Originally posted by: Shadowknight
Originally posted by: CZroe
IMO, this is a waste of bandwidth because if QAM-packaged MPEG2 isn't compatible with all DTV tuners, they should have just skipped it and gone with an MP4 standard.
What are you talking about? The point of QAM is to prevent the cable companies from charging extra for digital/HD channels broadcast for free over-the-air; otherwise, all basic cable would get you is local stations in analog and you'd have to upgrade to an "HD Package" to see high-definition content you can get locally with rabbit ears.
As to DTV tuners, are you talking OTA tuners or cable boxes? The government wouldn't let manufacturers include QAM because they are helping to pay for the converter boxes for people who are too poor/not interest in paying for cable and satellite and need free TV; they don't need a government handout if they can pay a $30 cable bill each month.
You act like all QAM channels are free & unencrypted (they aren't). There is encrypted QAM and unencrypted QAM. Actually, the point of QAM is to provide SOME reduction in bandwidth while still carrying the the MPEG2 HD signal obtained from 8VSB ATSC, though that signal can still have had the bitrate lowered. If your ATSC DTV tuner does not specifically support QAM, it can't "tune" it. Even if it can, it's not analgous to "Cable Ready" sets of the past.
The situation is so ridiculous that QAM is almost useless. If you are lucky enough to even tune unencrypted QAM, the channels are aften gone, moved, mis-numbered, etc. Often, my cable co accidentally turns off encryption one a few HDNET QAM channels.
Regardless, by the time it arrived, it was incompatible with current ATSC tuners and it was very obvious that MPEG2 required more bandwidth than modern codecs. If it was incompatible, it made a lot more sense to use a more modern, less wastefull, codec with some supporting hardware.
"Unlike the case with ATSC tuners there is no FCC requirement that QAM tuners be included in new television sets, as the ATSC standard calls for 8VSB modulation. Since cable providers can deliver twice as much data using QAM than using 8VSB, they petitioned the FCC to allow the use of QAM instead of 8VSB. As the same hardware is often used for both, ATSC and QAM are commonly included in most receivers."
Though most internal tuners support it today, that wasn't the case when HD sets were rolling out and most sold the sets with NTSC tuners. Even the ones with CableCARD, HDMI, and internal ATSC tuners did not support it when I was shopping in 2004. In fact, I couldn't get a QAM tuner anywhere a few years ago and the few that existed had been crippled (a well-known PC ATSC tuner card was quickly revised to remove it, the driver crippled it from the older cards, and Media Center refused to support it from the get-go). It wasn't until QAM was thoroughly stillborn that Vista arrived and QAM support was added back in with new tuners.
By now, we should have some form of "cable ready" HDTVs. We don't. "Digital Cable Ready" is laughable because CableCARD is pretty much just the same as getting a featureless cable box that integrates with your TV's remote as far as tuning is concerned. Cable cos enjoyed the profits from renting you a box that you could not buy. When CableCARD was mandated, the cable cos responded by cutting the fees on their boxes to nearly the same price, raising the cost of the service proportionally, and charging the same price for CableCARDs. Then, there is the hassel of actually GETTING one. My brother works in the office and fumes ever time it happens because they will not set up a process. They PURPOSEFULLY give the customer one that does not work and wait for them to call tech support before ever configuring it in the system. By then, the customer has already tried it and the tech jockey doesn't even know what a CableCARD is. They dispatch a tech and the tech can't do anything an installer couldn't do when issuing it in the first place. Eventually it bounces around the office until it lands on some head guy who may not even be there for the night/weekend who MIGHT manually enter the info when he gets around to it... OH WAIT! They already issued it to the customer and don't have the unique registration/serial/MAC numbers they need! His schedule probably doesn't sync perfectly with the customer and they will likely be pretty pissed already (WATCH OUT! There is another competing cable co at the local cable co where this insight comes from). They should have a stack of them pre-configured, then just authorize them for use and assign them to the customer when issued like they do for cable boxes. Add to that, the fact that there are two kinds of incompatible CableCARD standards and two slots and you have an inescapable clusterfuck.
Even when completely set up, then there's the "annoying the end user" factor that neither free QAM ATSC nor "Digital Cable Ready" (CableCARD) addresses: When color TV came around, you didn't have to switch to an alternate channel to watch it in color on your new color TV. When set up for cable, the customers then they have to "find" an HD channel. There should have been meta-data to map it to the analog channel as far as your set/box's channel numbering is concerned. Cable cos have always renumbered broadcast channels, so that's not the issue. It's laughable that they expect you to use them and yet they can't even get this right on their boxes. For example (I'll use Time Warner because they hand out HD-boxes to all customers and consider it "free"), a customer upgrades to an HDTV and connects their same old HD-capable box to the HDTV. They're savvy enough to be using HDMI and the box KNOWS they are outputting digitally, so why are the SD channels all lumped together and the HD channels skewed in a much higher range and spread across hundreds of unrelated (music, on-demand, etc) channels that you don't even receive in your package? For that matter, why does the box even list the hundreds of channels you don't receive? To make it harder to navigate on purpose? To annoy the user into buying them so they at least HAVE the channels that annoy them when they are looking for something else? No matter the reason, the box lists hundreds of channels they often don't even have and has no way to easily navigate through them or know what's TRULY on them without trial and error. When you *suspect* that a high-numbered duplicate channel is an HD version, you pick it and then have to compare it or check output resolution and settings etc to make sure you found what you are looking for.
If you are adapting the SD or HD channel to the specific output and resolution anyway, why not lump them together under one channel number and intelligently switch to it? Or, at the very least, at least offer it when watching in SD... the interface could offer a shortcut to HD or simply list the alternate HD channel number in the pup-up GUI.
Facebook
Twitter