Monday, May 30, 2005

The Definition of Definition?

What is the definition of "definition," as in "high-definition"? Is it simply how-many-pixels by how-many-pixels the transmitted signal provides, or is there more to it than that?

A 1080i signal has exactly 1,920 pixels across the screen horizontally, while there are exactly 1,080 pixels up and down the screen vertically. Each pixel of the frame is refreshed (updated) once every 1/30 second — though, actually, half (those on the odd-numbered scan lines) are refreshed in the first 1/60 second, for one field, and the other half (on the even-numbered lines) are done to make the second 1/60-second field. If every pixel is (spatially or temporally) distinct from every adjacent pixel, you get the maximal resolution or definition.

The same theory applies to 720p, except the pixel grid is 1,280 pixels across by 720 pixels up and down, while every pixel is refreshed once every 1/60 second. Notice that in both 1080i and 720p the pixels are square. The pixels used for encoding digital video on DVD are oblong.

So a plethora of pixels that are spatially or temporally distinct is the essence of high definition. Still, for several reasons, there's more to it than that. There are several things that stand in the way of getting maximal theoretical definition ... and some of them can even be considered good.


For example, a 1080i signal is vertically filtered. About 30-40 percent of the potential vertical resolution is filtered away in order to avoid interlace artifacts such as details flickering on and off as they rise slowly in the picture.

This happens because the two interlaced "halves" of the picture are offset slightly in time. It is even possible for tiny details that are moving upward (or downward) at just the right rate to be completely missed by the interlaced scanning of the image, if they happen to always fall on one of the "missing" scan lines in each 540-line field. But if the rate of ascent or descent is slightly different, these small details will blink.

Or, a completely stationary detail that is present in one of the two fields but not in the other will also blink, in what is referred to as "twitter."

The vertical filtering of 1080i to eliminate the blinking and twitter takes the potential 1,080 "lines of vertical resolution" down to 756 effective lines. It's a good tradeoff: slightly less detail for a calmer picture.

720p is not filtered, since it is not interlaced. Notice that the 756 effective lines of 1080i are not that many more than the 720 actual lines of 720p. For more on this, see DVE Frequently Asked Questions, a discussion by TV guru Joe Kane of his then-upcoming Digital Video Essentials test DVD and D-VHS tape.

Joe Kane writes, in Interlaced Video Go Away, about how the resolution of 1080i video is a lot less than your might think:

Most films transferred to video come in at 800 to 1100 pixels [in each horizontal pixel row of the image] and video material will often be in the order of 1300 to 1400 lines [of horizontal resolution, not the nominal 1920 lines of 1080i]. The clear winner in picture quality is 720p over 1080i. The reason is interlaced artifacts and the vertical filtering required to get from progressive to interlaced. The real vertical resolution of 1080i images in motion is somewhere around 640 lines [due to the filtering]. The true horizontal resolution capability of the broadcast 1080i signal is 1440 pixels or less. The limitations are MPEG encoding and the bandwidth of a TV channel. There is little hope of that getting better any time soon. Even at 1440 x 1080i the MPEG artifacts and lack of vertical resolution in a moving image are far worse than at 720p.

Decoding that: in 1920x1080i video you get just 640 lines of vertical resolution(!), not 1,080, owing to image filtering that has to be done in order to head off the possibility of "interlace artifacts" on your TV screen. These artifacts, if allowed to show up on the screen, would lead to an unwelcome, visible structure of pixel rows/scan lines surrounding moving objects in the picture. They would also cause images to flicker and shimmer when, for example, there is a camera pan taking place.

Furthermore, MPEG encoding, done to compress the digital video signal by drastically reducing the number of bits per second in it, needs to have a lot fewer distinct pixels per pixel row than the nominal 1,920 pixels per row of 1080i: "1440 pixels or less." Otherwise, it is hard to get the desired compression ratios between the number of bits per second going into the encoder and the number of bps coming out. The only other way to get the desired compression would be to put up with irritating "macroblocking" artifacts. Most people prefer a slightly softer image.

Film-based material is notoriously harder to compress than video-based material, so for it, "1440 pixels or less" per pixel row has to be further reduced, to "800 to 1100 pixels." But 720p video, because it is progressive, not interlaced, does not have to be filtered in the way 1080i does. Accordingly, its 720 rows times 1,280 pixels per row arrives intact on the HDTV screen.


Also good, in a sense, is the "chroma subsampling" which reduces the number of bits in a 1080i or 720p signal.

Each pixel actually starts out as three pixels, one red, one green, one blue. These R, G, and B numerical values are combined algebraically according to a certain formula to derive Y, the luminance or luma signal. Y represents a black-and-white or monochrome picture. (Actually, all these values are "gamma-corrected" to stretch the contrast ratios at one end of the brightness range and compress them at the other, but I'll ignore that.)

Once Y is obtained for a pixel, the two values (B - Y), or Pb, and (R - Y), or Pr, are derived. Pb and Pr are the two chrominance or chroma signals. Together, Y, Pb, and Pr are the three separate signals of "component video."

Pb and Pr in effect "color in" the Y monochrome signal with blue and red, respectively. Algebraic manipulation of Y, Pb, and Pr can derive, in effect, the (G - Y) color difference signal which allows green to be "colored in" as well.

But whereas Y is transmitted at full resolution, Pb and Pr are downrezzed somewhat by means of 4:2:2 chroma subsampling. The "4:2:2" notation means essentially that each pair of horizontally adjacent Pb pixels — and, separately, each Pr pair — are blended into one double-width pixel, thus cutting the number of bits needed to represent Pb and Pr in half.

This also serves to halve the horizontal resolution of the two chroma signals. (The vertical resolution is left unchanged, as are the vertical and horizontal resolution of the luminance signal, Y.) Yet, thanks to the fact that the acuity of human vision is lower for color than for monochrome information, the reduction in color resolution is unnoticeable at normal viewing distances.


Saving bits is important. It is the whole rationale of digital video compression. According to the online article High-Definition Television Overview, each broadcast HDTV channel has to be shoehorned into an existing analog channel 6 MHz wide — the channel's "bandwidth." This can be done only if the digital data rate is limited to roughly 20 (actually, 19.2) megabits of information per second.

But HDTV can generate about 120 megabytes per second, uncompressed. (See Charles Poynton, Digital Video and HDTV Algorithms and Interfaces, p. 117.) That's 48 times what's allowed.

Chroma subsampling cuts two of the three YPbPr streams, Pb and Pr, in half, which by my calculation cuts the 120 MB/s down to 80 MB/s. That data rate is not small enough.

Eschewing progressive scan and using interlaced scanning, à la 1080i, cuts that in half: 40 MB/s, or 320 Mbits/s. Still not small enough. True digital compression is needed. Enter the MPEG suite of digital video compression techniques. The standard used for HDTV is MPEG-2; specifically, "MPEG-2 Main Profile at High Level." (DVDs are encoded at much lower data rates using "MPEG-2 Main Profile at Main Level.")

MPEG-2 compression, whatever its profile and level, first removes redundant information that the decoder can restore on its own. But that still isn't enough, so it uses an algorithm to strip out more information. This information cannot be restored by the decoder — the compression is technically "lossy" — but the algorithm is designed to remove only information whose loss is undetectable to the human eye.


That holds true as long as the MPEG compression ratio, which is adjustable, is not too high. But what constitutes "too high" depends on the scene. Busy scenes with fast motion cannot stand as much compression as static scenes with little fine detail.

DVD compressionists adjust the compression ratio scene by scene, but HDTV is broadcast in real time. Usually, there has to be a single compression ratio chosen to accommodate the busiest, most dynamic scenes. If too much compression is done, some scenes can lose visual detail, especially when full of motion.

Here's a case where how-many-pixels by how-many-pixels doesn't really tell you what the definition is. But keep in mind that overly enthusiastic digital compression produces eye-disturbing artifacts above and beyond reducing apparent resolution, so rarely do you hear too much lossy compression blamed for poor picture definition per se.

Too much lossy compression is more likely with 1080i, less likely with 720p. Although 720p refreshes each pixel twice for every one time a 1080i pixel gets updated, the spatial resolution within the 720p frame is so much lower that it's easier to shoehorn 720p in a 6 MHz channel. So 720p needs less compression than 1080i.


And now we come to the vexed question of horizontal resolution. In theory, 1080i can support 1,920 "lines" of it, 720p just 1,280 (since each "line" is really a column of pixels whose width is that of a single pixel).

But Joe Kane says in D-Theater - Questions and Answers that there are several caveats. Due to "many places in the production and distribution chain where image resolution can be lost" — i.e., due to signal-processing compromises — the cruel fact is "that the broadcast limitation of horizontal resolution for the 1080i system is about 1400 lines." Meanwhile, 720p's horizontal resolution remains as advertised: 1,280 lines.

Also, says Kane, "film content ... usually doesn’t get much above the 1300 line mark in horizontal resolution." Or, again, "Horizontal resolution of most film masters in 1080p is in the area of 800 to 1300 lines."

(1080p? That's like 1080i except that it's intended for uses such as film-to-video mastering which can benefit from higher data rates than broadcast HDTV allows. So its 1,920 x 1,080-pixel frames can use progressive rather than interlaced scanning, it needs no vertical filtering, and it can use other frame rates than 30 frames per second.)

The important thing to notice here is that two things can reduce the actual horizontal resolution below its theoretical maximum. One is signal processing, especially with 1080i; the other is limited resolution in the source material (for instance, a movie).

Both of these things can, of course, also reduce vertical resolution. In fact, the vertical filtering which eliminates 1080i interlace artifacts is a type of signal processing that limits vertical resolution.

More problematic is what happens when video starts out at standard definition. Say it begins life at 480i or 480p, the scan rates associated, respectively, with standard-def TV and with DVDs, when progressively scanned. The former is interlaced; the latter is, unsurprisingly, progressive. 480i/p SDTV can be scaled or upconverted to, say, 1080i for HDTV broadcast. But the amount of detail in the picture — both horizontally and vertically — stays the same.

So an HDTV channel that broadcasts upconverted SD material doesn't look much better (if any) than an SDTV channel broadcasting the same SD material. In fact, the "pseudo-HD" broadcast might have even less detail, if some of it was lost in the signal processing for the upconversion.

One wrinkle on pseudo-HD is what I just encountered on the ESPN-HD channel, on the Memorial Day broadcast of the National Lacrosse Championship (Johns Hopkins 9, Duke 8). Quite on purpose, owing to the fact that they were using SD cameras and transmission equipment, they took a standard-def picture with the squarish 4:3 aspect ratio and put it between two hi-def "pillarboxes" on the 16:9 screen. Though the actual picture was clean (because it was digital) it didn't have that crisp HD feel to it.

This same kind of pseudo-HD thing can reportedly happen inadvertently in a signal transmission chain that isn't set up right. Suppose a TV network sends a member station both a 1080i and a 480i version of a program. The station is supposed to send the former out over its digital channel, the latter over its traditional analog channel. But what if there's a screwup, and the 480i feed gets upconverted for the 1080i broadcast, while the 1080i feed is ignored? Result: a nominally 1080i broadcast with just 480i-like resolution.


There is a third thing which can harm horizontal resolution. It is actually itself a kind of signal processing: intentional downresolution or downconversion. "Downrezzing," it's familiarly called. For example, the May/June issue of The Perfect Vision magazine cites the TiVo Community Forum web site to the effect that DirecTV is reducing the resolution of its 1080i channels from 1,920 x 1,080 to 1,280 x 1,080. (See "Has DirecTV Downrez'd HDTV?," pp. 14-15).

The reporter could not get DirecTV to confirm this policy. If true, it is doubtless being done in order not to overload the data transmission capacity of its satellite transponders, while still offering the same number of HD channels.


So there are several things which make the effective, as opposed to theoretical, definition in a digital HDTV picture hard to pin down. As we have seen, filtering, chroma subsampling, MPEG compression, limited resolution in source material, losses in digital signal processing, and downrezzing are among the most important.

We can compare either of the HDTV formats — 1080i or 720p — to a straw, and the picture content to a milkshake. The more detail exists in the content, the "thicker" the shake. The thicker the shake, the "fatter" the straw ought to be — i.e., the higher the definition of the format should be.

All the same, just because you have a super-fat straw doesn't guarantee that your milkshake isn't thin and soupy. Just because you are receiving a 1080i or 720p signal doesn't mean the content isn't essentially 480i.

Sunday, May 29, 2005

Finding HD Channels and Programs

The Official AVS HDTV Programming Synopsis is a topic on the AVS Forum with good, up-to-date info on what's on HDTV. Not specific programs, mind you, but broadcast, cable, and satellite networks and what they carry.

As for specific HDTV program schedules, TitanTV is a website that offers them. You enter your ZIP code, it shows you the relevant schedule in your area. Unfortunately, it claims the schedule for my local HD PBS outlet, listed as WMPT-DT (the DT stands for "digital television"), is "unavailable."

You can personalize TitanTV. I did that such that it (thinks it) knows exactly what cable and DirecTV channels I subscribe to. Then I selected the "All Hi-Def" category atop the listings. That gave me a grid with just the HD channels (on Comcast cable) ... except that channel 200, the Comcast SportsNet HD feed is missing. Alas! (But MPTHD, alias WMPT-DT, is there!)

Another quick way to see what's on HDTV, on the various broadcast, cable, and satellite networks, is to visit HDTV Galaxy. From Monday through Sunday, a week's worth of listings — series, movies, sports, etc. — are stacked on one web page with clickable anchors to get you to the day you want. One of the nice things about this listing is that only HD programming appears in it, making it easy to filter out non-HD fare from your viewing plan. No regional sports nets or local stations are listed. (Alert: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban premieres on HBO in 1080i this coming Saturday, 6/4/05, at 8:00 PM EDT.)

Powering On

Welcome to my new "What's on HDTV?" blog.

What's the occasion? I just got a cable box that records HDTV (as well as standard-def) programs. For the first time I have the ability to watch HDTV when I want to, not when the programs happen to be on. The way my life goes, that ability to timeshift makes a huge difference.

I've been able to watch HDTV for almost a year and a half on a Samsung 61" DLP television, by means of my earlier cable box, which lacked a DVR (digital video recorder). But I found I almost never went to the trouble, preferring instead to watch stuff I'd recorded off DirecTV. I have a DVR in my DirecTV receiver, although it receives, records, and outputs only standard-definition programs. I guess I'd rather take control of my viewing schedule more than watch HDTV. But now I can do both.

For those who are new to it: HDTV is high-definition television, which is digital, not analog. There are two formats, 1080i and 720p. 1080i presents a 1920x1080-pixel, interlaced picture (first the 540 odd-numbered scan lines, making up the first "field" of the "frame," then the 540 even-numbered lines in field two). 1080i is usually broadcast at 30 full frames per second (60 fields/second).

720p uses a 1280x720-pixel frame, scanned progressively such that all 720 scan lines are shown at once, usually at 60 full frames per second. Because of progressive scan, 720p is better for sports and action. Because it has more static detail per frame, 1080i is better for pictures without a lot of fast movement.

If you have an HDTV, you can watch (usually) one or the other, not both. The one which is not the TV's "native" scan rate has to be converted to the other. My Samsung "does" 720p natively and downconverts 1080i to it. (Actually, that point is moot. My cable box is set to transmit all HDTV signals to my TV at 720p.)

1080i and 720p both have a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. Standard-def TV uses the squarish 4:3 aspect ratio we are so familiar with.

I route the HD signal from my cable box to my TV using a three-headed component video cable, also known as YPbPr since the luminance (Y) and the two chroma difference signals (Pb for "blue" and Pr for "red") are on separate lines.

The audio goes to my A/V receiver in digital form, when available, and in stereo analog form otherwise. The receiver detects the digital audio when present and uses it; else it uses the stereo analog signal.

Sometimes, but not always, the program I'm watching has full-fledged Dolby Digital 5.1-channel audio. Sometimes it uses fewer digital channels. And sometimes, as I say, the only audio is old-fashioned analog stereo.

So the hookup is nontrivial. Remember when all you had to hook up to watch TV was an antenna and a power cord?


My new cable-box-cum-DVR, as provided by Comcast Cablevision here in Baltimore County, MD, is a Motorola unit which looks just like the one the cable guy took out, the one without a DVR. Considering the connections are all the same as before, I'd like to say the install went without a hitch. But it didn't.

First, the installer put the coaxial digital audio output cable in the wrong little hole: no sound. I soon found the problem and fixed it. Likewise, at least one of the three YPbPr connectors was misplaced: everything was blue. The installer was in a hurry to get me to sign off anyway, but I woudn't. He fiddled with the connections, and everything was fine.

The remote control, for the first time, is pretty much state of the art — read, lots of buttons. It's programmable; I haven't tried that yet. Controlling the complex onscreen functions for the cable system and for the DVR has been easy enough so far.

One of these functions is the ability to display a program list by channel or by time for just the channels that offer HD material. That's nice ... except that the Comcast SportsNet standard-def channel (7) is listed instead of the Comcast SportsNet hi-def channel (200). Which means that when I select a program, I get the SD version, not the HD. Bummer. All the other HD channels seem to be listed OK. I assume the mixup with Comcast SportsNet is something Comcast has to fix at their end, not a glitch at my end.

And that's my only real complaint to date, at least insofar as things Comcast has any control over.

But my other gripe is how hard — even with the dedicated HD program guide — it is to find our what's on in high-definition. And the cable box's HD guide does not really tell me which programs are actually being broadcast in hi-def ... just what's on the channels that sometimes do hi-def.

Add to that the fact that some programs mix and match. NBC recently broadcast the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes in high-definition. Yet several of the cameras were lo-def, upconverted, while the main shots were true-hi-def. Played havoc with my eyes, which thought they'd gone out of focus whenever a lo-def shot appeared.

Compounding the confusion is the fact that some hi-def sources — my local Public Broadcasting System affiliate, for instance — do not simulcast HD with the SD schedule. The two schedules are completely independent, and the HD schedule is not listed in either the national or the local-newspaper TV guide.


And, oh, by the way, I'd better mention that HDTV when done well is magnificent. I've watched a Baltimore Orioles baseball game and a D.C. United soccer game on Comcast SportsNet. Both offered stellar picture and sound. Crisp details. Vivid colors. No blurring when things are in motion.

As much as this improves baseball, the benefit is greater for soccer. The camera usually has to pull back away from the action to keep from having the ball exit the frame. That makes the players and their numbers tiny and hard to recognize, with lo-def. With hi-def, the problem is ameliorated, plus the wider picture shows more of what's going on. It's still hard to see the numbers on the players' backs, but that's more my eyes than the TV signal. And being able to recognize the players offsets it quite a lot.

Unfortunately, the commercials and sports updates are lo-def ... and sometimes the engineer-in-charge doesn't properly "pillarbox" them in a 4:3 box centered on the 16:9 screen, so people and objects get stretched horizontally. And that just compounds the lack of detail, making me realize just how nice the hi-def picture really is.

But, enough for now. In the future, I'd like to report on my HDTV experiences, with an emphasis on what's on, how easy it is to find it, and what its actual technical quality is.

By technical quality, I mean things like a classical music concert I saw in passing on one of the HD cable channels (I forget which one). It looked fine ... until the camera started to move, at which point everything grew blurred. I suspect the culprit was either too much digital compression or some other ill-conceived form of signal processing, such as maybe upconverting the video from some lesser scan rate. There was no blurring on either the soccer or the baseball, so I know it's not my imagination or my equipment that's at fault.

I realize it's a bit early in the changeover process from analog lo-def to digital hi-def to expect perfection. But it's not unlikely, I hear, that Congress will pull the on analog TV at the end of 2006. Soon, a lot of us will start expecting HDTV to look as good as it can, and won't be willing to put up with the equivalent of big-game hunting to find out, "What's on HDTV?"