the difference is night and day. Even on the 360. I'm not sure what you're looking at OP but the difference is hardly subtle.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: ST

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001
I don't call 480p "crap", but it definitely looks inferior to 720p/1080i 😉

caveat that with native 480p vs native 720p...where i live (bay area, ca) some hdtv ota will rebroadcast 480i signal in 720p format (but with bars) which practically look the same. I think this confuses a lot of the mass into thinking they are getting true 720p/1080i picture, but in reality it's just a cheap cost saving measure by the stations to start conforming to federal requirements to rebroadcast in hdtv.

Oh, that could be what I'm seeing and why for me the 720 doesn't look any better.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: xtknight

Originally posted by: ST

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001
I don't call 480p "crap", but it definitely looks inferior to 720p/1080i 😉

caveat that with native 480p vs native 720p...where i live (bay area, ca) some hdtv ota will rebroadcast 480i signal in 720p format (but with bars) which practically look the same. I think this confuses a lot of the mass into thinking they are getting true 720p/1080i picture, but in reality it's just a cheap cost saving measure by the stations to start conforming to federal requirements to rebroadcast in hdtv.

Oh, that could be what I'm seeing and why for me the 720 doesn't look any better.

If you're watching OTA channels at any time of day other than primetime (with the exception of PBS sometimes), that's almost definitely the case.

 

[xtknight]

Terrestrial 480p Jay Leno (complex scene): http://xtknight.atothosting.com/jayleno1.png
Terrestrial 480p Jay Leno (simple scene): http://xtknight.atothosting.com/jayleno2.png

That's over S-Video too. FFDShow is only doing deinterlacing (it went over S-Video so it's not 480p anymore) on there so no real postprocessing/sharpening/etc.

There is simply no way the picture PrayForDeath posted is 480p. That's gotta be some noisy analog cable, unless the JPEG compression is screwing it up something awful. I used PNG above so it is lossless.

Look here: http://htpcnews.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2722

It's funny how they're going on about how dramatic it is and I can't hardly tell a damn thing except a smidge sharper, lol. I must be blind. To each their own I guess. 😉 The 480p does lose some detail I suppose, but it's nothing dramatic (certainly not crap) from what I'm seeing. Maybe it would be worse when resized bigger.

Well, Jay Leno is primetime isn't it? I am watching OTA as well.

Edit: I edited this post enough to warrant a new one, sorry.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Terrestrial 480p Jay Leno (complex scene): http://xtknight.atothosting.com/jayleno1.png
Terrestrial 480p Jay Leno (simple scene): http://xtknight.atothosting.com/jayleno2.png

That's over S-Video too. FFDShow is only doing deinterlacing (it went over S-Video so it's not 480p anymore) on there so no real postprocessing/sharpening/etc.

There is simply no way the picture PrayForDeath posted is 480p. That's gotta be some noisy analog cable, unless the JPEG compression is screwing it up something awful. I used PNG above so it is lossless.

Look here: http://htpcnews.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2722

It's funny how they're going on about how dramatic it is and I can't hardly tell a damn thing except a smidge sharper, lol. I must be blind.

Well, Jay Leno is primetime isn't it? I am watching OTA as well.

Now that I look at that pic again, I think you're right. I must not have picked up on the '480p' label and automatically assumed it was from a 480i analog cable source, since that's what it looked like.

I'm not sure if Jay Leno is considered primetime or if late-night is considered separate, but the important thing is that you should be able to tell whether you're watching a program that's actually in HD or just one that's been upconverted. That show is actually broadcast in 1080i (as is all NBC programming) (edit: "real" 1080i, not upconverted 480i - unless the people working at your local station don't know how to "flip the switch" between the HD and SD/analog feeds, which isn't uncommon 😛).

Just curious, but why do you have your TV tuner set to output 480p only? Is that a limitation of the particular box or something?

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001
Just curious, but why do you have your TV tuner set to output 480p only? Is that a limitation of the particular box or something?

No, it's my *swears violently* stupid 19" ViewSonic 1280x1024 LCD that doesn't like to input 1280x720p. I've tried flashing EDID, everything, so who knows. I'm going by 480p@LCD vs. 720p@CRT. I can't do it side-by-side because the tuner only supports one mode at once but I'd say with certainty there is no difference worth spending the money for, at least from what I'm seeing. I have no clue why. I expected the 720p to be a lot better too. That's just my opinion though somewhat. I mean, side-by-side, well, I probably could tell just a little reduction in artifacts, but you might have to look at it a while to tell. Maybe my tuner is actually putting out 720 or something. My LCD is scaling too so it's anyone's guess what the hell is going on between all those electronics.

 

[JRW]

Yea those Conan shots were very poor examples , My Sony CRT HDTV displays standard analog (480i) channels much better than the Conan 480P shot above.

But using my Xbox360 as a refrence I can certainly see the improvement in graphic details & sharpness going from 480P to 1080i.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: xtknight

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001
Just curious, but why do you have your TV tuner set to output 480p only? Is that a limitation of the particular box or something?

No, it's my *swears violently* stupid 19" ViewSonic 1280x1024 LCD that doesn't like to input 1280x720p. I've tried flashing EDID, everything, so who knows. I'm going by 480p@LCD vs. 720p@CRT. I can't do it side-by-side because the tuner only supports one mode at once but I'd say with certainty there is no difference worth spending the money for, at least from what I'm seeing. I have no clue why. I expected the 720p to be a lot better too. That's just my opinion though somewhat. I mean, side-by-side, well, I probably could tell just a little reduction in artifacts, but you might have to look at it a while to tell. Maybe my tuner is actually putting out 720 or something. Who knows.

I see. Well, 480p/720p differences are going to depend a lot on the source. I'm not sure what programming you were using for this comparison (Jay Leno or something else), but I have noticed that the 1080i WB programming that the (semi-)local Fox station downconverts to 720p for later rebroadcast, looks pretty soft compared to their own 720p programming (and compared to any good 1080i). Not having ever seen a native 1080i WB broadcast, I can't say if this is because the source just isn't that good, or if a less than optimal 1080i->720p conversion process could make the picture soft like that.