DiamondGeezer

I haven't personally but me eyes are not that good


The BBC's high-definition (HD) television service has lost its pin-sharp pictures, viewers are claiming.

Hundreds of complaints have been posted online saying that broadcasts became fuzzy and grainy after the Corporation lowered the bitrate of its HD encoding technology from 16 megabytes to 9.7MB.

The BBC has been accused of stifling the criticism by closing user forums on its websites that contained negative comments from viewers. Forums that have been re-opened have been bombarded with fresh responses filling page after page. Viewers who claim they have been "fobbed off" have contacted the BBC Trust, demanding that it investigates the problem.

BBC criticised over HD picture quality - TV & Radio, Media - The Independent

sargie

Some times when watching bbc hd some of it looks amazing and then other times it looks grainy. I think some of it is to do with wether it is upscaled or shot in hd.

I was unaware they had lowered the bitrate though.

__________________
80CM DISH,TECHNOMATE 2200 MOTOR,cube revo mini black HD 160gb external hdd.
DIGITAL WORLD TILL THEY PULL THE PLUG!

hawkish

people are probably getting used to the HD effect and are now over critical

stefblak

ive noticed upscaled pictures are the same as council bbc. the only difference i see is Life, the documentary program about the planet, its stunning other than that i think its the same.

__________________

sargie

Lost land of the jaguar was pretty good and i noticed that they had hd cameras.

__________________
80CM DISH,TECHNOMATE 2200 MOTOR,cube revo mini black HD 160gb external hdd.
DIGITAL WORLD TILL THEY PULL THE PLUG!

nara

They've lowered the bitrate from 16mb to 9.7mb. I don't think it's being over critical to object to that.

K

Yep no diference pretty pointless really,. only diference i see is when recording it takes up more hard drive space..

Living HD is shyte aswell.. was watching CSI last night.. and the quality was exactly the same..

With regards to HD, in this country we're getting fobbed off but getting charged for the priviledge...

__________________

nozzer

Isn't it all very amusing that were having to move to HD to get the same quality of pictures that we had 20 years ago on analogue CRT's. So much with being fobbed off with the "digital is much higher quality" argument !

zad

Didn't this happen with DAB radio from the bbc also?, to free up more bandwidth they reduced the quality and if im not mistaken it went down to mp3 quality audio instead of the true digital audio they promised..

hawkish

Thats like saying that a big bottle of fairy washes more than concentrate. As is my understanding the new encoders at the BBC are better than the old with the issue being too much noise and grain in the newer image. This is a mixture of the new system showing it up more from camera operators using too much gain and overly post produced material. This causes a problem for the new encoders and there is a software patch in progress to blend it out like the old system did.

Its not a case of them using the same encoding techniques with higher compression, its a whole new encoder running more efficiently and still being a bit buggy. What it comes down to is if it had not have changed it would not fit on the new (and low on bandwith) freeviewHD service. When it goes right it works great like "life" but when it goes wrong its horrible.

one thing is for sure it needs more tweaking - well that and people are getting spoilt by HD going right they are not happy when it goes a bit wrong, quite rightly IMO this should have been tested more extensivly but with the Government pushing the freeviewHD forward these changes are being rushed


edit - found the article I read earlier