This is progress?

I haven't watched much sports this years, but with bowl season and the NFL playoffs upon us, I've been watching more. And I've been disappointed in what I've seen.

Not the quality of play. A lot of these games have been fantastic, like the memorable clash between the Giants and the unbeaten Patriots, or last night's battle between the Steelers and Jags.

No, what's disappointing is the picture quality.

Oh, it's fine when the image is static. But when there's movement - and in football there does tend to be movement - the picture will break up into ugly chunks of outsized pixels.

What is this strangeness? In search of an answer, I Googled ... and Googled ... and Googled. It took a while because I didn't know the correct terminology to describe the problem. But eventually I found my answer.

This strange pixellation effect is called macroblocking or, sometimes, mosaicism. There is a similar problem called mosquito noise. As best I can tell, both are compression artifacts of "bit-starved" digital video. In other words, when the video requires more bandwidth than the broadcaster has available, the picture will suffer in unpredictable ways.

I don't have HD TV, just the regular kind. But apparently the networks (or their affiliates), in broadcasting both HD and standard video streams simultaneously, are bit-starving their feeds*. The result is a substandard picture in either format.

Which sucks, really. Who would've thought that the brave new world of HD TV would actually result in worse picture quality than we had before?

Hopefully the problem will be corrected in time. For now, enjoy those hearty chunks of pixels every time Tom Brady chucks the ball.

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*Many factors affect the degree of macroblocking, including signal strength and the peculiarities of your cable box or TV set. But the bottom line is that not enough data are getting through.

A technical discussion of macroblocking and mosquito noise is found here.

Comments

[John]

You know, I've got a crummy 17 inch TV that has no input but a coaxial cable slot and I don't notice picture quality problems on mine.

Odd.

[Matthew]

I think you gave the wrong URL.

This URL which I found from the google search you listed has a good discussion, though.

[william]

Many years ago a follower of Judaism went to the rabbi and said his life had become horrible. The rabbi of course asked why. The follower said his in-laws had moved in with him and made his life miserable.

The rabbi thought for a moment and responded: I can fix your problem but you have to do exactly what I tell you, no exceptions. The follower thought for a moment and agreed to do exactly as told.

The rabbi said for this person to put his in-laws up for a month in a hostel and then to move in all of his farm animals into his home and they stay in his home with him and his wife for a month. After one month have the in-laws move back in and come back to see the rabbi one week after the in-laws have moved back into your home.

The follower came to see the rabbi in 5 weeks and thanked him, as his in-laws were not nearly so bad to live with after living with his farm animals. The moral of the story: “almost everything” is relative.

Don’t know if this story has any relevance here but I have wanted to tell it for a long time on this blog. One person’s picture is another’s pixel.

[Michael Prescott]

>I don't notice picture quality problems on mine.

Depends on the local station, the signal strength, the cable box, the TV itself, etc.

[John]

Well, to be fair, I watch hockey (Canada ;) ) much more than football, so I think just due to the nature of hockey, it doesn't have such a range of fast camera motion, colour variation, and other things like that.

[Michael Tymn]

I haven't noticed any decline in picture quality. In fact, after owning my TV for some 18 months, I just found out that I can see the same channels I've been watching without too much quality in high definition and in wide screen by switching to a higher channel number. As with the computer, I am techologically challenged.

Speaking of sports, our Hawaii football team got creamed by Georgia in the Sugar Bowl. Yet, the media are filled with stories about all they did for the state's pride and spirit. People are lining up today to pay $20 for Colt Brennan's autograph, while paying anywhere from $2.50 to $10 for the autographs of other seniors on the team. As I see it, it is all part of the celebrity-worship thing. The unreal has become the real. Sports grew out of practice and conditioning for war. In effect, athletes are pretend combatants, pretend warriors. Yet, military guys -- the real warriors -- are standing in line to get the autographs of the pretend warriors. Something is wrong with that picture, and I think it is all related to the fear of death. People want to live in a make-believe world, where movie actors and athletes are heroes and worshipped. It's part of a collective psychology designed to replace the religion that has failed us.

[Michael]

I guess I'm one of the few people without cable, but I recently bought a 32" hdtv for watching movies. I was surprised, though to discover that broadcast HD is available (something I hadn't known, because I'm not into TV), and more importantly, that the direct through-the-air quality is much, much higher than my neighbor's cable of the same stations.

Then I realized that everything you get on cable is compressed, to fit those 5000 or so useless stations in that tiny piece of wire, and decompressed at the cable box. That's where all of your rotten quality comes from, not from the fact that it's digital. Basically, TV through the air is like listening to a CD, but via cable is more like bad MP3s of the same material.

[MarkL]

Except for those folks now getting fringe reception. When the US switches to all HD in 2009 instead of a picture with a little "snow" folks on the fringe will get a badly pixelated display or no picture at all. I really don't understand why any broadcaster would want to reduce their viewer base but that's what is going to happen.