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One of the interesting things I've noticed is that (around here at least) the over-the-air TV is much higher quality than the local providers (cable and fiber).
by discreditable 5y ago
One of the interesting things I've noticed is that (around here at least) the over-the-air TV is much higher quality than the local providers (cable and fiber). The local providers streams are noticeably bit starved to me, while OTA looks quite good.
- jpmattia 5y ago> One of the interesting things I've noticed is that (around here at least) the over-the-air TV is much higher quality than the local providers (cable and fiber). There's a substantial difference in bitrate between OTA broadcast (for the main channel) and the cable broadcast. Typical cable will stat-mux several channels down to well below 10 Mbps/channel. Main OTA tends to be around 15 Mbps (for a different encoding) but not stat-muxed. So to some extent, the quality of the channel you're watching on cable/fiber depends on what is going on in the adjacent channels.
- matmatmatmat 5y agoCloser to 20 Mbps, even, for a full-bandwidth OTA broadcast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards.
- MrRadar 5y agoThough most broadcast stations have sub-channels which eat some of that bandwidth. In my market, almost every station broadcasts at least 3 video channels. A few of them even manage to squeeze 6(!) into their 20 megabits (which would be fine with modern codecs, but ASTC 1.0 is stuck with MPEG-2).
- cogman10 5y agoWhat I've been surprised about is the fact that cable has been really slow at adopting newer digital codec standards. AFAIK, pretty much all cable transmissions are MPEG2 (and analog for a long time before that). It's a little nuts considering all the benefits and readily available hardware decoders of new standards. A H.264 stream would look WAY better with far less bits.