Category Archives: DTV

HD Olympics

Posted on May 21, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

The principal broadcaster for the Olympics in Australia will be Channel 7, (Prime TV in regional areas). This time around we will be getting it in HDTV (1080i) in addition to SDTV. There is an interesting problem with the live … Continue reading →

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Will Australian digital TV switch to MPEG4?

Posted on March 5, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Last night I received a telephone call from a reader who wanted to know if Australia would be switching over to MPEG4 for its digital TV broadcasts. At the moment we are using MPEG2, the same codec used for DVD. … Continue reading →

Posted in Compression, DTV, HDTV, Video | 4 Comments

Another example of lousy 576i deinterlacing

Posted on February 17, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

I’m reviewing a high definition digital TV receiver/PVR that, like most of them, doesn’t have the ability to output 576i over HDMI, nor to perform decent deinterlacing of it. To confirm my suspicions I took some photos. Having taken them, … Continue reading →

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Macro blocking

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

In the last item on the HD cricket broadcast I referred to the appearance of MPEG macro blocking in the picture from time to time. So what is macro blocking? I don’t pretend to fully understand the maths behind it, … Continue reading →

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Cricket finally makes it to high definition!

Posted on February 2, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

At long last the first cricket match to be delivered in high definition in Australia was broadcast. This was the 20/20 match between Australia and India, played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Australia won handsomely. Let us have a brief … Continue reading →

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Insane artistic choices

Posted on January 2, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

So far as I am aware, there is no convenient book that fully describes all the range of issues regarding picture quality that I, for one, need to know. So what I have learnt has resulted from a painful process … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV, Interlacing, Rant | Leave a comment

Check, Recheck and Triple Check

Posted on November 30, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

One of the tasks involved in doing reviews on equipment is identifying faults with that equipment. That may seem easy, but it isn’t always. If you have a lousy picture while watching HDTV, is it the HDTV receiver that’s the … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV, Firmware, HD DVD, HDTV, Testing | Leave a comment

Even more on deinterlacing

Posted on September 12, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

I undertook on the Beyonwiz forum to explore further the output characteristics of the Beyonwiz video section. I have held off doing this for a few days because what I wanted to do was compare its 576p and 1080i output … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV, DVD, How Things Work, Interlacing | 2 Comments

More on deinterlacing

Posted on September 8, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

Someone on the DTV Forums recently posted a snippet of an ABC test pattern that he’d captured from ABC 2 digital TV. It’s 38MB, but he also posted a shorter trimmed version coming to 8MB (link here). That snippet is … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV, How Things Work, Interlacing, Video | Leave a comment

576i to the rescue

Posted on May 1, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

I mentioned below that ‘what we really need is a HD TV receiver that can either output 576i over a HDMI output (DVI outputs do a weird output when set to 576i, which isn’t compatible with all the displays I’ve … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV, HDTV, Interlacing, Video | Leave a comment