8PSK Conversion

A

arthur dent

New member
Well, I haven't watch much TV since then, but at least I didn't come upon anything apalling in terms of quality, which used to happen lately. It's too early to tell, though.
What I can say is that the new HD cahnnels from Calgary are far from the quality of the original OTA channels, compared on the same receiver (9200). Which means that BTV didn't go to great lengths in terms of allocating higher bandwith for the new HD cnahhels.
 
I was watching CBC on Sunday and as they were switching over programming, the picture became blank for a moment or two and it said 18Mps on the screen. This is the 1080i bandwidth, no and if so maybe Bell is now airing CBC at 1080i again.
 
What about CBC, didn't they used to have there own transponder? By the way the hockey games on CBC don't look nearly as good as they used to so have they crammed them on with other channels now?
 
How many more HD channels will BellTV be able to carry when the 8PSK conversion is completed?
 
How far Bell can go with encoding efficiency/bitrate depends not only on the backend encoding technology, but also on the receiver capabilities, the weakest one. I don't think they have much margin left.
This is the reason BellTV switched to 720p, I believe. MPEG4, being more efficient, requires more computational power that MPEG2.
Additional overhead due to 8PSK and N3 complicates things even more.

The next generation of Bell receivers might be able to upload all decoding similarly to how PCs do it today when playing BD.
 
Because there is more space available on the transponder. QPSK has a higher overhead, so a lot of the 'bits' get used to make sure our content arrives error free. 8PSK has less overhead, so more of the bits can be used for actual content.

-Mike
 
I do think this is a fair comparison to make as with Bell at home I see their quality all the time. I wasn't sitting that far away from the over 70" tv and the quality on it was way better then what I see on Bell on my 60" tv. There wasn't a motion artifact to be found. I even checked out some of the plasmas in there too and they looked way better then anything I've seen on Bell. I know these bars in restaurants here have Directv as in the past they've always been advertising to come in to watch Riders home games (two years ago before the sellouts started). These would have been blacked out on TSN here, but they would show the game on the channel they found it on on Directv.
 
When is this 8PSK switch over supposed to happen and finish? I'm so tired of what Bell is trying to pass of as HD (HD Lite). 75% of shows are really soft, even the brief moments of the Canucks game on TSN tonight that I saw were not as sharp as it has been, complete with artifacts and macroblocking. The studio show looked poor. The Ducks/Sharks game on Centre Ice was extremly soft. I've seen DVD's (not BluRay) look better then what Bell is passing as HD. Something has to give soon, and it might be me going elsewhere. Only thing tying me to Bell is Centre Ice.
 
Only the 6000 does not support 8PSK, all the rest do.

The 6100 & 9200 do NOT support MPEG4, so they will require cahnging before Bell switch to that format.

The 6131, 6141, 9241 & 9242, all support 8PSK, MPEG2 & MPEG4, so they should last a while......
 
I Wish they would wake up and put the american superstations like NBCHD on 8PSK they by far look the worst, just compare CBCHD and NBCHD during an NHL game!!
 
To break it down a bit.. the only channels that most of us have that are now on 8psk are 825 WGNHD,838 SHWHD,896 CBCMH,897 SUNHD,900 CTVCH, 820 NBCHW,823 FOXHW. Nothing very significant yet imo.
 
On a side note, I've never seen HNIC look so bad last night, and no I'm not talking about the Flyers/Penguins. The Sharks/Ducks game in HD last night was full of motion artifacts and I even saw the odd bit of macroblocking. Hopefully Bell gets out of testing stage soon and starts to implement these changes.
 
If the picture became blank with 18Mb/s on the screen, this was most likely a CBC issue and the 18Mb/s number probably was referring to the signal CBC sends to Bell.

Besides, mpeg-4 compression would be less that 18Mb/s anyway.
 
It would depend on how much bandwidth they chose to allocate to each channel, I think...
 
I can't say I've noticed any change in picture quality, but they definitely have room for more HD now. I'm sure they'll continue to add new channels at their own pace though. They'll have to make do with what they have until the MPEG4 transition, which will be costly.

-Mike
 
Until very recently CBC was (the only one left) still broadcast in 1080/60i.
Not anymore.
 
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