Richmond, VA - HDTV - Page 290

Still better than SD

What was up with the untimely insertion of WRLH's local "Family Guy" silent 5 second ads in the middle of Fox primetime last night? They cut into TerraNova not even close to a commercial at around 8:18, and also delayed House's return from commercial once as well. Were they covering up a satellite glitch, or was somebody just asleep at the switch?

Drew

Hi,

We're fairly new to Richmond. I've never lived in an area with 2 PBS stations, and I was kind of wondering how that happened. They're run by the same people, right?

Can somebody explain the rationale for how the PBS stations are used here & why WCVW is low power? And why they put 2 SD subs on WCVE, but left WCVW-HD alone? The HD on WCVW is far better than on WCVE, but it is a shame that WCVW is so low power. WCVW is the only local station that I have trouble getting reliably.

Thanks,

Drew

Well basically each one started in the 60s. Richmond was not the only community to have 2 in the US.

Actually now Hampton Roads has 2 since UNC Public Broadcasting moved in on WHRO. I get them both on Directv and UNC has 2 channels as opposed to WHRO's one.

There are other cities with more than one PBS station. I am familiar with Washington DC and Tucson as also having this. I am sure there are quite a few others.

Can anyone recommend a good attic-mounted multi-directional antenna? I'm in Mechanicsville, and my AntennaWeb.org info is

Antenna Type/Call Sign/Channel/Network/City, State/Live Date/Compass Heading/Miles From
* yellow uhf WRLH-DT 35.1 FOX Richmond, VA 267° 20.2
* yellow uhf WCVE-DT 23.1 PBS RICHMOND, VA 267° 20.2
* yellow uhf WCVW-DT 57.1 PBS RICHMOND, VA 267° 20.2
* yellow uhf WRIC-DT 8.1 ABC PETERSBURG, VA 267° 20.2
* yellow uhf WUPV-DT 65.1 CW ASHLAND, VA 7° 11.1
* yellow vhf WWBT-DT 12.1 NBC RICHMOND, VA 260° 15.2
* yellow uhf WTVR-DT 6.1 CBS RICHMOND, VA 267° 20.2

Nathan,

I will PM you a name of a company that can help you here in the Mechanicsville area.

Rodney

Got it, thanks.

Hi,

I recently moved here from the Raleigh market in NC. I get my tv OTA, and have perfect reception (except for WCVW).

It is hard to compare due to different houses, a new TV, etc, but NBC here looks pretty bad as compared to how it looked in Raleigh, so I've been looking at a few things..

First, it looks like like WWBT is broadcasting primetime dramas at a very low bitrate (~11Mb/s, or about 5GB/hr). I've never seen a 1080i station broadcasting at such a low bit rate (to compare, NBC17 in Raleigh broadcast at about 6.8GB/hr). This may not be a fair comparison since it is not primetime, but I just took a look at their traffic this morning during the "Today" show, and I see this:

I'm pretty sure pids 31 & 34 are 12-1, and 41 & 44 are 12-2. But it looks like they are wasting 5Mb/s on NULLs. (pid 1fff).

Has WWBT always been this bad? Or is this new? Do their engineers hang out here?

Is the station in Charlottesville any better? Should I just put up a second antenna pointing at Charlottesville to bypass WWBT?

Thanks,

Drew

WWBT is that low? Whenever I've checked it, it's been in the 15 Mbps neighborhood. Last time I received it a month and a half ago, the instantaneous bitrate I happened to catch was 14.88 Mbps.

WVIR is at 13 Mbps fixed last I checked.

- Trip

Check in prime-time tonight. I've only got 3 recordings laying around from them now:
Both Prime Suspects are 60:00 long, and Jay Leno is 62:00.. So you can see the average bitrate is in the 11Mb/s range..

I wonder if they're getting ready to add a new subchannel, or if something is just mis-configured with their encoder.

Drew

I can't really schedule times to check it since I only receive it via DX.

- Trip

I keep forgetting that. I assumed you must have a network of PCs equipped with OTA tuners & tsreader, all around the country

I may give WVIR a try. 13Mb/s is a lot better than 11Mbs, especially if they at least enable inverse telecine on their encoder, which WWBT does not do.

Drew

I have a network of people with that kind of gear, but not in Richmond, since I can DX the market without much issue. Though now that I'm moving away, it won't be quite as easy, so I might have to find somebody. You don't happen to have a Windows computer floating around, do you? Haha.

I would love to have a network of PCs like that, but it would be very expensive.


I think WVIR looks good, but I could be biased because I happen to like NBC29.

- Trip

At first blush, TSReaderLite seems to work via Wine with my HDHR. But my HDHR is currently on Qam, since I was playing with seeing if I could solve my WCVW issues that way. I attached a screen shot, showing wwbt at 11.8Mb/s with over 4Mb/s of NULLs.

Drew

Ah! Yes, that's right, you have the HDHomeRun. The HDHomeRun does work with TSReader in WINE, as that's how I use it much of the time these days. USB and PCI tuners, however, do not work with WINE.

That low bitrate is on QAM, I'd have to see it on OTA. I don't trust the cable company to not knock it down.

- Trip

You saw it via my dvbtraffic output. It is less pretty, but it is the same data

Drew

It's possible that WWBT is using a variable bitrate encoder. Since TSReader takes an average over time, it will show more null packets as time goes on.

Snag me about 20-30 seconds worth of the full transport stream during HD programming with some motion in it and I'll PM you my FTP server to upload to. I'll take a look and see how variable it is.

- Trip

See PM.

For fun, I captured an hour+1 minute of the transport stream last night from 8:59 to 10:00pm, and hacked the linux dvbtraffic app to take the TS file, and report the bandwidth across the entire file at 1 second intervals,, then graphed the output. Near as I can tell, they're using some kind of variable encoder with the max set to 15Mb/s for 12-1. But it seems to fairly aggressively throttle things. Never is there less than 1.5Mbs of NULLs going out. See the attached WWBT.jpg.

I have heard that there are encoder settings that can prioritize an HD feed, and which could steal bandwidth from SD feeds when needed (eg, 17Mb/s peaks). Is this true?

BTW, the points where the NULLs peak well above the 12-1 bandwidth seem to match the comskip.exe results for the Grimm recording. I used that to more-or-less verify that my code seems correct.

Drew

Well, you did what I was going to do, except I was going to use my paid copy of TSReader to do it. I'd love a copy of your modified dvbtraffic.

It looks like WWBT is doing what I've seen several other stations do, including the CBS O&O stations and WCVE. The HD encoder was upgraded and the SD was not. The HD is variable, but they're capping it since the SD is not variable.

As to your question, yes. The device that does that is called a statistical multiplexer. I'm pretty sure UNC-TV and WTVD in Raleigh both have one, and I'm not certain about WTVR and WRLH though I know both are variable. The stat muxer adds a slight delay, but in doing so it looks ahead at the next piece of video from each stream and figures out the most efficient use (however that is defined) and adjusts the bitrates accordingly. You can just as easily prioritize an SD feed rather than the HD, and I know of one station that has done that (I think it's accidental).

In theory, since it can spike to 15 Mbps and doesn't have to worry about balancing that elsewhere, it should look as good as any other 15 Mbps source. Whether or not that pans out in reality may be another matter, of course.

- Trip

Yeah. I've seen some fugly things, like rough pans and bad pixelization on nighttime scenes in cop shows with flashing lights. Granted, both of those tend to be torture tests for mpeg.., but I could swear WRAL and WNCN looked better..

Drew

The first 13 minutes of the movie "Any Given Sunday" on 35-1 were chopped off by an infomercial yesterday.

Did the football game run a bit late? I wouldn't be surprised if they showed the infomercial after the football game in its entirety for contractual reasons..

Drew

Got a letter from comcast in the mail stating that HD will be available for petersburg area around today 12/20/2011.
Can anyone confirm this?

Thanks,

Anybody in the Henrico, VA 23060 area have the Motorola DCX3400M AnyRoom HD-DVR with Comcast? Trying to verify if Comcast has a multi-room HD-DVR similar to Verizon FiOS in our area.

Looks like I have to go back to Comcast since FiOS will not offer any deals or roll over any of the discounts I got last year to keep me as a customer (other than the $300 visa card). My bill would be going up $70 a month if I stay with FiOS. I hate playing these games.

ghudson,
I'm planning to start these same games next renewal.
One and done is the cheapest.
V* is ticking me off with the persistant increases and bumps of channels to higher tiers.
If Comcast has improved their internet speeds and the picture is close, I'll be OK.

nw
nw

WWBT will shut down First Warning Weather currently airing on 12-2 on Feb 6th at Noon. MeTV will begin airing in it's place at Noon If you would like to learn more about MeTV visit their website: http://metvnetwork.com/

Lots of good old shows that are hard to find even on cable anymore.

At the risk of being off topic, the mention of old shows reminded me that one of the best histories of a television market available on the web is hosted by WWBT, with the "Roots to Satellite" book online here:

http://www.nbc12.com/story/8129383/history-of-nbc12

I'm old enough to remember what was WRVA-TV when it signed on in 1956. Even if you're not, the story and mishaps of what's now WWBT is very interesting reading.

Even better as a teen we were always allowed to hang around the station, be on-air with the teen dance show with Dave Davies and sponsored by Noldes bread. It was very interesting to watch Jim Granger do the weather.

The WRVA-TV people were very down to earth and always were friendly to us