This week I’m complaining about:

Digital TV / Cable / Music

(WARNING: This article contains a lot of techno-babble talk and some rough language leveled at technology)

Digital TV is SHIT! Digital Cable is SHIT! Digital Music is CRAP! DVD’s are OK though!

We have reached a sad impasse in this world. People are accepting entertainment (TV, movies, music) of shitty quality simply because a magical word has been placed in front of it.

Digital!

I hate to break it to everyone, but almost every “digital” form of delivered entertainment is pure and utter shit. Why do you ask? I shall elaborate…

In the olden days media (the term I shall use to cover TV, music, etc) was recorded and delivered in analog form. This included TV shows that came over the airways, music on records and laserdiscs. “Analog” refers to the fact that different voltages of power were used to represent the picture (such as 1.5 volts, 4 volts or 2 volts) instead of digital 0’s and 1’s (which are usually +5 volts or 0 volts, cut and dried) The reason this was better was because the entire picture (or sound) was recorded and represented on the screen or in the picture. Though it was analog and thus subject to “flutter” (voltages might be a little off and cause distortion) you still “got everything” that was originally recorded.

Compact Discs (you know, CD’s) are digital but even they record everything, a large spectrum of sound, as digital data. The same goes for video laserdiscs, which record an analog video signal in digital form.

Then came compression and everything went to hell, especially for video.

“Compression” is the act of taking electronic media and removing “unused” portions to make the file size / bandwidth used smaller. In a digital MP3, for example, parts of the sound not heard by humans are removed along with some other stuff. In a digital video file (such as the very common MPEG2) most compressors only record the “difference” between the frames. So let’s say a newscaster is sitting in front of a set. Their mouth and head will move as they talk but the background will be still. Thus, the compressor only needs to record the moving parts of the picture constantly, whilst the background is only recorded/updated every second or so. This is why compressors such as MPEG as referred to as “talking head” compression schemes.

The MPEG2 scheme is widely used today in everything from DVD’s to digital cable to HDTV. It typically uses variable compression, which means the data rate can be changed on the fly (variably) to improve the quality of the picture.

Before I start ripping on digital TV and cable let’s look at DVD for an example of compression done right. A single-sided DVD that contains 2 hours of video can contain up to 4.7 gigabytes of data (Gigabytes as in how the size of your hard drive is measured) This translates to roughly 652k a second, that’s the data rate available as the video runs. (For a reference, a high-speed cable internet connection can transfer about 300k a second) However since a DVD is variable compression the player can use higher or lower data rates depending on the video.

For example, if a movie is playing a scene of Gandalf talking to Frodo there’s not much motion going on, just their mouths really. Therefore the DVD can use a lower data rate, let’s just say 300k/second, for that scene, saving space on the disc. Then, when an army of Orcs attack the DVD can use a higher data rate to better present the motion, action and detail of the scene, perhaps 1000k/second (1 megabyte). By using lower rates in places it free up overall space to allow higher data rates elsewhere.

This can also be called “mastering” the DVD, by optimizing the picture/data rate as much as possible by analyzing the detail and motion demands of the video on a frame-by-frame basis. Jones (you know, the site master) told me the DVD of Ridley Scott’s crap-fest “Legend” was delayed for several years. Upon watching it for a Shitty Movie Night I knew why – every scene contain floating dust, snow, flower petals or stripper glitter. That meant the backgrounds were always in motion and therefore probably a bitch to compress decently. On the other hand some cheap DVD’s of flop movies (such as “The Rocketeer” - starring Jennifer Connelly when she was hotter than shit on an Arizona tin roof) don’t give a shit about the picture quality and just sort of “dump” it onscreen, sometimes with a fixed compression rate. Some scenes may look OK, but others containing action and lots of movement don’t have the extra data available and look bad.

Now I’ve come to the point where I can rip on digital cable/TV because I’ve introduced the idea of a fixed compression rate. While a DVD can spin faster or slower to get more or less data as needed for a good picture streaming video services (such as digital TV and cable) have a fixed amount of bandwidth to work with. So a close-up of a flowerpot gets the same amount of bandwidth as an army of mosquitoes flying over a waterfall. The flower will look good, the mosquitoes like shit.

Remember when I mentioned how a high-speed internet connection can get 300k a second? Ok, so then imagine if that’s ALL the available bandwidth for a video – it’s less than a fixed rate DVD even! (appx 625k) It’s the same basic idea for digital TV that comes over your cable or from a dish. There’s a certain amount of bandwidth and that’s it – no more or less.

What really pisses me off is that people are made to think that it’s better. It’s not. Here’s a hint: the cable companies don’t want to give you anything better, only if it’s better for them. The reason they’re so hard over digital shit is that they can fit several compressed digital channels in the space of one old analog channel, thus streaming more stations of Texas Hold ‘Em and Fear Factor into your living room and bilking you for more money. Compression is not some magic bullet – if media is compressed you loose something. If media is compressed a lot (as with digital TV) you loose a lot.

What really sucks is even with my analog cable TV the station streams are compressed before even being sent to me as analog signals down my line! They’re probably compressed before being sent out to local markets, then decompressed and sent as analog, or passed along as digital if that’s what the person uses. So you get shitty digital quality even if you don’t ask for it! My favorite, the History Channel, comes in like this, even though I don’t have digital cable. What horseshit!

Look closely next time you watch digital cable (or as mentioned, probably a lot of your analog cable channels) Especially bad are close-up water effects, such as an electric toothbrush agitating water – everything turns to ass-looking “compression squares” like a really low-quality JPEG (internet picture) Look at the small text at the bottom of car ads and all the “lice” pixels hanging around it. BARF!

I remember in the past how football games were well photographed and look crystal clear on good old analog television. Well no more! I’m sure it’s not always this bad but last fall I saw a game (off Dish Network) and it was so fucking compressed the grass looked green – as in a solid color green like a 1980’s videogame. I thought I was watching god-damn John Madden Football on my Genesis until I realized the grass in that game actually had a texture to it. And the numbers on jerseys – forget about reading them! Why would you want to anyway, you’ve got DIGITAL TV!

How fucking stupid is it that TV had a better picture 10 years ago? How is that an advance? My car sucks – I must need a horse and buggy! Granted the American TV system (NTSC) is ancient - the color version of it hasn’t changed since 1953 – but why is it being replaced with something of lower quality? Oh yeah I forgot, so they can fit more lower quality channels in the space of 1 old good-quality channel.

Ok now it’s time for the big kicker of digital TV: Even if you get a digital cable package, with “1000 premium all-digital channels” once it goes onto your TV screen it’s no longer digital but ANALOG! Yes, that’s correct – your digital cable is analog! Ha ha ha ha ha!

This is because while the methods of delivering video have changed TV’s have not. Ok granted HDTV’s are different but those are still few and far between, despite what Hollywood and shows like “24” might make you think. The vast majority of people still have 4:3 ratio NTSC TV’s – even high-tech Sony Vega’s fall under this category. And these TV’s still use analog signals as inputs - even RGB (technically “component”) is analog, albeit a very good type. So a digital cable box must take its [shitty] digital signal and convert it to an analog form that your TV can display.

Of course in the future (or present, again if you believe commercials and Hollywood) everyone will have flat-panel LCD or OLED televisions. And then the shit will REALLY hit the fan. See, one slight saving grace of watching crappy digital video on a conventional CRT (tube-based) TV is that since the TV signal format is a bit primitive it “hides” a lot of errors in the digital picture, mostly due to the overall higher contrast of the tube. While an LCD screen, whose range is more even, will reveal more errors. For a good example of this try watching a DVD on your TV, then your laptop. (An 2D animated movie such as “Lilo & Stitch” works very well, unsuccessful 2D movies, such as the first Iron Giant DVD release, have much worse compression and look almost BAD on LCD’s) Using the laptop’s LCD, look at things like text on the screen, or the ink lines of animated characters. You’ll see “garbage squares” - similar to highly compressed JPEG pictures - around ink lines, and “bubbles” around text (when it appears over a picture) However the main color of a character is perfectly clear as it contains simple data (only 1 color) Also watch backgrounds – they’ll appear perfectly still under the camera pans, at which time they’re “jump” to life and move. Now while a DVD is usually well compressed digital TV is not - so imagine those kinds of errors, only much worse, on a LCD television from digital cable in the future. Yeech. I think we’d be almost better to go back to 1920’s-style mechanical TV (look up Mechanical TV sometime – pretty interesting stuff)

While HDTV is better than digital cable it’s still compressed and since most HDTV’s are flat-screen LCD variety the errors they do have are immediately apparent. Look at text and thin lines, such as newscast graphics. You’ll see garbage squares and bits of pixels “jump” around them. The overall resolution is much higher than TV, digital TV or even DVD’s but the same evils of compression are still there. And, as with digital cable, the streams are constant so they don’t get to use more or less data as needed.

Well I’m sure my ranting is not going to have any effect but the acceptance of lower-quality media by the public and the fact we’re made to think it’s better kinda pisses me off. Oh well. Maybe someday when digital cable becomes SO compressed (to fit in 5000 channels of Texas Hold ‘Em instead of the standard 100) and starts looking like video from a Sega CD-ROM game (and I’ve seen some digital movies off cable that, in parts, look ALMOST that bad) people will notice and say “Enough is enough!” That is if they haven’t become complete TV zombies yet.

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK FOR MY NEXT RANT!

Entitled:

”The aliens in ‘War of the Worlds’ better not have shields, dammit!”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2005 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Ben Heckendorn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.