Category Archives: Video

New formats always lead to troubles

Posted on February 17, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

When the DVD was first introduced, some of the early discs were released in pan and scan 4:3 format. There was outrage from quite a few enthusiasts, who wanted to see movies in their original aspect ratios, a position with … 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 →

Posted in DTV, HDTV, Video | Leave a comment

1080p24 – is it worth it?

Posted on December 4, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

Reader Peter Greed emailed me recently, drawing my attention to a Highdefdigest forum discussion on the value of 1080p24. This thread hangs off a pretty good article on 1080p24 from Joshua Zyber on the subject, entitled ‘What’s the Big Deal … Continue reading →

Posted in Blu-ray, How Things Work, Video | Leave a comment

What is moire?

Posted on November 5, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

From time to time I mention moire as an artefact of video systems, often due to poor deinterlacing of progressive scan material. See for example here, and here, and here (near Figure 2). Here’s a real world demonstration from my … Continue reading →

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Scale once, not twice

Posted on November 5, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

Your home entertainment display probably has a fixed physical resolution due to the pixel structure of its LCD, DLP or LCoS panel(s). Many modern DVD players and HD set top boxes can output the video with a vertical resolution of … Continue reading →

Posted in Scaling, Video | Leave a comment

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 →

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Flicker

Posted on June 5, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

In my Canberra Times column this week I discussed 1080p24 as the ideal delivery standard for Blu-ray and HD DVD. Today I received an email on this, thus: I had never heard of 1080p24 or even conceived that it might … Continue reading →

Posted in Equipment, How Things Work, 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 →

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Proof of crappy video output from HDPVR

Posted on April 30, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

Below, my blog entry ‘We need a videophile’s High Definition Digital TV Receiver‘ puts the case that we are not getting all the picture we should be with standard definition digital TV, thanks to what I suspected was poor deinterlacing … Continue reading →

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HD picture quality, vs SD picture quality

Posted on April 28, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

The issue before last of Sound and Image magazine carries my article comparing the picture quality of SDTV and HDTV. In brief, I captured snippets of both versions of the same programs on a high definition PVR (the Strong SRT-5490), … Continue reading →

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