Hi,


Don't have an HD ready TV yet so....

If I record / watch HD version of programme through RGB scart, will the picture quality be better, or wil it make no difference as I'm watching via a normal TV.....

also, why are the recordings so big? Half hour shows about 1gig, but and hours TV encoded with Xvid as AVI is about 300K.

Why, with the limited amount of bandwidth are we not using an encryption method that compresses the signal better?

thanks

Normal TV= Normal picture, regardless of source. It may look a bit sharper and brighter, but nowhere near HD quality.
The signal is recorded raw to the box. Other boxes can and do compress it when recording, but obviously quality would suffer here, as would picture quality if the codecs weren't efficient enough to give the same quality picture as before a bit rate drop. See the thread about BBC HD cutting their bit rates, picture quality suffered. There just isn't a good enough commercial codec to give a fantastic HD picture at very low bit rates- yet.

("Even") BBC HD can look far better than SD on an SDTV.

It's because many digital SD broadcasts are sub-SD, with easily visible artefacts on challenging (fast moving or changing, detailed) content.

For things that don't stress the SD encoder so much (e.g. slow moving drama), you won't notice much difference - the SD picture is already pretty good.

The downscaling in boxes isn't "perfect" - there's quite a lot of aliasing, which can make pictures look a little sharp - artificially so - in a way that makes fine details do very strange things as the camera pans and zooms.

Cheers,
David.

Watching an HD programme on an SD TV considerably improves the picture, making SD look like it should do - much greater bandwidth, much better quality.

It's NOT worth spending £10 per month on , but it is worth pressing an extra button or two to watch an HD version if available.

Different boxes do different things with Freesat protected HD, as far as I know Humax may disable RGB but allow composite video, Panni allows all ports but only at a downscaled 576p, also beware that most broadcasting is widescreen and although there is a sidecut option I am not impressed, so you may need a new tv for that reason!
hope this is a help nick.

The latest firmware on both Humax HD boxes restores SD RGB output for HD transmissions. You can't get 576p from a scart socket only 576i. A component or hdmi port is required for anything over 720 x 576 interlaced.

thankyou Graham, at least I got 576 part ok. I guess also that PAL has allways been interlaced, and maybe a few less than 625 lines, but maybe I am guessing to much now bye

ps, I think panni also downscales output to 576i for component outputs to.

Ps some PVRs, I know Panasonic is one, put the sattelite bit stream straight onto the hard disk, so these recording files are also fairly small.

Are we related

It might improve it a bit. HD has a better colour range so things might look more vibrant. Downscaling from HD to SD to transmit through SCART may retain more detail than is normally present in an SD broadcast.

Compressing is always a balance between size, speed to encode and quality of the result. Different distribution methods do it differently. The more you compress the worse the end result is.

HD will always require significantly more storage than SD. That's unavoidable.