ABC O&O's destroy HD quality with launch of Live Well HD. - Page 12

^^^^
IMHO, it is four more subchannels than needed

That's why I said "at least."

Ya, but to me, all four of the live well channels are too many.

It is, in some areas.

This is the conclusion I (and Trip in VA) also came to, but until it happens I'm going to be a little nervous.

Which is why I posted that forum members need to post if they know for sure that a station, or stations, are providing high bitrate feeds to providers.

KUAS/KUAT (PBS) in Tucson, AZ, provides a 1080i fiber feed to local cable, while the OTA broadcasts are 720p (same feed on both) with 2 SD subchannels (PBS Kids/World on one, VMe/Create on the other). I know WUNC used to provide a better fiber feed to TWC in Raleigh back when they were doing HD only part time OTA, but I don't know how that works bitrate wise now that HD is full-time. Most other examples are in 100+ markets where some networks are SD-only over the air but an HD feed is given to the local cable provider, and even these are disappearing with the move to dual HD OTA broadcasts.

Again, that's why I said "at least three."

This is true for KKFX, the Fox affiliate for the California's (southern) Central Coast. On cable or D* you have Fox network programming off the splicer and local HD syndication. OTA is a subchannel of CBS affiliate KCOY and an analog LP transmitter.

KDFX, the Fox for Palm Springs is also HD on cable only. Since Palm Springs is a Time Warner Cable market, I'm not sure if they would re-encode the Fox splicer signal though to rate shape the bandwidth down.

Having a fiber feed to the provider, from a station, doesn't necessarily mean that a higher bitrate is also provided. I know there are stations here that provide fiber connections, AFAIK, it is the output from the mux. I'll have to ask around and find out for sure.

To me, that means there is still at least one subchannel containing that live well thing. Which, IMHO, is still one too many subchannels.

Thrid time: fouir channels of LiveWell are, as I said, "at least three more than needed."  And you wonder why we poke fun at cheeseheads.  Can't even tell you we're agreeing with you ...

I think he'd prefer to be called a BUDhead.

'Tis very true, which is probably why I'm reading it differently than it is apparently supposed to be interpreted by the author.

Plus on some stations in addition to the HD and SD sub channels you have a mobile DTV feed taking even more bandwidth away.

Actually, MrVideo and I have been acquainted over the net for some time now.  Our earliest significant exchange that I remember was about the announced TV schedule for the autumn of 1995, which would have put it just over sixteen years ago,

I didn't think you guys were serious.

I think ABC has lowered the quality of their national feed. The HD quality of ABC programming on KERO Bakersfield dropped about a year or so ago, long before they fired up their -3 subchannel (Cool TV). The quality did not noticeably drop when the subchannel was added. I think ABC is lowering the quality of their feed so stations will figure that they might as well add LiveWell. As for Bakersfield, they could not add Live Well and still have the other 2 subchannels. I would like to see them flip co-owned KZKC-LP Azteca to digital and put LiveWell in HD on it's subchannel. If Azteca ever goes HD they could run 2 720p's on LP42. Then kill the Azteca simulcast on KERO and give the bandwidth to CoolTV, which is bandwidth starved now. No use giving the bandwidth to ABC HD since the network has lowered the quality. I doubt they would kill the Azteca simulcast, though, since every station in town wants to simulcast co-owned LPs, even digital ones, on subchannels of the full power station in order to reach the outlying areas of the DMA.

I've seen ABC from a variety of sources (different stations, different sources [OTA/satellite/cable]) and I think ABC has the worst HD picture of the major networks.

They may have allocated the bandwidth without actually using it for anything. KERA (PBS) here in Dallas has been running their HD channel at about 11Mb/s since before I moved here, despite the fact that they only have 1 SD subchannel taking up about 2.5Mb/s (and had none at all back then), with the rest simply being wasted on nullpackets. The video looks like crap whenever there's motion, but apparently no one outside of AVS cares about PQ.

So are there 2 Live Well's on each channel, 7 and 44? Are 2 English and then the other 2 the same language? Or all 4 different languages?

They all have the same, English-language soundtrack.

Still, they ain't half as bad as WCIU and all their mirrored subchannels on various frequencies here.

Stupid.

I think it is possible that ABC has watered things down. I get 4 ABCs via OTA and they run the gambit subchannel-wise; WLS has Livewell HD and SD, WKOW has 2 SDs, WTVO has 1 SD, and WISN is unencumbered. During the Indy 500, WISN did not look as good as it did last year, as there were gray tiles along the edges of the track during in-car camera shots. As I switched between the ABCs, the others did not look like they were worse than WISN. The NBA Finals, however, do look noticably better on WISN.

Believe me when I say they haven't. The network feed is H.264 @ 23.5 Mbps. That works out to MPEG-2 @ ~47 Mbps and H.264 is a better encoder than MPEG-2.

Their old MPEG-2 feeds were no better than ~40 Mbps.

There are no mosquito errors with their feeds.