RTÉ TWO HD - What A Waste!

Rick_

Looking through the schedule for the next fortnight, there seems to be only one or two programmes a day in HD. I mean, why make a HD channel when they have so little HD content? Shouldn't they have waited until they had secured HD rights for most/all their imported programming and films at least before launching RTÉ TWO HD which is only really worth getting the HD upgrade for sports content?

STB

Paddy C wrote: »

Looking through the schedule for the next fortnight, there seems to be only one or two programmes a day in HD. I mean, why make a HD channel when they have so little HD content? Shouldn't they have waited until they had secured HD rights for most/all their imported programming and films at least before launching RTÉ TWO HD which is only really worth getting the HD upgrade for sports content?

A dedicated Standard definition channel could never support HD....:)

Thats the thing about broadcasting Paddy you can not do things in reverse!

Little by little. And certainly not a waste.

Richard

STB wrote: »

A dedicated Standard definition channel could never support HD....:)

Thats the thing about broadcasting Paddy you can not do things in reverse!

Little by little. And certainly not a waste.

I agree. It's not as if there are loads of channels begging to be on Saorview.

liamtech

Richard wrote: »

I agree. It's not as if there are loads of channels begging to be on Saorview.

In all honesty you have to remember that SD upscaled by saorview and broadcast as HD, is way better then SD - I know that its not as good as Native HD... But RTE2HD always looks sharper and clearer than any of the SD stations currently on offer

GullibleOne

liamtech wrote: »

In all honesty you have to remember that SD upscaled by saorview and broadcast as HD, is way better then SD - I know that its not as good as Native HD... But RTE2HD always looks sharper and clearer than any of the SD stations currently on offer

so it is not even 'real' HD on any programme?

GullibleOne

GullibleOne wrote: »

so it is not even 'real' HD on any programme?

No, the SD programming is upscaled to HD. There is some real HD content but not a whole lot.

Tony

Its also a good way to make sure everyone bought a HD rather than an SD box and negated the need to have a separate RTE 2 SD feed.

swoofer

and i can remember when the rte picture on one and 2 was woeful, like living in a new country now, apart benda and co.

formerly scottish paddy

If you're old enough you'll remember that when colour "started" there were few programmes in colour but gradually the number increased until it was a "total" service.

GullibleOne

formerly scottish paddy wrote: »

If you're old enough you'll remember that when colour "started" there were few programmes in colour but gradually the number increased until it was a "total" service.

there was an advert that said "remember if you have a colour tv you must have a colour licence"

munchkin_utd

there is worse than what RTE is doing.

In germany all the private tv channels (akin to ITV) make you pay 100 quid a year for the priviledge of the HD channels and the amount of native HD content is similar to RTE, i.e. theres shag all of it to justify actually having it

At least RTE2 HD is free.

APM

munchkin_utd wrote: »

there is worse than what RTE is doing.

In germany all the private tv channels (akin to ITV) make you pay 100 quid a year for the priviledge of the HD channels and the amount of native HD content is similar to RTE, i.e. theres shag all of it to justify actually having it

At least RTE2 HD is free.

If your a Sky Subscriber they charge €180 a year extra for the luxury of HD too

lertsnim

Upscaled SD is better than the SD alternative. The SD channels on Saorview look incredibly soft.

munchkin_utd

munchkin_utd wrote: »

there is worse than what RTE is doing.

In germany all the private tv channels (akin to ITV) make you pay 100 quid a year for the priviledge of the HD channels and the amount of native HD content is similar to RTE, i.e. theres shag all of it to justify actually having it

At least RTE2 HD is free.

Is that HD+? They also prevent you from skipping adverts in programmes you have recorded.

lertsnim wrote: »

Upscaled SD is better than the SD alternative. The SD channels on Saorview look incredibly soft.

That's partially due to the 544x576 screen resolution.

STB

Karsini wrote: »

No, the SD programming is upscaled to HD. There is some real HD content but not a whole lot.

Even so the average quality of the broadcast output on the stat mux is 1200KB/s on RTE2HD compared to 300KB/S on the SD channels.

Noticable. Tv3 looks kack which makes me think that encoders they are using are very intelligent hardware, matching the content.

Capt'n Midnight

RTE spent 20 years simulcasting on 405 and 625 line. Even when they started 405 was more or less obsolete and most people rented TV's rather than buying them.


Lets hope they show some Christmas movies in HD

Technique

STB wrote: »

Even so the average quality of the broadcast output on the stat mux is 1200KB/s on RTE2HD compared to 300KB/S on the SD channels.

Noticable. Tv3 looks kack which makes me think that encoders they are using are very intelligent hardware, matching the content.

I was watching Chelsea/Juventus on ITV HD last night. Turned over to TV3 to see how Celtic were doing and couldn't believe how soft the picture was. Even my 8 year old asked what was wrong with the TV.

Man City / Real Madrid was excellent quality on RTE 2 tonight. Was that in native HD?

lertsnim

Karsini wrote: »

That's partially due to the 544x576 screen resolution.

Yes

STB

Technique wrote: »

I was watching Chelsea/Juventus on ITV HD last night. Turned over to TV3 to see how Celtic were doing and couldn't believe how soft the picture was. Even my 8 year old asked what was wrong with the TV.

Man City / Real Madrid was excellent quality on RTE 2 tonight. Was that in native HD?

Man City game was in HD.

RTENL have set a min bit band rate on RTE2HD which appears to be about the 750KB/S mark. During HD output that runs up another 500KB/S and everything else on the mux is squeezed as a result.

Stinicker

Technique wrote: »

I was watching Chelsea/Juventus on ITV HD last night. Turned over to TV3 to see how Celtic were doing and couldn't believe how soft the picture was. Even my 8 year old asked what was wrong with the TV.

Man City / Real Madrid was excellent quality on RTE 2 tonight. Was that in native HD?

TV3 have rotten picture quality at the best of times.

Elfinknight

APM wrote: »

If your a Sky Subscriber they charge €180 a year extra for the luxury of HD too

RTE2HD comes with.the standard package as do BBCHD and BBC1HD. Anything else u are corect

snaps

Technique wrote: »

I was watching Chelsea/Juventus on ITV HD last night. Turned over to TV3 to see how Celtic were doing and couldn't believe how soft the picture was. Even my 8 year old asked what was wrong with the TV.

Man City / Real Madrid was excellent quality on RTE 2 tonight. Was that in native HD?

There was a huge difference alright on Tuesday night between the 2 channels. The celtic match was so bad compared to the Chelski game i couldnt watch it.

lawhec

STB wrote: »

Even so the average quality of the broadcast output on the stat mux is 1200KB/s on RTE2HD compared to 300KB/S on the SD channels.

Noticable. Tv3 looks kack which makes me think that encoders they are using are very intelligent hardware, matching the content.

Those figures don't look right, they should be both at least 4-5 times those values.

I'd hate to see a 1440x1080 1080i HD programme running on an average bit rate of 1.2Mbps :eek:

The use of 544x576 seems to be a deliberate ploy by RTÉNL to minimise artifacting at the expense of picture sharpening. The resolution is OK for 4:3 material, but suffers for 16:9 broadcasts as the pixel ration gets close to 2:1 i.e. 2 times wider than it is tall.

Also sports content demands a higher bit rate to keep a consistent picture quality compared to say talking heads in a news interview because of the extra detail required and the fast moving cameras putting more detail into the I frames each frame, for example in a soccer match there would be the constant panning of the camera, details like the blades of grass, small features on players' kits, individuals in the stands etc. all of which punish the stat-muxs. ITV in the past, especially on Freeview, has been notorious for its very poor picture quality for matches; the pitches being smudges of no more than a handful of shades of green with major artifacting to go with it.

lertsnim

Elfinknight wrote: »

RTE2HD comes with.the standard package as do BBCHD and BBC1HD. Anything else u are corect

BBC HD and BBC One HD require no package of any kind

JonathonS

STB wrote: »

Tv3 looks kack

I watched the Champions League on TV3 last week, terrible quality. RTE2 HD is worth it for the sports coverage alone.

Capt'n Midnight

lertsnim wrote: »

BBC HD and BBC One HD require no package of any kind

With a FTA receiver you can also get
BBC 1 HD (Several regions inc. NI)
BBC HD
Channel 4 HD
ITV1 HD (Several regions - but not UTV - yet)
NHK World HD
(Russia Today HD) - coming soon


Back on topic.

BBC have been getting a bit of stick about the bitrate on Satellite vs. terrestrial for their HD
Not sure if the same applies to saorsat vs. saorview.

wil

Funny how a few years ago people could view any movie/sport/event on a 12inch portable without major complaint, now no matter what drivel, for many it is only watchable so long as it is in HD.
Since when did the quality of content become irrelevant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT7hcWFu7q4

(the irrelephant contradiction of a utube contribution vividly illustrates why life is so much more colourful and bewildering than reality)

mike65

Karsini wrote: »

That's partially due to the 544x576 screen resolution.

STB wrote: »

Man City game was in HD.

RTENL have set a min bit band rate on RTE2HD which appears to be about the 750KB/S mark. During HD output that runs up another 500KB/S and everything else on the mux is squeezed as a result.

Are we stuck with the dismal SD resolution until MUX 2 is fired up then?

Capt'n Midnight

wil wrote: »

Funny how a few years ago people could view any movie/sport/event on a 12inch portable without major complaint, now no matter what drivel, for many it is only watchable so long as it is in HD.
Since when did the quality of content become irrelevant.

Lets not forget that sometimes having too much resolution can be a problem.

Like the problems with the early days of sound. Actors with funny voices and noisy stages and sets. Now it's ropey special effects and CGI that don't stand up to close inspection, and make up can't hide all the blemishes for presenters and porn actors.

watty

Satellite has more space so can use 720 x 576 or 1920 x 1080. Cheaper channels run 544 x 576 or 1440 x 1080
Terrestrial has less space and is thus 544 x 576 (about equivalent to PAL) or 1440 x 1080. The 1440 x 1080 WS is roughly animorphic WS. 1920 x 1080 is "square pixel" HD.

Square pixel SD 4:3 would be 768 x 576 and WS 1024 x 576

Ordinary digital TV is only meant to replace a good analogue TV signal, not be better. Hence 544 x 576. DAB on the other hand is only for more stations. It could be as good as FM, but in UK and Ireland is much poorer due to worse coverage and a bit rate HALF of what it should be.

It's the RTE Radio on DTT that's really rubbish quality.

Note that composite PAL has "artefacts" that make it seem sharper at times. RGB looks softer but has no artefacts.


I don't expect the SD or HD to have any higher resolution. Complain about the so called "Digital Dividend" that sacrifices part of the TV band and the greed to make the channels transmission cheap rather than have three multiplexes instead of two.

dharn

porn actors ? in HD.... tell us more

Capt'n Midnight

mike65 wrote: »

Are we stuck with the dismal SD resolution until MUX 2 is fired up then?

Pretty much unless you can break the laws of physics.

All new device approvals from (jan ?) 2013 will require a T2 tuner. This gets you maybe another ~30% of bits. But no use for the foreseeable future since most people don't have them. (That's the lovely thing about standards - so many to choose from)


The other problem is the rate adaptive compression. In digital TV you send fewer key frames and more partial frames with only the changes. In theory most of the time big changes aren't happening on all channels at the same time so you can give each channel more bandwidth when it needs it because it will need less when only someone lips are moving.

In theory you could spend a lot of time compressing say a movie so that you get a better trade off between bitrate and quality than encoding it live. But to do that you would need to guarantee a fixed amount of bandwidth for the movie. AND you would not be able to improve quality when there was spare capacity on other channels.

At that stage you are heading for fairly impressive stuff, like having a movie compressed in advance (spend lots of time on a render farm for quality) at a variety of bitrates (to fit available bandwidth) and when showing the movie you send the best quality packets for the available bandwidth.

But it's a question of complexity vs. ease of use.
And I'm not even sure if a render farm would give that much of an improvement compared to on-the fly compression given the diminishing returns of lossy compression.



Also it's a pretty safe bet that if offered a discount for using a lower bitrate or lower priority during high demand that TV3/3e would say yes. It costs RTE €1.5m a year for all their channels on Saorsat, By not going on it TV3 are probably saving less than Tubberty pays in income tax.

The Cush

STB wrote: »

Even so the average quality of the broadcast output on the stat mux is 1200KB/s on RTE2HD compared to 300KB/S on the SD channels.

lawhec wrote: »

Those figures don't look right, they should be both at least 4-5 times those values.

I'd hate to see a 1440x1080 1080i HD programme running on an average bit rate of 1.2Mbps :eek:

Average 2 Mbps for the SD channels and 6 Mbps for RTÉ2 HD according to RTÉ. If you remember the thread that covered the first true HD programme on RTÉ2 HD, the Magners League Final, it was posted that at times during the match the bitrate was over 9 Mbps.

RTÉ plans to use statistical multiplexing. As part of a statistical multiplexed pool the
HD service will use an average bit rate of c. 6.3 Mbps, RTÉ News Now will use an
average bit rate of c. 2.2 Mbps, RTÉjr and RTÉ Plus will share the same spectrum,
requiring an average bit rate of c. 2.2 Mbps and RTÉ Aertel Digital will require 1.0
Mbps of capacity.

STB

lawhec wrote: »

Those figures don't look right, they should be both at least 4-5 times those values.

I'd hate to see a 1440x1080 1080i HD programme running on an average bit rate of 1.2Mbps :eek:
..........blah.

Re-read the values......

1KB/s = *kbps ?

The Cush

STB wrote: »

Re-read the values......

1KB/s = *kbps ?

1KB/s = 8kbps.

Didn't notice that in your op, I've only ever seen DTT mux capacity referred to in Mbps.

The 1200KB/s (9.6 Mbps) avg bitrate you mention for RTÉ2 HD appears to be a bit high when looking at RTÉ's published figures. During the Magners League final when the reported bitrate averaged 8.5 Mbps (1062.5 KB/s) the RTÉjr/RTÉ1+1 stream was off-air and would have had about 2 Mbps available for that particular event.

This from RTÉ

Statistical multiplexing will be used for all video services, audio and data services are fixed bit rate.

It is planned to use the following bit rates as part of a statistical multiplexed pool.

High Definition Video (HD)
1 Minimum of 2.0 Mbps
2 Maximum of 9.0 Mbps
3 Weighting 90%
4 Resolution 1440 x 1080i
5 Expected average bit rate 6.0 Mbps

Standard Definition Video (SD)
• Minimum of 1.0 Mbps
• Maximum of 8.0 Mbps
• Weighting 90%
• Resolution 544 x 576
• Expected average bit rate 2.0 Mbps

lawhec

STB wrote: »

Re-read the values......

1KB/s = *kbps ?

Touché

lawhec

The Cush wrote: »

I've only ever seen DTT mux capacity referred to in Mbps.

Same here, that or Kbps

STB

The Cush wrote: »

1KB/s = 8kbps.

Didn't notice that in your op, I've only ever seen DTT mux capacity referred to in Mbps.

The 1200KB/s (9.6 Mbps) avg bitrate you mention for RTÉ2 HD appears to be a bit high when looking at RTÉ's published figures. During the Magners League final when the reported bitrate averaged 8.5 Mbps (1062.5 KB/s) the RTÉjr/RTÉ1+1 stream was off-air and would have had about 2 Mbps available for that particular event.

This from RTÉ

I wasn't talking about Mux capacity, but Mux capacity depends on coding/mod parameters and bit rates.

The figures I mentioned earlier in the thread are the individual bit rates at one snapshot in time.

During the Champions league Man City VS Real Madrid game broadcast RTE2HD peaked at 1287KB/s (10.2Mb) so the reality is that during HD broadcasts the statistical muxing effect on other stations on the multiplex is quite evident and certainly more than the max quoted by you above which is from the DCENR Consultation document on RTE's new service proposal from November 2010.

Even during Non HD broadcasts RTE2HD is outputing bit rates that are 2.5-3 times that of the SD stations.

When the second Mux kicks off we should see higher picture quality on the SD stations if the stations are evenly distributed. My pain point initially was that RTE2HD is given bit rate preference on the Mux regardless of the output being HD or upscaled. This has the visual impact for most punters that it is something special.

The Cush

STB wrote: »

I wasn't talking about Mux capacity, but Mux capacity depends on coding/mod parameters and bit rates.

The figures I mentioned earlier in the thread are the individual bit rates at one snapshot in time.

Whether individual bit rate or capacity all I was saying is I've never see it described in KB/s.

STB wrote: »

During the Champions league Man City VS Real Madrid game broadcast RTE2HD peaked at 1287KB/s (10.2Mb) so the reality is that during HD broadcasts the statistical muxing effect on other stations on the multiplex is quite evident and certainly more than the max quoted by you above which is from the DCENR Consultation document on RTE's new service proposal from November 2010.

In the consultation document, from prior to the public launch of Saorview and RTÉ2 HD, they were described as the expected bitrates. Post consultation/Saorview launch/RTÉ2 HD launch we see actual bitrates.

How does the Saorview RTÉ2 HD 10.2 Mbps peak bitrate compare with UPC and Sky for the same event?

STB wrote: »

When the second Mux kicks off we should see higher picture quality on the SD stations if the stations are evenly distributed. My pain point initially was that RTE2HD is given bit rate preference on the Mux regardless of the output being HD or upscaled. This has the visual impact for most punters that it is something special.

As you say the picture quality of the upscaled content on RTÉ2 is very good compared to the SD channels, hopefully the other 3 main channels will go upscaled/full HD in the coming months.

Better picture quality on the SD channels when the second mux launches provided they don't cram in too many services, an article last month did mention a third PSB mux if required.

Elfinknight

lertsnim wrote: »

BBC HD and BBC One HD require no package of any kind

I know. What i was trying to explain that with sky, you don't need to pay the extra charge sky have for hd to view them. Sorry for being unclear.