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Watching video on TV via USB


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Old 26-07-2016, 17:56
hazydayz
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This is a thing I've been wondering for a while now and have wanted to ask people's opinions. I often download TV shows that are maybe not out over here at all or if they are can be weeks and weeks behind from when we get it on Sky but one of the things I do download is WWE wrestling because I refuse to pay the Sky Sports prices and IMO the Sky Sports prices are set from football mainly. I think that's why they get away with charging that kind of money.

As some of you will know they have their own Network which is 720p and 30fps. The TV output is 1080i and 60fps so it's slightly different, it's more of a movie like feel on there but the ones I get are 720p and they look ok. They don't look too good on my monitor but most stuff looks great on the TV. I feel like even at 720p when I play it back it always seems very dark and it's like an orange haze over the screen. I have used the calibrated settings on my TV and have never changed them. When I go through the other settings like Eco and Vivid, they tend to look a lot better, VIvid looks great but i know the colour temperature and the sharpness and backlights are turned up way up. It's a very cold look but it does look really good. I know that the calibrated settings are really what I should be watching and even those are tweaked, I wanted a little more colour and brightness to them.

The problem that I'm having is I was watching clips from their Youtube channel and the Youtube clips looked reallly good. I watched other programming from their Network not too long back and it looked really good. You could see faces in the crowd. It look crystal clear and yet the 720p recordings I have kind of look a bit muddy unless I turn on this VIvid setting and yet I have my standard settings for everything else and those other clips I watched looked fine on the standard settings. Is it the recordings at fault? And I have to say for other TV shows that I watch, the 720p quality is fine, they look great. If I watch any of the free HD channels which are obviously 1080i, they look great too. I don't feel the need to change anything so I don't know what it is. It just seems very very soft. I can only imagine that the person capturing it maybe isn't doing it as best as they could. I used to think maybe it was because I'm watching it on a 42" TV and 720p might not look that good but nearly everything else looks fine. Even when i'm going through the picture settings, you can clearly see going the brightest Vivid settings to my own settings a haze over the screen. I know that's to do with the colour temperature.

I don't want to use the Vivid settings because I know that makes everything bright and not everything on TV is meant to be watched that way. My feeling is it's the recordings but I'm trying to figure out what they've done wrong on their end to make it this way.
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Old 26-07-2016, 20:54
Stig
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You get what you pay for, which in this case is nothing.
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Old 26-07-2016, 22:23
mooghead
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You get what you pay for, which in this case is nothing.
Spot on, you have some front complaining about stuff you are stealing. And as for the 'vivid' setting.. Who says it shouldn't be used? If you like it use it.
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Old 27-07-2016, 02:11
Chris Frost
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Setting aside the moral issues of pinching content and whether it's right or not then then complain about the quality, your OP is vague and confusing with respect to the questions you're asking. Who exactly are they that "have their own Network which is 720p and 30fps"? Also who calibrated your TV, how and when? Or have you simply plucked some numbers from someone else's settings?

If we work on the basis that 'they' means the American broadcasters then it's perhaps useful to understand that just over 1/4 of the HD channels delivered via terrestrial (aerial), or satellite or cable are transmitted at 720p. The remaining 3/4 are at 1080i. The other thing to understand about the American broadcast system is that the overwhelming majority of HD channels are delivered via cable. This is to overcome the problems of geography. Terrestrial reception is okay within city limits but no good for spanning a continent. As such then, cable provides over 90% of the HD channel coverage in the US. That's a bit of a quality bottleneck in itself because the cable broadcasters apply some pretty heavy compression to the source programme material in order to minimise bandwidth and make more channels available. Straight away then there's a quality drop compared to exactly the same content delivered by terrestrial or by satellite. So, if statistically the majority of American households receiving a HD signal are getting it via cable, and cable is the lowest quality medium, then that goes some way to you understanding why there's a quality difference.

Now lets look at the process of capture. Recording the native HDMI signal is possible but one is likely to run in to issues with HDCP. The alternative is to capture the signal in an analogue form (Component video) and then re-digitise using an on-the-fly H.264 encoder. While this solves the HDCP issue it introduces at least to other problems right from the word go. First, there's a quality dip with the digital-analogue-digital conversion process. Second, the on-the-fly encoding isn't that good. There's at least two more issues. One is how the source box has been set up to output in Component and how the capture card is ste-up too. Video has a different dynamic range to PC signals. Video uses a 16-to-235 dynamic range compared to 0-to-254 for computer images. That means black in video is slightly grey in PC terms. This could easily explain the darkness that you're seeing, and it also has an impact on colour saturation. The other issue is how much additional compression is being applied at the capture stage on top of what's already in the broadcast signal.

Finally we have to consider your replay chain. You mentioned USB, so is it safe to presume you're allowing the TV to decode the data files? We have already discussed whether those files are ripped for PC- or video-level- black and what that does to the black level and colour saturation. On top of those things is the effect of the picture settings on the TV. A calibrated TV should give a warmer looking image compared to using the default picture modes. If there's a predominance of black in the source signal then you'll see any colour tint that affects those areas. If you calibrated your TV's colour balance by eye or chose to use someone else's numbers then the accuracy of the calibration might be in doubt.
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Old 27-07-2016, 17:58
anthony david
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I also think it is a dynamic range problem. You don't say what TV you are using but Sony TVs have auto and manual range select on their HDMI inputs, default is auto. Playing the file on a computer connected to the TV via an HDMI cable may solve the problem.
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Old 27-07-2016, 17:59
Mr Dos
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You get what you pay for, which in this case is nothing.
It's a pity Microsoft got 1st dibs on the phrase 'digital entitlement' (Windows 10 activation) - would be a preferred insult to the portmanteau 'freetard' (as popularised by El Reg) with its uncomfortable etymology.
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