How to Get the Best Looking HD Content for Your Buck

By Dave Kaplowitz

Now that the transition to digital television is all said and done, this next column looks at how broadcast TV stacks up to the other sources for HD video for your TV such as Cable, Satellite, Telco, and Blue-ray. And since the recession is hurting most of us, I would like to look at ways to get the best quality picture for the lowest amount of money.

What do you actually mean by quality?

Before we get into what those solutions might be, I’d like to talk a little about what we mean by video quality in the digital age. Essentially what we have to deal with is the signal coming out of the broadcast facility, then progressing down the transmission medium (the airwaves or the cable), then finally how well your TV can display this image. Many people think that because we are now in digital, you are getting an exact copy of what the original content looked like when it was created. If only this were true. The main reason it is not true is something referred to as compression. The problem is that there is much too much information in an uncompressed TV signal, and especially an HD signal, to send over the air, down a cable, satellite, or burn onto a Blu-ray disc. Several years ago some clever engineers figured out that our eyes are more sensitive to certain things than other. For instance, we are more sensitive to brightness than color. So to save space they just don’t put in as much color information as brightness. They also figured out that color and brightness only change slightly from pixel to pixel. Similar technology is used in the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) standard that is used in digital still cameras.

Video is still images projected at a speed where things look like they are moving. Some clever engineers figured out that, except in scene transitions, each video image (or frame), only changes slightly from the previous one and the following one. So instead of transmitting each image, the difference between the image and the previous and next image is transmitted and takes much less space (or bits in computer speak). This of course is an oversimplification, but you get the idea. So these clever people at MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) continue to come up with better ways to put 10 pounds of potatoes in a 5 pound sack (actually it’s more like putting 100 pounds of potatoes in a 8 ounce sack, but that doesn’t have that sound of homespun wisdom). First there was MPEG-1 that was mostly used for internet video. Then came MPEG-2 which is used on DVDs, some cable TV and digital broadcast TV. Then came MPEG-4 which is the most modern standard that is used for Blu-Ray, satellite, and pretty much anyone else that wants to have the best quality HD images in the smallest space and is able to start from scratch. Specifically I am referring to MPEG-4 Part 10 aka MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Codec) aka H.264.

What about MPEG-3 – isn’t that the MP3 standard that we all know and love for music? Well, no. MP3 actually means MPEG-1 Part 3 and has been around for quite some time and it has been improved somewhat over the years. There are even better standards for compressing audio, both sound tracks and separate music files, that are included in the more recent MPEG standards.

How come the picture gets blurry when there is a lot of action?

Even though these compression standards do a pretty good job, the broadcasters are always trying to push them to their max so they can broadcast more channels. It is especially important to them from a marketing perspective these days to advertise that they have MORE HD CHANNELS then their competition. How does this work? Let’s say I have 5 channels and I’d like to squeeze a 6th one in. All I have to do is send 17% fewer bits down the first 5 and I have enough bits left over to make a 6th channel. This is classic case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Unfortunately the Peter that gets robbed is actually the viewer – the images look good when there isn’t much action on the screen. But when things get busy, either characters moving around or lots of camera movement or both, the images tend to get blurry until the action dies down.

OK, enough of this technical stuff. How do I get the best quality HD picture?

The best quality HD picture hands down is from Blu-ray. They have allocated more bits for the picture and audio than anything else out there. Even though Blu-ray players are coming way down in price and will break the $100 price point at the low end this holiday season, Blu-ray discs are still quite expensive - sometimes more than two or three times as much as their DVD equivalents. Hollywood has not been enjoying the plummeting price of DVD and has been salivating at the idea of everyone going out and replacing their huge DVD libraries with new Blu-ray discs. You’ll often get more and fancier goodies on the Blu-ray version, but you have to ask if it's really worth it, especially when you’ve probably got a rather large DVD library. What you may have noticed by now if you have a Blu-ray player is that DVDs look almost as good as Blu-ray. This is because of a technology called upsampling. This is done when the image is uncompressed from the information coming off the disc and the image is reconstructed from the bits. The upsampling algorithms do some fancy signal processing to make it look like you have more information there than you do. It works best on high quality source material, but it can look almost as good as Blu-ray. You would certainly be able to tell the difference side by side, but who cares? With a Blu-ray player you’ll be able to splurge on that Blu-ray version of Planet Earth you have been wanting to see in all its awe and HD glory, yet still enjoy watching your well-worn DVD of Runaway Bride on date night.

How does broadcast TV stack up?

Behind Blu-ray the next best HD picture comes from over the air broadcast TV. As I mentioned in the last edition, the federal government spent a considerable amount of time and energy evaluating competing standards and ensuring that the picture quality is of a high standard. While not as high quality as Blu-ray and sometimes difficult to receive, the picture has the potential to be really nice. I say the potential because stations have the option of taking up some of the bits by including up to two standard definition streams in with the HD stream. So instead of putting 10 pounds of potatoes into a 5 pound sack, they are putting 10, 2, and 2 pounds into the same 5 pound sack. So the HD picture is going to have fewer bits allocated and not look as pristine. You can tell if these standard definition subpictures are there if there are multiple versions of the same station, for instance channel 51.1, 51.2, and 51.3. Channel 51.1 would be the HD picture and 51.2 and 51.3 are the standard def subpictures. So the potential is there for really nice looking video, but the stations sometimes cut corners to include more programming.

How much do you love your cable company?

Finally, we are left with Cable, Satellite, and the Phone Companies. There are endless debates on which is best and which is terrible. From what I have seen they are all very similar in terms of picture quality and I would base my decision more on total bundled price and who has the programming I like. Unfortunately we are still years away from a la carte pricing of premium TV – meaning by and large, we have to take the packages that are offered by the providers and we have to like it. Since the cable companies are now in the phone business and the phone companies are in the TV business and everyone has high speed internet service, it makes sense to reevaluate your bundle by talking to as many providers as you can and seeing if someone might beat your current provider. I had a surreal experience recently when I dropped my land line that I have had for years with AT&T. Now that I have an unlimited minutes cell phone plan I figured I’d save the $25 that I was spending monthly for my land line that I rarely used. I was worried that my internet would go up because I wasn’t bundling the services. For some reason my internet went down by $5 per month. Go figure.

Next issue: Some hints on picking an HDTV set.