Yep, it's much better to have a 1080i picture converted to 720p then reconverted from 720p to 1080p on full HD TVs, than having a 1080i picture deinterlaced to 1080p...Not sure I got the point. Will try again: it depends.
If the stream is a movie (1080/24p), it is perfectly telecined, perfectly transmitted,
your receiver doesn't screw it up and TV set does perfect IVTC - then no, 1080i transmission is better.
Since satisfy all those ifs is harder than for a snowflake to survive in hell - yes, having the deinterlacing chores
taken away before transmission makes perfect sense. Especially when we are talking about single digits Mbps streams...

Gosh, I almost hate to come out in favour of Bell, but I've had Bell-TV in Oakville for a month now -- previously with Rogers in Mississauga -- and I can't say enough about the quality of both HD and SD.

HD is probably about the same as Rogers (excellent), but SD quality in particular is much better. I can actually read the fine print disclaimers at the bottom of advertisements.

And the PVR 9242 is so far superior feature-wise to the SA8300HD!

I'm very happy!

Sorry!

Regards, Rich

I also am very happy with Bell TV, SD could use some improvement quality wise but HD is right up there with the rest of them (with the exception of some US networks) people don't realize alot of times that it's there TV's that are not tuned up properly or that its a source problem or stuff like that.

Some people I guess notice a real difference, but honestly its nothing to go cry wolf about.

well the good news today is bell came out with a press release about the new nimiq 4 sat and said they will use it to enhance there HDTV channels

Originally posted by Hugh in another thread


Telesat's Nimiq 4 satellite begins commercial service

Payload provides enhanced HDTV services for Bell TV

OTTAWA, Oct. 9 /PRNewswire/ - Telesat, the world's fourth-largest fixed
satellite services operator, announced today that it will begin commercial
service Saturday, October 11 on its state-of-the-art Nimiq 4 satellite.
Nimiq 4 is fully leased to Bell TV, which will use the new satellite to
enhance and expand its industry-leading High Definition (HD) TV channel
services across Canada.

"Telesat has achieved an important milestone with the entry into
service of Nimiq 4," said Dan Goldberg, Telesat's President and CEO. "Nimiq
4 will expand the high quality digital video services, including HD
services, Bell TV is able to offer all Canadians, and is expected to make a
significant contribution to Telesat's financial results for many years in
the future. I am particularly pleased that we have been able to start
commercial service on this new satellite just three weeks after its launch,
an impressive technical and operational achievement."

Telesat's Nimiq 4 payload consists of 32 active high power transponders
in Ku-band and eight transponders in Ka-band. Nimiq 4 operates from the 82
degrees West orbital position and has an estimated mission life of 15
years.

Manufactured by EADS Astrium, Telesat's Nimiq 4 was launched September
20, 2008 on a Proton Breeze M rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the
Republic of Kazakhstan. Transfer orbit, in-orbit testing and traffic
transfer was completed in less than three weeks due to the use of Telesat's
innovative in-orbit testing system, close cooperation between the Astrium
and Telesat teams, and support from Bell TV.

Generally speaking I've found the HD quality from Bell to be pretty decent. However, Heroes this season simsubbed with the Global feed has been terrible! Full of glitches and tears and looking very soft.

"looking very soft."

That's because Global receives a 720p signal from Bell, transcodes it to 1080i to add their "On Global logo" sends it back to Bell that transcodes it again in 720p for their customers.

"Not sure I got the point. Will try again: it depends."

Have you ever done image processing ?
I do for a living and all I can say is that scaling picture from one format to another require way more complicated algorithms and CPU power than deinterlacing that requires almost none. Those algorithms also introduces tons of artefacts (plus bluriness when a picture is blown up) to the original picture.

When you think that most 720p TVs on the market actually use 768 lines matrices (resulting in a blow up of the 720p signal), guess what happened to the original 1080i picture ? It's completely gone.

I will therefore stick to my point: deinterlacing has almost no influence on TV sets, unlike video scaling. But it allows TV manufacturer to charge more for those TVs (than old CRT TVs) since they require more hardware to get a proper picture. And they can charge even more for TVs that are natively displaying the original signal (1080p) since they provide a better picture, even though they could be cheaper to manufacture than 720p TVs.

But I think we're all getting used to the fact that cheaper to manufacture technology will be sold at a higher price than older technologies (CD vs LP, DVD vs VHS, ....)

I just got bell a few days ok and so far I think the HD is just ok. I still had my comcast cable for a few days after I got bell and comcast HD did look much better.

What I really want to know is what they are planning on doing when it comes to HD theme packs. It is fine now that they only have 4 or 5 theme packs, but if they add more HD channels and continue to place them in HD theme packs consisting of 2 or 3 channels, suddenly it is going to be $20-30 dollars to get the same channels that you already have in SD. With comcast I got any channel in HD if it was available as long as I already had the channel in SD. That seems like a fair way to do it, hopefully bell will go that route.

Have you ever done image processing ?
I do for a living and all I can say is that scaling picture from one format to another require way more complicated algorithms and CPU power than deinterlacing that requires almost none. Those algorithms also introduces tons of artefacts (plus bluriness when a picture is blown up) to the original picture.I don't do it for a living but am encoding/transcoding hidef video for as long as it is available. You're right, changing resolution is very taxing on video quality.
But I believe your comparison is only true in an ideal world where the stages video goes through are perfectly executed.
Nothing to do with the real world...

A perfect example of what it "costs" to deinterlace is trying to playback 1080/60i footage on a PC.
It takes at least twice the horsepower of progressive playback (same bandwidth). Since DVD times.
Again, if nothing but a proper 3:2 puldown is required, it works. But there was never a stream that qualified.
Have you ever read DVD player reviews on Secrets? If there is one problem most players in $1K+ class have, it's deinterlacing.
And screwed up deinterlacing is very visible. Therefore I'd pick a 720/60p video stream over a 1080/60i any time.
The fact that the bandwidth is not more than 9Mbps most of the time and the encoders at BeV are often plain horrible doesn't help...

EDIT: An example of perfectly performed telecine-IVTC is HD-DVD playback.
The source video material is stored on the disk as 1080p.
Unlike BD, on exit movie material is telecined.
The TV turns it back into 1080/24p... if it is capable of x24Hz.

granduncle and fmr, here's a couple more points to add to your debate:

1) Subjective viewer testing of the effects of reduced bandwidth on compressed video performed by the European Broadcast Union has indicated that 720p degrades much more gracefully than 1080i. Considering BTV assigns only 8-9Mbps per channel maybe 720p is a better compromise.

2) If you purchased your 1080p TV prior to 2008 there's a good chance it fails to deinterlace 1080i inputs properly and results in 540 lines of vertical resolution. Gary Merson at Home Theatre Magazine has written several articles that reveal the shortcomings of the deinterlacers included in consumer HDTV's. (The good news is that 96% of 2008 1080p HDTV's passed the test. The bad news is that most failed the 3:2 pulldown test.)

I realize we've shifted quite a bit from the original topic, maybe a new topic would be appropriate.

"If there is one problem most players in $1K+ class have, it's deinterlacing."

Deinterlacing used to be a problem, when recorded material comes from an interlaced camera (can happen for most TV shows on DVD, but should not happen on movies transferred properly to DVD). Since the camera captures both half frames at a different moment, movements will create issues during deinterlacing. But nowadays, with most cameras being progressive, when you create an interlaced picture from this kind of source, it should not be a problem anymore. There may be the odd case where some hardware or software will place half-frames in different order (even-odd, instead of odd-even), in which case, the deinterlacing creates a garbled picture.

One last note about (de)interlacing:
At an IBC 2004 session, I was asked to explain why format wars seemed to be on the horizon for Europe. Having explained the EBU’s position in favour of progressive formats, one member of the audience said:

“I am amazed that anybody would consider launching new services based on interlace. I have spent all of my life working on conversion from interlace to progressive. Now that I have sold my successful company, I can tell you the truth: interlace to progressive does not work!”.

This remark was followed by a spontaneous round of applause from the audience. When the person was asked to give his name, he replied “Yves Faroudja” (who is widely acknowledged as the world’s foremost expert on format converters).
Taken from here (http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/trev/trev_301-editorial.html).

I strongly believe (and have quite a bit of personal experience to support this) that in real life situations - low bitrate, imperfect transmission, receiving, decoding, deinterlacimg, TV sets, setups, etc. - 720p is better than 1080i. Only when reaching the HD/BD level does this change.

"1) Subjective viewer testing of the effects of reduced bandwidth on compressed video performed by the European Broadcast Union has indicated that 720p degrades much more gracefully than 1080i. Considering BTV assigns only 8-9Mbps per channel maybe 720p is a better compromise."

Of course. You don't need subjective testing for this kind of conclusion. Math will do the job for you: a 1080i picture uses more pixels (1,036,800) than a 720p picture (921,600pix): 12.5% more ! If you allocate the same bandwidth for both signals, it is normal that the 1080i will have inferior quality.

I strongly believe (and have quite a bit of personal experience to support this) that in real life situations - low bitrate, imperfect transmission, receiving, decoding, deinterlacimg, TV sets, setups, etc. - 720p is better than 1080i. Only when reaching the HD/BD level does this change.That may be true, but I strongly believe that BDUs such as Bell should not be making those decisions for me. If NBC, CTV, CBS, CBC, HDNet etc. have chosen 1080i, then BDUs should be abiding by CRTC rules and delivering those stations to me in 1080i format with no degradation or reduction of bitrate.

If a BDU has bandwidth contraints then they should offer fewer channels (cut some superfluous SD channels) or they should not be allowed to market the product as HDTV.

i aree there must be some channels SD or HD people rarly watch. if it were me i be firing the guys who decided to put the hunting and fishing network on SD tv. who the heck need those sports 24/7 LOL. oh and i am curious if anyone watches BITE on 82W

...I strongly believe that BDUs such as Bell should not be making those decisions for me.It's a different issue and I won't argue here...
It looks like that famous wording means nothing in terms of accounting.
And BeV was screwing up 1080i signal so badly, it wasn't hidef most of the time.

Yes, sticking to "better fewer channels but higher bitrate" would have fixed this. But the market doesn't leave this approach a chance for existence...

"1) Subjective viewer testing of the effects of reduced bandwidth on compressed video performed by the European Broadcast Union has indicated that 720p degrades much more gracefully than 1080i. Considering BTV assigns only 8-9Mbps per channel maybe 720p is a better compromise."

Of course. You don't need subjective testing for this kind of conclusion. Math will do the job for you: a 1080i picture uses more pixels (1,036,800) than a 720p picture (921,600pix): 12.5% more ! If you allocate the same bandwidth for both signals, it is normal that the 1080i will have inferior quality.

I forgot to mention that the EBU also found that 1080p degrades more gracefully than 1080i. This isn't at all intuitive since 1080p contain 2x pixels/sec and it would suggest that interlaced video is inherently more susceptible to compression artifacts.

Based on this, perhaps BTV should switch to 1080p!

Ok here's a thought...... how about BEV just deliver all their channels at 1080i ( which is what the broadcasters send them anyway - ABC, TSN, FOX being the exceptions) and send this at 14-16 Mbps per channel..... and Ohhhhhh and how about only 2 channels per transponder.:rolleyes::rolleyes:

Just a thought guys, just a thought!

Paul

Because there isn't unlimited Bandwidth, and Bell would have to remove existing HD channels to accomplish that, which would cause the other half to bitch and complain. It's a no win situation.

-Mike

...Ok here's a thought...... how about BEV just deliver all their channels at 1080i...14-16 Mbps per channel.... BTV did this on multiple occasions: last winter Olympics opening/closing ceremony (CBC), Oscars the same year (CBC), HDNET testing phase, MC-HD for a short time (even tried 1280x1080/60i). Except for the MC-HD, every single time there was hardly anything else on the transponder and the 9200 would start acting up ~1 hour into the show (overheating).

Also, today's BTV encoder quadrupled the GOP size (from 15 to 60 frames). That means if one frame gets screwed up, the next 59 could be mangled.