Tuesday, June 13, 2006
World Cup Viewers Say: Compression Sucks
Posted by Jeremy Charette in "ARTICLE" @ 03:00 PM
"Anticipation of watching the world’s top players in action during the World Cup may have jacked up sales of high-definition televisions but there are more than a few who complain they didn’t get their money’s worth; and it’s not because of the quality of the hardware. Kim Hyung-shik, a 30-year-old football fan living in Seoul, spent 2.5 million won for a 30-inch high-definition LCD TV and the HD cable TV service last month. But when the World Cup finally kicked off last Friday, he couldn’t believe his eyes. ``I couldn’t see the ball clearly every time when the players kick the ball hard. The screen gets blurred around the ball when it is moving fast,’’ Kim said. ``Now I regret buying the HDTV set. It’s only good when the players are standing still, and drink water at the sideline.’’ The Web sites of three main broadcasters _ KBS, MBC and SBS _ and the Korean Broadcasting Commission have been flooded with hundreds of angry complaints and insults from football fans, angry after witnessing their brand-new digital TV sets as only capable of playing blurred and scrambled images with inconsistent audio. Some viewers even reported their new TV sets went blank when changing channels and never recovered until they pull the plug out."
This is my biggest complaint about HDTV, and digital TV in general: compression sucks. Some HDTV channels from Time Warner look great, such as Discovery HD, but others are a macroblocked mess, like TNT. It looks like Korean broadcasters have been playing games with compression and bandwidth in an attempt to get more World Cup games on more channels, and it's backfired in a huge way. I tried to watch the British Grand Prix on Sunday, and it was painful. Between all of the format conversions and scaling, the picture I saw on my HDTV was worse than an analog signal. Someone has got to stop this madness, or consumers are never going to want to adopt HDTV. When Microsoft's HDTV guru still doesn't have an HDTV in his own house (because he thinks compressed HD is so painful to watch), that tells you something.
This is my biggest complaint about HDTV, and digital TV in general: compression sucks. Some HDTV channels from Time Warner look great, such as Discovery HD, but others are a macroblocked mess, like TNT. It looks like Korean broadcasters have been playing games with compression and bandwidth in an attempt to get more World Cup games on more channels, and it's backfired in a huge way. I tried to watch the British Grand Prix on Sunday, and it was painful. Between all of the format conversions and scaling, the picture I saw on my HDTV was worse than an analog signal. Someone has got to stop this madness, or consumers are never going to want to adopt HDTV. When Microsoft's HDTV guru still doesn't have an HDTV in his own house (because he thinks compressed HD is so painful to watch), that tells you something.
