[Sugarfix]

Just a thought, but does anyone know if the SkyHD box will do any internal upscaling of SD source material broadcast by Sky?

Is this something that the Pace and other HD STB's do?

Cheers in advance for your replies.

[Dan27]

No one knows yet, its not public knowledge. I hope so..

[Sugarfix]

OK. Fingers crossed then.

Thanks for the reply Dan.

[Teresa]

The Telewest HD box upscales SD programmes and outputs 4:3 programmes as 4:3 by adding black bars at the sides to make them widescreen. This means that letterboxed widescreen programmes have a black bar all the way around. However, most HD screens have no facilities to resize HD resolution pictures and many people trialling the Telewest box are upset that they are forced to watch with black bars unless they go back to scart.

[Sugarfix]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Teresa

The Telewest HD box upscales SD programmes and outputs 4:3 programmes as 4:3 by adding black bars at the sides to make them widescreen. This means that letterboxed widescreen programmes have a black bar all the way around. However, most HD screens have no facilities to resize HD resolution pictures and many people trialling the Telewest box are upset that they are forced to watch with black bars unless they go back to scart.

Personally, I prefer to watch with the black bars down the sides rather than zooming and having part of the image clipped off or having the image streched and distorted.

[Teresa]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sugarfix

Personally, I prefer to watch with the black bars down the sides rather than zooming and having part of the image clipped off or having the image streched and distorted.

That's how I always watch 4:3, however it seems that there are quite a few people who object very strongly to these black bars and consider this to be a major fault with the set top box. They want to be able to stretch upscaled 4:3 just like SD 4:3. Telewest set top boxes have never resized 4:3 and it has always been up to the screen to resize these pictures. However, these people have new expensive HD screens that lack the capability to resize HD pictures in the same ways as SD pictures. Therefore they are very dissapointed and want Telewest to change their software to provide this feature instead. I wonder how Sky are going to approach this problem.

[cjgpers]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Teresa

I wonder how Sky are going to approach this problem.

Hopefully they'll give the viewer the choice. Yes, some people like to keep native 4:3, others like to zoom in. I personally like to display in 14:9, small side bars and some clipping across the top/bottom.

I presume the Sky+HD box will have some sort of scaler/deinterlacer in it, which should be able to scale to most popular formats - 4:3, 14:9, 16:9, etc.

However, when have Sky ever designed a STB which gives the viewer choice about how they view their picture!!

[meltcity]

I think most people would object to having their TV picture surrounded by black bars in shrinkyvision™. Flextech are one of the worst offenders, showing 16:9 widescreen programmes in a 14:9 letterbox, and they are owned by Telewest!

The cheap solution is to upgrade the software in the Telewest HD boxes to use 'smart' scaling that detects the presence of black bars in an SD broadcast and zooms in to compensate. A better solution would be for Flextech and other 4:3 broadcasters to upgrade their facilities to anamorphic widescreen, but that isn't going to happen any time soon.

[sanderton]

No particular reason for thinking any scaling technology in the Sky+HD box will be superior to that built in to the TV is there? Especially as with its primary function (HD) it doesn't need to do any scaling!

[{ph[oe]nix}]

I should imagine that the sky box, will at worst, allow the output of SD channels using progressive scan. This would improve the quality to some extent.

There is an issue here, in that, if you are paying more for Sky HD, then watch Sky1 SD, for a non-hd show, do you not, at LEAST, deserve to get a less compressed picture. So, for channels with HD simulcast, I hope that when not in proper HD, they will show SD at far higher bitrates.

I suspect they won't.

The other way to do it, would be to create new versions of the SD channels, in MPEG-4 (only the ones that have HD alternates) and use the smart card to substitute the old MPEG-2 channels for the new, better compressed system...

[sanderton]

If you watch Sky 1 HD for an SD show, then you'll see an upscaled (at Sky's end) show with presumably higher bitrates, so that should be good.

I don't see why Sky 1 SD will be affected at all by HD's launch?

[czytt]

I do not want SD signals upscaled, or even progressive. Anyone who runs a separate scaler will want that to do the work, not a $10 chip in the Sky HD box.

If they are going to upscale over HDMI, I only hope they simultaneously send the SD signal out through the SCART socket. At least I could use that instead.

Any news on this would be most welcome.

Jerry

[camaj]

I don't know about simultaniously but they will give you a SD output from the Scart

[karel paborsky]

Taken from the Sky HD Question thread...

Quote:

Quote:

Originally Posted by czytt
What happens to SD channels?

Will they be upscaled by Sky (which I would hate, since I hace a scaler), or output in SD over HDMI (as interlaced - Yay!. or progressive - Boo!), or output over the SCART (simultaneously with the HDMI output).

Thanks

Jerry

Depends what your question is are you asking will the output stage be scalled to HD (I don't know but will ask)

Or are you asking if non HD programming on Sky One HD will be scalled to HD by Sky at the point of broadcast - in which case I'm sure their £50,000 scaler will do a better job than yours [well it should]

So if it is done at Sky's end which sanderton suggests; they will not be using that $10 chip.

[Sugarfix]

Quote:

Originally Posted by karel paborsky

Taken from the Sky HD Question thread...

So if it is done at Sky's end which sanderton suggests; they will not be using that $10 chip.

Now that's what I'm hoping, SD content on the HD channels to be scaled at source and the SD channels to be left alone

(or maybe just the bitrates improved for those of you who'd like that little bit more from your own scalers )

On the point earlier about the scaling and introduction of side borders, I agree, TW should allow the end user to make thier own choice.

[sanderton]

Much harder to do though. With SD, the exact same picture is output by the box, but the TV does the stretching, usually in a very analogue way by varying the timing of the horzontal scan. In HD the 720p output is 1280 x 720 no matter what the source, so the stretching would have to be done digitally in the STB by resampling the picture. I wouldn't count on having that facility.

You'll only need to switch inputs to RGB SCART though for SD channels, so hardly the end of the world.

[cjgpers]

Quote:

Originally Posted by sanderton

Much harder to do though. With SD, the exact same picture is output by the box, but the TV does the stretching, usually in a very analogue way by varying the timing of the horzontal scan. In HD the 720p output is 1280 x 720 no matter what the source, so the stretching would have to be done digitally in the STB by resampling the picture. I wouldn't count on having that facility.

You'll only need to switch inputs to RGB SCART though for SD channels, so hardly the end of the world.

Sounds like the end of the world to me!! Having to change TV inputs between HDMI and RGB everytime I change channel would be unreasonable. I see no reason why the Sky+HD box wouldn't be able to scale SD (720x576) up to HD (1280x720 or 1920x1080). After all, my Showcenter 200 does this with excellent results, taking any media dimensions I throw at it and scaling up to 1280x720 with excellent results. Even gives you choices between original size, full screen, fit to screen, 4:3, 16:9, etc.

As long as Sky are using a modern MPEG4 decoder, they'll get scaling built in. The SC200 uses the Sigma EM8620 chip, and this does MPEG2 and MPEG4 decoding and scaling in one solution.