Picture quality not as good as DVD quality

[netfreak]

These are not tech standards since its much more then technology that decides quality.

Much of it comes from Business decisions. TV Broadcasters have to decide how much to spend on digitizing non-live feed and how much bandwidth to be purchased etc etc.

Most of good quality encoding is manual, editors have to choose key frames manually and adjust frames to keep playback smooth [e.g without square blocks in action scenes].

That costs $$$. So the solution is to use automatic encoding where you pop edited footage into some system and out comes MPEGed feed. And compress it to max possible extent to save on satellite costs.

To save money, most production houses in India [there are exceptions] do not consider spending anything on DVD/TV authoring.

Where can I find out what SHOULD be the output ?


HQV - Hollywood Quality Video Processing for HD : Benchmark DVD

 

[teamare2006]

India has to come a long way in the term of Broadband Internet and DTH technology this technology are available in India but only use by corporate (High Speed Internet) at a very high cost it will take a time a Home user will get the high speed internet on their Hands

 

[vebk]

We have not come a long way in DTH technology.... we are using very old technology, especially w.r.t. STBs. We should have jumped straight to HD, even if it took a couple more years and more investment.

 

[teamare2006]

i am totaly agree with you vebmetal you are talking about the HD but the DTH in India is in stone age they are not providing the S-Video wire to there Set-Top-Box the S-Video is also Outdated you can get the S-Video with any cheap dvd players so why dont they are not providing the S-Video connection to the devices

 

[Karan]

We have not come a long way in DTH technology.... we are using very old technology, especially w.r.t. STBs. We should have jumped straight to HD, even if it took a couple more years and more investment.

Even if they did introduce HDTV who would afford the equipment for it? First you need to get one of those expensive HD ready TVs then get HDTV STBs that cost in excess of Rs. 12,000 abroad, the good ones costing more than twice that and many times the cost of the over priced STBs sold here by Tata Sky, not to mention the over pricing that would be done on these STBs if they were introduced. Then you have the monthly subscription costs etc etc... i think you can figure out where this is going.

 

[vebk]

Precisely those people who spend more than Rs. 80,000 on a TV would want HDTV, since most such TVs have at least 720p.

And it's not that I am saying that we should exclusively go HD - just that the option should be there for those willing to pay for it. There are a lot of people in the metro cities who would pay Rs. 1500+ p.m. for HDTV.

But it's somewhat of a chicken and egg thing - till the hardware isn't there for DTH providers to transmit HD, channels have no incentive to end upgrade their transmissions to HD, and vice-versa.

And as teamare said, the fact that the only output in all STBs available here (AFAIK) is composite, is really shitty at best. They should have at least got component hookups.

 

[netfreak]

It might be possible to "hack" an HDTV solution. But that will not give you any result unless content itself is of HD Quality.

For example, it should be possible to hook up Coolsat 8000 HD FTA Satellite Receiver - COOLSAT8000H by: Coolsat - to Dish TV / Tata Sky dish.

 

[leomax]

720p TV's are here from 30k onwards..So its nearing mainstream channel and lcd tv prices are going down by a good margin by each quarter..So it might be good to intro some HD channels at a premium..but this is india

 

[devakj]

Not quite true, the cable i.e a coaxial is more than capable of delivering far greater than "DVD Quality" you just need the right sort of equipment. Cable Internet modems are capable of delivering over 40Mb/s of bandwidth over the same cable, a DVD needs 4Mb/s of bandwidth for the video to be streamed. It is actually the STB in this case that is incapable of delivering "DVD Quality" because the cable TV standard in India is Analog.

I disagree. The connection from your set top box to your TV is only by RCA cables. RCA/Composite or S Video cables can accept a maximum of 480 interlaced while DVD specifications claim a full quality of 480 progressive. The bandwidth to the set top box is not the bottleneck here. So for delivering full DVD quality, as advertised, they need to have either component out/DVI or HDMI output out of the set top box. period!!!.

The only thing they can advertise is that the signals are digital.

But again, none of the Indian TV channels provide 480p broadcast. The only way of using full DVD quality (480p) would be to source HD content from Discovery/National Geographic and Down Rez it to 480p.

 

[max]

yeah! whatever he ^ said!