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Am 26.04.2010 12:04, schrieb Invisible:
>>> ...in other words, the entire reason for multiple resolutions existing
>>> is to extract more money from people.
>>
>> The entire reason for HDTV /per se/ is to extract more money from people.
>
> Damn. And here I was thinking it was supposed to improve picture quality...
No; that's just a semi-rare collateral effect...
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> ...in other words, the entire reason for multiple resolutions existing is
> to extract more money from people.
Of course, why else would any company do anything?
>> No, the cost of panel area outweighs all the things I mentioned above.
>
> Oh, OK. I assumed the difficulty of manufacturing a higher dot-pitch was
> the main problem...
No, that's technically easy. Besides pixels can be made orders of
magnitudes smaller than what is needed for TV (computer monitors, cell phone
screens, LCDs for projectors, etc.).
>> Funny how radiotimes.com indicates almost every TV program is broadcast
>> in widescreen :-) You need to fix your TV if you are not seeing a
>> widescreen picture from normal TV.
>
> I especially love how I have a widescreen TV, but you have to manually
> flip between 4:3 and 16:9 aspect. Even though it's connected by a digital
> link, so you'd think it could *detect* which kind of signal it's
> receiving...
Don't know about that, I have a widescreen TV and all the TV programs I
watch come in widescreen format, so I never need to adjust anything and it
always looks fine. Where are you getting 4:3 content from?
> That being the case, it's not entirely easy to tell whether you're
> watching a widescreen broadcast, or a normal one with the top cut off.
> (Unless of course you configure the TV to show black bars at the side -
> but it's my mum's TV, and she always complains when I configure it that
> way.)
With 99% certainty anything you are watching from UK TV will be widescreen.
It is very rare anything is broadcast in 4:3, I certainly haven't seen
anything and looking through radiotimes.com I can't find anything either.
Quite often you will see the text and captions on the TV will be formatted
within some "safe" area for 4:3 (so won't use the left/right edges), but the
main feed will be 16:9 format. Like this:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v467/jonchoo/954963b2.jpg
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And lo On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:19:45 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> did
spake thusly:
> PS. I am similarly baffled by the current fashion for "widescreen" TVs.
> Given that 99.998% of all video content ever created is in 4:3 aspect,
> what the hell is the advantage of buying a TV with a 16:9 aspect?? I
> don't understand.
To all those giving an answer of "movies" to this question may I point out
that most aren't 16:9 but are in 21:9 cinema proportions. 16:9 was the
compromise yet now we have the option of purchasing yet another television
at this proportion from Philips.
--
Phil Cook
--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com
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And lo On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:53:08 +0200, Fredrik Eriksson
<fe79}--at--{yahoo}--dot--{com> did spake thusly:
> I have to ask: Is Milton Keynes like one of those little tribal villages
> sometimes found deep in some jungle, where technology has not improved
> for centuries?
No that'd be Scotland... ooooo channeling Frankie Boyle there.
--
Phil Cook
--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com
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>> ...in other words, the entire reason for multiple resolutions existing
>> is to extract more money from people.
>
> Of course, why else would any company do anything?
I don't mind paying money when I actually get something in return.
>>> No, the cost of panel area outweighs all the things I mentioned above.
>>
>> Oh, OK. I assumed the difficulty of manufacturing a higher dot-pitch
>> was the main problem...
>
> No, that's technically easy. Besides pixels can be made orders of
> magnitudes smaller than what is needed for TV (computer monitors, cell
> phone screens, LCDs for projectors, etc.).
I often wonder why we don't have monitors with 300dpi or 600dpi yet.
Then the text on screen would be nearly print-quality.
(Except that, to this day, changing resolution makes everything come out
too small. How many managers have you seen turn down the resolution to
make the text bigger?)
>> I especially love how I have a widescreen TV, but you have to manually
>> flip between 4:3 and 16:9 aspect. Even though it's connected by a
>> digital link, so you'd think it could *detect* which kind of signal
>> it's receiving...
>
> Don't know about that, I have a widescreen TV and all the TV programs I
> watch come in widescreen format, so I never need to adjust anything and
> it always looks fine. Where are you getting 4:3 content from?
Even the adverts?
Which channels are you watching?
> With 99% certainty anything you are watching from UK TV will be
> widescreen. It is very rare anything is broadcast in 4:3, I certainly
> haven't seen anything and looking through radiotimes.com I can't find
> anything either.
Perhaps I live in a different country or something then? Most of what we
receive doesn't appear to be widescreen.
(Or are you talking about the HD channels? We only receive SD.)
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Phil Cook v2 wrote:
> And lo On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:19:45 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> did
> spake thusly:
>
>> PS. I am similarly baffled by the current fashion for "widescreen"
>> TVs. Given that 99.998% of all video content ever created is in 4:3
>> aspect, what the hell is the advantage of buying a TV with a 16:9
>> aspect?? I don't understand.
>
> To all those giving an answer of "movies" to this question may I point
> out that most aren't 16:9 but are in 21:9 cinema proportions. 16:9 was
> the compromise yet now we have the option of purchasing yet another
> television at this proportion from Philips.
Well, the monitor I'm watching right now actually has a 8:5 aspect, and
the one at home has (I think) a 11:6 ratio. No idea what that means...
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>> How about if it supported only SD (which is one resolution) or only HD
>> (in one resolution)?
>
> Then you would ignore the market segment that consists of people that
> want something better than SD but cannot (or do not want to) pay the
> full price of 1080p.
I'm of the opinion that "full price 1080p" shouldn't be that expensive
in the first place, and we should all be saving up for 4096p or
something. But I guess that's next year's money draw...
>> (What the hell is the advantage of a widescreen *laptop* for goodness'
>> sake?!)
>
> 1. Watching movies on the go.
OK. If you accept that there is movie content available in widescreen
then that makes sense.
> 2. A better match for the aspect ratio of the keyboard.
That works. In fact, my (widescreen) laptop is the very first laptop
I've ever seen with a numpad. Usually laptops omit it.
> 3. Cost (remember that thing about the diagonal and the surface area).
Fair enough.
> I have to ask: Is Milton Keynes like one of those little tribal villages
> sometimes found deep in some jungle, where technology has not improved
> for centuries?
Milton Keynes hasn't actually existed for a complete century yet, so...
no. (Although for some strange reason almost nobody seems to have heard
of it or know where it is. And whenever shows or events happen, they
happen in Northampton. Not Milton Keynes. No idea why!)
I did once see a film at Loughborough Cinema [there is only one]. That
was an experience; no surround sound, for a start. It's surprising how
much of a difference that makes!
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Perhaps I live in a different country or something then? Most of what we
> receive doesn't appear to be widescreen.
>
> (Or are you talking about the HD channels? We only receive SD.)
Lightbulb overhead *ping*!
Are you by any chance still watching the analogue signal? Everything on freeview
that was made within the last 5-10 years will be widescreen, but I seem to
recall that PAL is only 4:3...
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On 26/04/2010 11:55 AM, Phil Cook v2 wrote:
> And lo On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:53:08 +0200, Fredrik Eriksson
> <fe79}--at--{yahoo}--dot--{com> did spake thusly:
>
>> I have to ask: Is Milton Keynes like one of those little tribal
>> villages sometimes found deep in some jungle, where technology has not
>> improved for centuries?
>
> No that'd be Scotland... ooooo channeling Frankie Boyle there.
>
Oi! Do ye like hospital food? ;-)
--
Best Regards,
Stephen
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> I don't mind paying money when I actually get something in return.
Most people feel the same way, and obviously people selling stuff realise
this too.
> I often wonder why we don't have monitors with 300dpi or 600dpi yet. Then
> the text on screen would be nearly print-quality.
Because you view a computer monitor from further distance than a book, an
arbitrarily increasing the ppi is a waste of money and electricity.
On the other hand cell-phones, which you often do use much closer, have much
higher resolution displays. 200-300 dpi on high-end phones is normal, for a
computer monitor at normal viewing distances I doubt there would be much
improvement going from 100 -> 300 dpi, and going to 600 dpi would be pretty
much invisible at normal viewing distances.
> (Except that, to this day, changing resolution makes everything come out
> too small.
You can change the ppi setting somewhere in windows, but IME some badly
behaved programs don't like it.
> Even the adverts?
Yeh I think so, I would have probably noticed if they weren't.
> Which channels are you watching?
Just the usual, BBC1-3 and red button, ITV1&4, C4 etc.
> Perhaps I live in a different country or something then? Most of what we
> receive doesn't appear to be widescreen.
>
> (Or are you talking about the HD channels? We only receive SD.)
No I only get SD too, everything I've seen is widescreen, again check your
favourite listings magazine or website if you don't believe me.
"Most digital broadcasts from the BBC and the other main broadcasters are
now in widescreen format"
From:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/reception/digitaltv/widescreen.shtml
Oh wait, you're not still receiving analogue signal are you? That might be
different.
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> Well, the monitor I'm watching right now actually has a 8:5 aspect, and
> the one at home has (I think) a 11:6 ratio. No idea what that means...
IIRC they made computer monitors 16:10 rather than 16:9 so that you could
watch a 16:9 movie and have a little space for the GUI whilst still seeing
the film at full size.
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> Question: Why aren't there any widescreen cinemas yet?
> >
> > At risk of entirely misunderstanding the question, all cinemas have shown all
> > films in 16:9 or wider for almost a hundred years.
> Really?
> Huh, well, you learn something every day. The picture always looked
> fairly square to me...
I'm beginning to suspect that this is not Andrew, and instead some troll
is posting using his nickname.
If even TV is not square (it's 4:3), how in the world could you ever
think that movies are square? I don't get it.
The narrowest aspect ratio used in movies for the past 20+ years has
usually been 1.85:1. The most common aspect ratios for big movies today
is 2.25:1 and even 2.35:1 (that's well over twice as wide as tall).
--
- Warp
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scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> Don't know about that, I have a widescreen TV and all the TV programs I
> watch come in widescreen format, so I never need to adjust anything and it
> always looks fine. Where are you getting 4:3 content from?
"Looks fine" is not saying much...
Well, I'm not saying you are one of those people (and I'm in fact
assuming you aren't), but I have seen *way* too many people who vehemently
deny seeing *anything* wrong *at all* in a 4:3 picture which has been
stretched horizontally to cover the entire 16:9 screen area.
--
- Warp
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>> I often wonder why we don't have monitors with 300dpi or 600dpi yet.
>> Then the text on screen would be nearly print-quality.
>
> Because you view a computer monitor from further distance than a book,
> an arbitrarily increasing the ppi is a waste of money and electricity.
I can see the pixels on my monitor. But yeah, maybe 600dpi would be
overkill. Perhaps just 150 or something?
>> (Except that, to this day, changing resolution makes everything come
>> out too small.
>
> You can change the ppi setting somewhere in windows, but IME some badly
> behaved programs don't like it.
Hell, there are programs that ignore you if you change the default
window colours. Or programs that don't like it if Windows is installed
on D: rather than C:. ;-)
>> Perhaps I live in a different country or something then? Most of what
>> we receive doesn't appear to be widescreen.
>>
>> (Or are you talking about the HD channels? We only receive SD.)
>
> No I only get SD too, everything I've seen is widescreen.
Mmm, OK. I shall investigate further...
> Oh wait, you're not still receiving analogue signal are you? That might
> be different.
I don't *think* we are... I thought we were using Freeview.
(Then again, my grandparents use FreeSat. Their TV physically has a 4:3
aspect [it's an old CRT], and the picture seems to fit natively, so...)
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Warp wrote:
> Well, I'm not saying you are one of those people (and I'm in fact
> assuming you aren't), but I have seen *way* too many people who vehemently
> deny seeing *anything* wrong *at all* in a 4:3 picture which has been
> stretched horizontally to cover the entire 16:9 screen area.
This is the best part of widescreen! :-D
You can choose between:
1. Black bars at the side of the screen. (I.e., all that extra screen
area you just paid money for being completely unused.)
2. A stretched image where everybody has elliptical heads.
3. One of the various "zoom" modes which distorts the image non-linearly
to supposedly give a better picture than a linear distortion.
4. Cut the top and/or bottom off the picture to make it fit.
Everybody seems to hate #1, but lots of people apparently see nothing
wrong with #2 or #3. *shudders*
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> I can see the pixels on my monitor.
What dpi is it? How far away are you from it?
> But yeah, maybe 600dpi would be overkill. Perhaps just 150 or something?
My laptop has a 150 dpi screen. My desktop monitor is 103 dpi and from
normal viewing at my desk (60 cm) I cannot see any jagged edges from the
pixels (maybe that's just because of the AA settings though). Maybe the
fact that Windows is not good at scaling has meant that making a 150 or 200
dpi monitor that is used from "desktop" viewing distances would be
impossible to use due to the tiny physical size of the fonts and other GUI
items?
> Hell, there are programs that ignore you if you change the default window
> colours. Or programs that don't like it if Windows is installed on D:
> rather than C:. ;-)
I was running it for a while on my laptop with a non-standard dpi setting.
On the whole Windows and Office was fine, but IIRC my CAD software screwed
up, with some buttons being shifted outside of the window so you couldn't
get to them!
> (Then again, my grandparents use FreeSat. Their TV physically has a 4:3
> aspect [it's an old CRT], and the picture seems to fit natively, so...)
Most stand alone sat/freeview boxes I've seen have an option to output to
4:3 which just crops the left/right edges of the 16:9 signal (I assume if
it's built into a TV it will be set accordingly to match the TV). This is
why they always put any important information in the central part of the
screen, as they know some people are still chopping the sides off to watch
4:3.
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> 1. Black bars at the side of the screen. (I.e., all that extra screen
> area you just paid money for being completely unused.)
And that's wrong because...?
> Everybody seems to hate #1
I have been thinking about an explanation for that psychological phenomenon
for years, but come up with nothing. It still baffles me.
Clearly I'm different than 99% of people. The stretching bothers me a
lot, but the black bars on the side not at all. This seems to be the exact
opposite of what those 99% of people feel. But why? I have no idea.
--
- Warp
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> 2. A stretched image where everybody has elliptical heads.
Maybe it makes them feel better if everyone else looks fatter on TV :-)
Still interested to know where you're getting your 4:3 TV feed from that
requires one of these "fixes". Are you using a separate
freeview/cable/satellite box? That might be configured to 4:3 rather than
16:9?
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Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> 1. Black bars at the side of the screen. (I.e., all that extra screen
>> area you just paid money for being completely unused.)
>
> And that's wrong because...?
It's wrong that I should have to pay extra for a bunch of additional
pixels that I'm never going to use.
However, if I've already paid that money, I'd rather see black bars than
squashed heads.
>> Everybody seems to hate #1
>
> I have been thinking about an explanation for that psychological phenomenon
> for years, but come up with nothing. It still baffles me.
Join the club.
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And lo On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:28:34 +0200, Bill Pragnell
<bil### [at] hotmailcom> did spake thusly:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Perhaps I live in a different country or something then? Most of what we
>> receive doesn't appear to be widescreen.
>>
>> (Or are you talking about the HD channels? We only receive SD.)
>
> Lightbulb overhead *ping*!
>
> Are you by any chance still watching the analogue signal? Everything on
> freeview
> that was made within the last 5-10 years will be widescreen, but I seem
> to
> recall that PAL is only 4:3...
Nope not even that, the analogue widescreen broadcasts are anamorphic so
despite being 4:3 they expand to 16:9. Even prior to Freeview most films
on my 4:3 CRT were black-barred top and bottom. I'm trying to think of any
current broadcasts in 4:3... the older items obviously particularly those
from the USA; oh and one channel on Freeview - Viva
--
Phil Cook
--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com
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"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> a écrit dans le message de groupe de discussion
: 4bd58d26@news.povray.org...
> Well, I'm not saying you are one of those people (and I'm in fact
> assuming you aren't), but I have seen *way* too many people who vehemently
> deny seeing *anything* wrong *at all* in a 4:3 picture which has been
> stretched horizontally to cover the entire 16:9 screen area.
Truly, lots of people are blind to wrong image ratios. Some years ago the
photos in my university's facebook had been stretched horizontally, turning
hundreds of students into flattened toads. Nobody found that odd. Recently,
I saw a framed print of a painting where the image had been squeezed because
the original image's ratio was wider than the frame's ratio. Why bother to
crop the image or find the right frame? Making movies in widescreen is a
real waste: filmmakers could film everything in 1.37:1 as in the old times,
stretch them to 2.39:1 and few people would notice.
G.
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> Truly, lots of people are blind to wrong image ratios. Some years ago the
> photos in my university's facebook had been stretched horizontally,
> turning hundreds of students into flattened toads. Nobody found that odd.
> Recently, I saw a framed print of a painting where the image had been
> squeezed because the original image's ratio was wider than the frame's
> ratio. Why bother to crop the image or find the right frame? Making movies
> in widescreen is a real waste: filmmakers could film everything in 1.37:1
> as in the old times, stretch them to 2.39:1 and few people would notice.
I think it's because we are used to often seeing things at an angle during
everyday life, so our brain is quite good at automatically correcting aspect
ratios for us.
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>> I can see the pixels on my monitor.
>
> What dpi is it? How far away are you from it?
No idea what the dpi rating is. It's 1400x900 and it's probably about
30cm tall or something? And I'm sitting maybr 40cm or so away from it.
(I don't have anything to actually measure it with.)
> My laptop has a 150 dpi screen. My desktop monitor is 103 dpi and from
> normal viewing at my desk (60 cm) I cannot see any jagged edges from the
> pixels (maybe that's just because of the AA settings though).
Yeah, AA hides a multitude of sins. ;-) Curiosly, they don't seem to
have invented AA for mouse pointers yet. (Except in computer games...)
> Maybe the
> fact that Windows is not good at scaling has meant that making a 150 or
> 200 dpi monitor that is used from "desktop" viewing distances would be
> impossible to use due to the tiny physical size of the fonts and other
> GUI items?
Plausible.
> I was running it for a while on my laptop with a non-standard dpi
> setting. On the whole Windows and Office was fine, but IIRC my CAD
> software screwed up, with some buttons being shifted outside of the
> window so you couldn't get to them!
Haha! And I bet that CAD software was the most expensive thing on the
whole PC, by a mile... ;-)
>> (Then again, my grandparents use FreeSat. Their TV physically has a
>> 4:3 aspect [it's an old CRT], and the picture seems to fit natively,
>> so...)
>
> Most stand alone sat/freeview boxes I've seen have an option to output
> to 4:3 which just crops the left/right edges of the 16:9 signal (I
> assume if it's built into a TV it will be set accordingly to match the
> TV). This is why they always put any important information in the
> central part of the screen, as they know some people are still chopping
> the sides off to watch 4:3.
Maybe that's it then. Maybe the reason I still see all broadcast signals
in 4:3 aspect is because the receiver is resizing them?
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> Haha! And I bet that CAD software was the most expensive thing on the
> whole PC, by a mile... ;-)
Yeh, I think it is about 10x the price of the laptop itself :-)
> Maybe that's it then. Maybe the reason I still see all broadcast signals
> in 4:3 aspect is because the receiver is resizing them?
I would definitely check the settings on the receiver.
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>> Haha! And I bet that CAD software was the most expensive thing on the
>> whole PC, by a mile... ;-)
>
> Yeh, I think it is about 10x the price of the laptop itself :-)
Only 10x? Bargin!
Oh, wait - what laptop do you have? I'm thinking about the £300 laptops
that *I* usually work with...
>> Maybe that's it then. Maybe the reason I still see all broadcast
>> signals in 4:3 aspect is because the receiver is resizing them?
>
> I would definitely check the settings on the receiver.
Mkay...
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> Oh, wait - what laptop do you have?
Some HP one, with Intel T9600 CPU and nVidia FX770M, it's quite nifty and
surprisingly the battery lasts for 4 or 5 hours if you're not doing anything
particularly CPU or GPU intensive.
> I'm thinking about the £300 laptops that *I* usually work with...
I think mine was about 1500 GBP, although I think our IT guy has some scam
going with the supplier, because his prices always seem to be way more than
I find them for on other websites ;-)
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scott wrote:
>> Oh, wait - what laptop do you have?
>
> Some HP one, with Intel T9600 CPU and nVidia FX770M, it's quite nifty
> and surprisingly the battery lasts for 4 or 5 hours if you're not doing
> anything particularly CPU or GPU intensive.
Yeah, I'm still quite surprised at how well the batteries on my laptop
last. It's always been my experience that the battery specs on the
packet are nonesense and the battery *actually* lasts about 20 minutes.
But my current laptop _really will_ run for over an hour without needing
charge.
(And, since it's the first laptop I've seen with a *working* glidepad,
you can ACTUALLY USE IT ON YOUR LAP! Amazing...)
>> I'm thinking about the £300 laptops that *I* usually work with...
>
> I think mine was about 1500 GBP.
I'm glad I was already sitting down. :-)
Man, 10x that... that's expensive! Hell, it's almost worth stealing the
laptop just for the software that's stored on it! ;-)
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> Man, 10x that... that's expensive! Hell, it's almost worth stealing the
> laptop just for the software that's stored on it! ;-)
Yeh good luck with that, assuming you managed to get past the hard drive
encryption somehow, the software won't run without a license. It picks up
the license from the network (you can "borrow" it for up to 14 days if you
want), so you'd either need to hack my VPN account too, or get physical
access to our site somehow. Anyway, once we knew it was stolen I'd
definitely notice if that machine had picked up the license, and then I'd
ask IT to block it :-)
Easier to just download the software from bitTorrent along with a crack...
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On 4/26/2010 3:19 AM, Invisible wrote:
> I mean, if you're going to force everybody to buy a new TV, new
> receiver, new type of disk and a new machine to play it, why it increase
> the resolution *significantly*? Why only increase it by a small amount?
> I don't understand that.
Partly bandwidth related. The UHF/VHF frequency space has only a certain
amount of bandwidth per channel. Now, while a HD broadcast in 1080p at
an "acceptable" compression ratio might fit nicely within the allotted
bandwidth for a channel, doubling the horizontal and vertical
resolution, for example quadruples the number of pixels on the screen.
Eventually, the video would need to be compressed to the point where the
image would be nothing more than a macroblock-fest.
> (And hell, half the equipment and content that says "HD" on it isn't
> even full resolution anyway... Why allow half a dozen resolutions when
> it would have been far simpler for the designers and less misleading for
> the public if they allow only one resolution?)
We're in a transitional period right now. Give it time. What really irks
me is the way the cable company has been handling content. They have
allotted no fewer than 4 channels per local station, which is, IMO
completely unnecessary, and (if the channels aren't just aliases, and
some aren't: they're analog variants!) it's a horrible waste of
bandwidth. I can understand simulcasting the analog variant for those
who do not have HD equipment, but do not want to rent a box.
> Hell, when I was at uni ten years ago we had computers exceeding these
> resolutions. With Windows NT 4.0, Service Pack 4. Has technology not
> moved on since then? It's not like there's any technical challenge to
> using a higher resolution, after all...
In both the digital flat panel and the CRT's case there is some
technical challenge to higher resolutions: Eventually the frequencies
involved get so high that capacitance becomes VERY important, and
circuit design becomes exceptionally tricky, to the point where traces
at certain distances from each other (whether on the same layer, or
overlapped in different layers of the board) will essentially act as a
low-pass filter killing the signal.
> PS. I am similarly baffled by the current fashion for "widescreen" TVs.
> Given that 99.998% of all video content ever created is in 4:3 aspect,
> what the hell is the advantage of buying a TV with a 16:9 aspect?? I
> don't understand.
Movies.
Going back to why movies went widescreen (they used to be displayed at a
square ratio, even!) has to do with how the human visual field works, we
have a wider angle of view on the horizontal axis than we do on the
vertical.
--
~Mike
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On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:19:45 +0100, Invisible wrote:
> Given that 99.998% of all video content ever created is in 4:3 aspect,
Most of what's created today 16:9 or some other widescreen format. Older
stuff? Maybe not "99.998%", but certainly a majority of the content ever
created by mankind is likely a 4:3 aspect. Except movies.
> what the hell is the advantage of buying a TV with a 16:9 aspect?? I
> don't understand.
If you watch more modern content, then you can better utilize the space
for a larger system. Me, I use my 16:9 projection system mostly for
watching HDTV and movies, so 99.998% of what I watch is actually 16:9.
Jim
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>> I mean, if you're going to force everybody to buy a new TV, new
>> receiver, new type of disk and a new machine to play it, why it increase
>> the resolution *significantly*? Why only increase it by a small amount?
>> I don't understand that.
>
> Partly bandwidth related. The UHF/VHF frequency space has only a certain
> amount of bandwidth per channel. Now, while a HD broadcast in 1080p at
> an "acceptable" compression ratio might fit nicely within the allotted
> bandwidth for a channel, doubling the horizontal and vertical
> resolution, for example quadruples the number of pixels on the screen.
> Eventually, the video would need to be compressed to the point where the
> image would be nothing more than a macroblock-fest.
Quadrupling the number of pixels doesn't necessarily mean that the
*compressed* signal takes more bandwidth. I'm sure I'm not the first
person to notice that using higher resolutions tends to make the video
more compressible. (Although, sure, I imagine there's a limit to how far
you can feasibly go.)
Then again, since we replaced our old CRT with a shiny new LCD, suddenly
I notice that just about *everything* on TV has DCT artifacts all over
it. (I guess the CRT was too blurry to show this.) It's quite annoying.
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Mike Raiford wrote:
> Partly bandwidth related.
Ooo, here's a random thought: Do you think there will ever be a day when
the Internet becomes fast enough to watch TV-quality video in realtime?
When do you think that day will be?
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On 4/26/2010 4:49 AM, Invisible wrote:
> I especially love how I have a widescreen TV, but you have to manually
> flip between 4:3 and 16:9 aspect. Even though it's connected by a
> digital link, so you'd think it could *detect* which kind of signal it's
> receiving...
Heck, the device producing the signal even does this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widescreen_signaling
There is a slight issue, of course with HD signals, since they're only
intended for the 16:9 aspect ratio, if a program was originally intended
for the 4:3 ratio, it will be "pillar-boxed", but the signal is still
16:9, so you must manually change the TV's widescreen mode if you want
to fill the screen.
> That being the case, it's not entirely easy to tell whether you're
> watching a widescreen broadcast, or a normal one with the top cut off.
> (Unless of course you configure the TV to show black bars at the side -
> but it's my mum's TV, and she always complains when I configure it that
> way.)
I don't care for the stretching, though when viewing 4:3 full-screen on
my TV it's not as severe as some, the only reason I do stretch it,
though is because my TV is an old-school CRT projector and prone to
burn-in. If it weren't for that, I'd display 4:3 in its native format.
Perhaps your mother has the same concerns?
--
~Mike
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On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:15:28 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>
> Ooo, here's a random thought: Do you think there will ever be a day when
> the Internet becomes fast enough to watch TV-quality video in realtime?
>
> When do you think that day will be?
About five years ago.
Are you sure you are not living in the jungle?
--
FE
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On 4/26/2010 8:28 AM, Invisible wrote:
>> Maybe the fact that Windows is not good at scaling has meant that
>> making a 150 or 200 dpi monitor that is used from "desktop" viewing
>> distances would be impossible to use due to the tiny physical size of
>> the fonts and other GUI items?
>
> Plausible.
>
>> I was running it for a while on my laptop with a non-standard dpi
>> setting. On the whole Windows and Office was fine, but IIRC my CAD
>> software screwed up, with some buttons being shifted outside of the
>> window so you couldn't get to them!
>
> Haha! And I bet that CAD software was the most expensive thing on the
> whole PC, by a mile... ;-)
>
That's the biggest part of the problem out there, many apps were written
without regard to a higher DPI setting, and do some wacky things if
they're used with a higher DPI. I think Windows 7 has some compatibility
settings somewhere to help alleviate some of these issues. So, high-dpi
display may be coming soon.
--
~Mike
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>> Ooo, here's a random thought: Do you think there will ever be a day
>> when the Internet becomes fast enough to watch TV-quality video in
>> realtime?
>>
>> When do you think that day will be?
>
> About five years ago.
Really?
And where the hell does this happen?
> Are you sure you are not living in the jungle?
Yes, quite sure. (I hate the outdoors, remember?)
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On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:25:35 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>> Ooo, here's a random thought: Do you think there will ever be a day
>>> when the Internet becomes fast enough to watch TV-quality video in
>>> realtime?
>>>
>>> When do you think that day will be?
>> About five years ago.
>
> Really?
>
> And where the hell does this happen?
Here.
>> Are you sure you are not living in the jungle?
>
> Yes, quite sure. (I hate the outdoors, remember?)
I thought you enjoyed skiing. Is it just plants that you hate?
--
FE
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On 4/26/2010 8:00 AM, Invisible wrote:
>
> 2. A stretched image where everybody has elliptical heads.
>
I don't know how things are in the UK, but over here, everyone generally
has an elliptical head. ;)
> 3. One of the various "zoom" modes which distorts the image non-linearly
> to supposedly give a better picture than a linear distortion.
Mmm, my father in law had a TV that did this. It was quite literally
nausea-inducing. I always wound up with a nasty headache after watching
anything in 4:3 on that TV.
> 4. Cut the top and/or bottom off the picture to make it fit.
Depending on the program, this is acceptable, of course if there's
titling or a crawl across the bottom of the screen... it's a nuisance.
> Everybody seems to hate #1, but lots of people apparently see nothing
> wrong with #2 or #3. *shudders*
Yeah, I don't get it. The only reason I really want the screen filled is
so my CRT doesn't burn-in.
--
~Mike
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>> About five years ago.
>
> Really?
>
> And where the hell does this happen?
Virgin have a system called On Demand in the UK. Here in Germany we have
T-Home. Obviously you need a fast internet connection (about 6 MBit/s or
higher IIRC) to receive broadcast quality video.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_on_Demand
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>>>> When do you think that day will be?
>>> About five years ago.
>>
>> Really?
>>
>> And where the hell does this happen?
>
> Here.
Who is it?
It's me.
>>> Are you sure you are not living in the jungle?
>>
>> Yes, quite sure. (I hate the outdoors, remember?)
>
> I thought you enjoyed skiing. Is it just plants that you hate?
OK, I rephrase: I hate being outside for no particular reason. Like,
"hey, let's go for a walk outside". (Or rather, "let's wander around at
random for no purpose when I could be coding stuff".) Apparently some
people like to look at the view or something...
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Quadrupling the number of pixels doesn't necessarily mean that the
> *compressed* signal takes more bandwidth.
It depends on the video contents and the codec.
If you take, let's say, a 640x480 video and quadruple its size to
1280x960 (using some interpolation filtering), you won't need significantly
more bitrate eg. on MPEG-4 to get the same picture quality. That's because
the larger version doesn't contain any more information than the smaller
one (any additional bitrate you might need comes mostly from other overhead
caused by the larger video size).
However, if your *original* video is 1280x960, at full detail, then it
will contain significantly more information than the 640x480 version. Most
of this extra information will get mangled if you use the same bitrate as
you did with the smaller video (assuming the bitrate was pretty optimal for
it to begin with). You will need more bitrate to retain that extra
information as much as possible (although not four times as much, of course).
This is so for MPEG-4. Digi-TV (at least here) uses MPEG-2 (the same as
DVDs use). I don't know how well that handles larger video resolutions
compared to smaller ones.
> Then again, since we replaced our old CRT with a shiny new LCD, suddenly
> I notice that just about *everything* on TV has DCT artifacts all over
> it. (I guess the CRT was too blurry to show this.) It's quite annoying.
Most digital TV broadcasts use significantly lower bitrates than DVDs,
which is why most digital TV broadcasts have significantly more visible
artifacts.
--
- Warp
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scott wrote:
> Virgin have a system called On Demand in the UK. Here in Germany we
> have T-Home. Obviously you need a fast internet connection (about 6
> MBit/s or higher IIRC) to receive broadcast quality video.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTV
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_on_Demand
Hmm, interesting.
I know the BT Vision system is supposed to allow you to download video
content to watch later, but I'm not aware of any system which can manage
it in realtime. (Certainly not just using a normal PC...)
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Fredrik Eriksson <fe79}--at--{yahoo}--dot--{com> wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:15:28 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >
> > Ooo, here's a random thought: Do you think there will ever be a day when
> > the Internet becomes fast enough to watch TV-quality video in realtime?
> >
> > When do you think that day will be?
> About five years ago.
At what quality?
Certainly if your bandwidth is enough to transfer a full double-layer
DVD (ie. about 8 gigabytes) in 2 hours, then it would be enough to *watch*
that DVD in real-time over the internet. Not many people have such huge
bandwidths, though.
--
- Warp
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> I know the BT Vision system is supposed to allow you to download video
> content to watch later, but I'm not aware of any system which can manage
> it in realtime. (Certainly not just using a normal PC...)
Many TV company websites let you watch TV live via your PC at varying levels
of quality. I have certainly seen a few that exceed digital SD broadcast TV
(a friend was watching american football streamed over the net in HD
quality, I had it through my laptop hooked up to the TV - definitely better
than watching it on normal SDTV).
How about BBC iPlayer, what's the quality like on that? (I can't access it
outside the UK)
YouTube also streams video at resolutions up to 1080p, you just need a fast
enough internet connection to watch it in real time as it's downloading.
IIRC the best digital TV broadcast streams use about 6 mbit/s, so that
should give you some idea what internet speed you need.
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scott wrote:
>> I know the BT Vision system is supposed to allow you to download video
>> content to watch later, but I'm not aware of any system which can
>> manage it in realtime. (Certainly not just using a normal PC...)
>
> Many TV company websites let you watch TV live via your PC at varying
> levels of quality. I have certainly seen a few that exceed digital SD
> broadcast TV.
Seriously??
> How about BBC iPlayer, what's the quality like on that? (I can't access
> it outside the UK)
Pitiful. Utterly pitiful.
I mean, forgetting the minor detail that it's plain unusuable at certain
times of day, the picture quality is abysmal. (The sound isn't bad though.)
Also, if you use the iPlayer client (rather than just the Flash thing on
the website), it appears to turn our PC into a peer-to-peer client,
constantly uploading and downloading data even when iPlayer isn't
running. (It installs a background service which starts at boot.)
> YouTube also streams video at resolutions up to 1080p, you just need a
> fast enough internet connection to watch it in real time as it's
> downloading. IIRC the best digital TV broadcast streams use about 6
> mbit/s, so that should give you some idea what internet speed you need.
I've yet to see anything on YouTube which even approaches TV quality.
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> Certainly if your bandwidth is enough to transfer a full double-layer
> DVD (ie. about 8 gigabytes) in 2 hours, then it would be enough to *watch*
> that DVD in real-time over the internet. Not many people have such huge
> bandwidths, though.
That "only" comes out at around 9 MBit/s, a lot of people nowadays have
internet speeds getting on for that.
Anyway, there are also compression algorithms that are a lot more efficient
than the one used on DVDs. So in theory you could get DVD quality with a lot
less than 9 MBit/s if you use a better compression algorithm.
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> I've yet to see anything on YouTube which even approaches TV quality.
You did find a video that supports HD resolutions, and switch YouTube to use
that resolution, and watch full-screen? Search "1080p demo" to easily find
some.
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scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> Anyway, there are also compression algorithms that are a lot more efficient
> than the one used on DVDs. So in theory you could get DVD quality with a lot
> less than 9 MBit/s if you use a better compression algorithm.
MPEG-4 Part 10 (also know as H.264) can compress DVD video to at least
1/4th of the size without any visible loss of quality, so what you are
saying is certainly true.
However, MPEG-4 is still such a new technology that not many companies
nor devices support it well yet. (H.264 also requires quite a lot more
computing power to decompress than MPEG-2, which means that viewing
devices need to be more expensive.) Of course since we are talking about
internet broadcasting here, and thus people wathing on their PC's, that's
mostly a non-issue.
Digital TV could have benefited from using MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2, but
it didn't. It's a bummer.
--
- Warp
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Invisible escreveu:
> http://www.xkcd.com/732/
>
> This puzzles me too.
yeah, my only conclusion is that you and the author of XKCD both use
(blurry) glasses. Perhaps that even may explain his simple art style... :D
> I mean, if you're going to force everybody to buy a new TV, new
> receiver, new type of disk and a new machine to play it, why it increase
> the resolution *significantly*? Why only increase it by a small amount?
> I don't understand that.
It *is* a significant increase and it looks specially good on big Full
HDTV screens in the living room, not a small 19 inches PC monitor. BTW,
mine here at work is a 19 inch LG monitor and is running at the maximum
resolution of 1600x900 pixels. That is below 1080p.
You won't even want to know what I ran back in 2004. Humor demands
exaggeration. :)
> (And hell, half the equipment and content that says "HD" on it isn't
> even full resolution anyway... Why allow half a dozen resolutions when
> it would have been far simpler for the designers and less misleading for
> the public if they allow only one resolution?)
Because, say, games at full HD may have to cut geometry or frame rate
here and there to fit comfortably?
> Hell, when I was at uni ten years ago we had computers exceeding these
> resolutions. With Windows NT 4.0, Service Pack 4. Has technology not
> moved on since then? It's not like there's any technical challenge to
> using a higher resolution, after all...
Regarding the iPhone resolution: obviously huge TV screens have far
"bigger" pixels than that on a iPhone display. Literally. From the
distance of your sofa, though, you don't notice them individually. Just
as a guy doesn't notice any lack of pixels at a tiny iPhone display.
> PS. I am similarly baffled by the current fashion for "widescreen" TVs.
> Given that 99.998% of all video content ever created is in 4:3 aspect,
> what the hell is the advantage of buying a TV with a 16:9 aspect?? I
> don't understand.
Yeah, why sell color TVs in a time when 99.98% video content ever
created is B&W? This is one of your "obviously impossible" kinda
comments, ain't it?
--
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9
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On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:04:34 +0200, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>
> Digital TV could have benefited from using MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2,
> but it didn't. It's a bummer.
Over here we have already started the switch to MPEG-4.
Depending on where in Finland you live, you might even be able watch some
of it (with a compatible receiver of course).
--
FE
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