Euro HDTV - Jan 1st 2004

The Cigarette Smoking Man

http://www.euro1080.tv/

It'll broadcast five hours per day to start with and will be 1080i. Hopefully they'll show the Olympics in Athens

Charles Slane

This is very interesting indeed. HDTV is well over-due in this part of the world.

So what will it mean ? New equipment ? And will the broadcasters sign up ? Perhaps it will take an EU directive to make it happen.

carrolls

New satellite box, new TV, new HDTV DVD (Not even invented yet)
Sounds great.
I don't think a lot of European brodcasters will be willing to use up 4 times the bandwidth and hope to get people to go out and get new TV's.

chernobyl

Originally posted by carrolls
I don't think a lot of European brodcasters will be willing to use up 4 times the bandwidth and hope to get people to go out and get new TV's.

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watty

HDTV is more relevent in Japan and US since their TV does not look much better than a badly colorised 405 Line TV (480 active lines compared with 576 here.

The US has had a kind of psuedo HDTV some time. Japan on satellite has the real Bandwidth hogging variety.. So the TV sets exist in several flavours.

Since hardly any TVs in Europe are "good enough" to show all the horizontal detail in terrestrial PAL (Have you ever seen PAL on a BBC grade one Monitor?), I can't see it being wildly demanded.

BTW, in the US, DVD and Satellite is an "upgrade" as digitally stored Analog NTSC is reckoned at 640 dots per line and DVD etx is 720.
PAL analog in "square pixels" is 768 dots per line, but although our DVD / DVBs is 576 active lines rather than US 480, the horizontal is 720. A downgrade.

Perfect analog PAL is better than DVD/ DVBs in Europe.

Perfect Analog NTSC is WORSE than DVD/DVBs in USA.

If you use a 4 times as many pixels camera and down sample to 720 x 576 you capture nearly four times the detail of a 720 x 576 diect camera or analog to digital at 720 x576.

The Digital image will then go through the DVD/DSat chain to ordinary RV and be sharper! (US HDTV is not much different to this).

If you capture full resolution analog PAL at 1536 pixels instead of 768 and (still 576 vertical lines) and resample down to 720 x 576 after you get nearly twice the detail.

Its all in Nyquist's sampling theory... You have to sample at twice the detail to capture it.

David Robinson

Originally posted by watty
PAL analog in "square pixels" is 768 dots per line...

Yes, but where can you get square pixel PAL? To get the full resolution your BBC monitor will need a comb filter decoder that will introduce its own artefacts. As for terrestrial reception, the bandwidth used for PAL is 5.5MHz, and the active line period is 52µs, which gives 5.5 * 52 * 2 = 572 pixels. This is assuming a very high quality analogue receiver. Digital TV is hardly "a downgrade" compared to this.

Square pixels are unnecessary anyway for standard definition TV. Due to the line structure and the use of interlace, the vertical resolution appears less than the 575 active lines would suggest. Therefore it's reasonable to reduce the horizontal resolution to match.

chernobyl

Originally posted by David Robinson
Digital TV is hardly "a downgrade" compared to this.

Ohhh i would contest that.
I think a wiser move for broadcasters would be to upgrade their systems to MPEG4 as this has enormous bandwidth [and bottom line] financial benefits.

I doubt any of the *older Sky boxes would be capable of decoding a heavily compressed mpeg4 stream, but you can hope.

watty

At broadcast quality MPEG4 does not hardly save data. MPEG4 advantage over MPEG2 is increased quality at much lower bandwidth than used by normal satellite, e.g. Web Streaming.

(There is some MPEG4 on Satellite, but these are streaming multicast, not regular TV quality).

Normal DTH Digital Satellite is likely to remain MPEG2.

If you have a PC satellite Card and a PC display 1600 x 1200 or better you might be able to watch the 1080 HDTV transmissions. Until I get more details I don't know what (if any) Software Upgrade is needed. I know my own card the built in SW assumes 480 or 576 lines but the SDK lets you specify whatever you like for display. The actual MPEG decoder DSP chip seems to cope with any resolution of MPEG2 image video I have generated from tmpgenc and played pack as if it was a recored satellite stream.

(My desktop screen only does 1280 x 1024, but the Laptop does 1600 x 1200.. you can stream the ouput of a PC Satellite Card on the LAN easily enough with a 100Mbps ethernet card and switch)

Professional pre-DVD digitised PAL is stored at 768 x 576. The commonest HDTV in USA seems to be 720 line.

At least 1080 line is almost twice the 576...

Neither basic USA HDTV nor "ordinary" DVBs / DVD Video is much improvement on Analog PAL. Many DVD and DVBs transmissions do not even equal quality of PAL Plus (too much compression or poorly encoded).

To give similar ratio of quality in H and V as USA has for Animorphic DVD / DVBs (in Europe) it should be 864 x 576 (not 720 x 576) this is the same ratio as USA 720 x 480

I would regard 1080 as the barest minimum for HDTV.

Also in terms of viewing distance, if the screen is not big enough, you can't see the detail. HDTV is only needed for screens bigger than 36" WS or 28" 4:3 TV.

A 36" WS is over 2000 Euro.

I dread to think what a 48" HDTV would cost (minimum worth bothering with).

Commonest size of TV is 28" WS and 21" 4:3. Most of either of those do not even show all the detail there is at the moment (DVD, Digibox or Analog Off Air). So I think it will be a VERY long while before there is demand and commercial viability of European HDTV.

The USA is different as the existing NTSC is obviously poorer than PAL on a 21" set and US typically many more folks have larger than 44" sets where the NTSC looks like a picture stuck on ventian blinds... Their poor version of HDTV will be well established just as we think HDTV is a good idea in 5 years time

watty

Originally posted by David Robinson
<snip> active line period is 52µs, which gives 5.5 * 52 * 2 = 572 pixels. This is assuming a very high quality analogue receiver. Digital TV is hardly "a downgrade" compared to this.

Thus unless the sampling is done at 1200 pixels or more, you will lose detail. After sampling you can do bilinear resample to 270 dots prior to encoding.

The encoding DOES reduce the quality. The more the compression, the worse the quality (which is I agree different from resolution).

MPEG DVD or DVBs at 720 x 576 can be as good as Pal Plus, but at typical bitrates and encoding / transfer practices is worse.
( I can compare Analog Satellite on a new reciever, 3 differerent Digital Receivers, off air and computer generated. I have a commercial 2 pass variable bit rate MPEG2 encoder). Comparing images and the same signal, my NEW 28" TV does NOT show all the horizontal detail in DVD, DVBs, or Analog PAL. My computer screen does (which has Analog Win TV source PCI card, Digital Satellite PCI card and DVD all direct to overlay or drawing surface.)

Square pixels are unnecessary anyway for standard definition TV. Due to the line structure and the use of interlace, the vertical resolution appears less than the 575 active lines would suggest. Therefore it's reasonable to reduce the horizontal resolution to match.

David Robinson

Originally posted by watty
Thus unless the sampling is done at 1200 pixels or more, you will lose detail...

Whoa there! I've already included a factor of 2 in my calculation. A sample rate equal to the pixel rate will do the trick (plus a margin for filter slopes). I don't think even Nyquist suggested multiplying the bandwidth by 4! :cool: