Phoenix, AZ - HDTV - Page 339

It is up on D* in Phoenix. But is the Sunday ticket redzone channel different than the cox redzone channel?

Yes it is.

I don't know if this is the right section to post but I have a question regarding Cox Communications cable lineup. I am building a HTPC with a TV tuner card in it and I would like to be able to receive the HD local stations and the non-HD regular channels (I get all the channels from 1-~100) and would like to know what type of TV tuner I would need to do this. It is my understanding that the signal from Cox (I am not using a receiver or CableCard right now but just plugging the coax from the TV directly into the wall) is using the QAM standard for all of the channels (HD and non-HD alike). If this is the case, can I just buy a clearQAM TV tuner and scan for channels and both the local HD and the regular non-HD will all show up? I know that my TV does this just that way (due to its internal QAM tuner) and I was wondering if it would be as easy as just buying a QAM supported TV tuner? Thanks for any help!

-Rhaen-

You should apply for a job writing the Sharper Image catalog descriptions. I am afraid that this sounds more like a fairy tale, much more made up fantasy than fact. And here is a single fact that completely invalidates that fantasy:

According to "Digital Television Fundamentals" by Michael Robin and Michel Poulin in section 11.4.9 on page 508, there is this very clear statement:


(I won't bore you with the other three sources I have that state very similar facts regarding the rules by which MPEG program streams are constructed).

That statement of fact would clearly indicate that there is no need for the encoder to "detect" anything regarding the comparison of successive fields, simply because the encoder has already been instructed in packet-header metadata that the content is originally from film. And of course anything originally from film is 24 fps, which means for it to get to a frame rate of 30 fps 3:2 pulldown is necessary, which, since in that process each field is duplicated five times in a row and then every other field is discarded, by definition means that there are and must be successive duplicated fields arranged in 3:2 pulldown order. And there really is no grey area or wiggle room here for vague descriptions to wriggle out of. This is pretty black and white, and virtually indisputable.

So, under those circumstances (the circumstances that apply in each and every case of ATSC broadcasting of original-film material) it would not matter whether successive fields are 100% or 90% or even less identical, because the very simple instructions in such a case to the encoder are, for each and every successive 60 fields of content, to discard completely fields 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58, and 60, and to transmit only fields 1, 4, 6, 9, 11, 14, 16, 19, 21, 24, 26, 29, 31, 34, 36, 39, 41, 44, 46, 49, 51, 54, 56, and 59. Or, of 60 consecutive fields, completely discard these particular 36 duplicate fields, and send only these other remaining original 24 fields, each of which represents a frame of the original film. You will notice this not a condition to where the modifier "sometimes" might or could possibly be attached. On the contrary, this is a basic tenet, an unbreakable rule of MPEG encoding for ATSC delivery.

This also instructs the decoder in every STB or tuner through a like mechanism to duplicate the received frames as necessary and interleave copies of them into the transmitted frames to recreate the original pulldown and 60-field rate just as if it were there all along, which every licensed MPEG-2 decoder can do very easily and completely losslessly.

IOW, "detection" of film content is not by comparison of successive frames to see how similar they either are or are not, but by simply obeying the order given in the metadata flag that since it has been declared to be original film content, to obey certain instructions, the above instructions, regarding what gets transmitted and what does not. That is a very simple task, and path degradation or any other variables you can dream up and throw at it will not affect it whatsoever.

The MPEG spec is very specific regarding what it contains and what it does as far as the algorithm itself goes. Rules can't simply be ignored or broken on a whim.The decoding process must always be an exact mirror reverse of the encoding process, for all intents and purposes, and you can't change one of those two independently. The spec is written to account for each of the tools in the toolkit, and the decoder is designed to follow the instructions and parameters set for each of those tools. While the particular degree of the parameters of the tools are set by the compressionist, this does not allow ignoring the actual rules set by SMPTE in conforming to MPEG-2. "Film mode" is not optional.

That is not to say MPEG-2 is not without issues. While the spec is extremely specific about what the algorithm must include, and that you must accomplish certain things to get from point A to point B, exactly how to accomplish the goals set in the spec, is completely open, left completely to the encoder and decoder manufacturers. But the rules themselves must still be followed. They are rules, after all.

That is the best compromise of having fixed rules but not carving how they are interpreted in stone. This allows order but also allows technology to flourish in finding new and better ways to implement the tools in the MPEG toolkit over time, and the improvements in the last 10 years in HD are a testament to that.

But the tradeoff for not being explicit in exactly how you get from A to B is that sometimes decoder manufacturers can get off the rails a little bit and there can be local issues of incompatibility which need certain workarounds applied to keep everyone happy.

That may explain murky reports like the one you have described; having lived in that world since broadcasting first embraced MPEG, I can recount numerous horror stories of incompatibility that are very similar. But none of them are due to the rules for MPEG not being written immutably, and all of them stem from poor interpretation and execution of the methods used to interpret those rules.

Normally I can follow this type of discussion, but in this case you have totally lost me with your description of 23.976 source material to 29.97 user viewable material.

First off, what do you mean when you wrote "each field is duplicated five times in a row?" I suspect that a picture is worth a thousand words. But why would the 2:3 pulldown process require that anything be thrown away. The conversion of four 23.976 frames to five 29.97 frames isn't rocket science. It is a simple process that looks like this:

So, what am I missing in your explanation?


You sequence listing above doesn't compute. Keeping 24 fields only results in 12 complete frames in a second. Excuse me, but there should be 24 frames in that second.

Taking my original conversion example, I've deleted the video frames:

You can't get complete film frames from that pattern. You need a pattern like this:

I do not know of any OTA broadcaster that is sending out anything but 29.97 video with unmarked film source. Of the five OTAs, only CBS, CW and NBC are 1080i. NBC sends out H.264, so that eliminates them from the MPEG-2 issue. The CW is the only network that is still sending out MPEG-2 to the affiliates that I capture from their feeds. CBS is on my sh!t list, so I don't capture their network feeds. Since CBS and the CW are both sent out by the CBS network center in New York, I suspect that CBS is no different than the CW.

The CW does not mark any of the scripted shows as being film and physically sending out 23.976 MPEG-2 video. How do I know that? When I bring the captured video into the VideoReDo editing program, no frames are marked as being duplicates. I double-checked with the authors of the program what they do when they load 23.976 MPEG video marked as film and contain the 2:3 pulldown markers. They display the video as 29.97 and mark the duplicated frames.

At this point in time, they've indicated that they do not correctly handle anyone editing said video files out-of-cadence. It seems that the only MPEG-2 sources that have said 2:3 pulldown markings are MPEG-2 movie video files from DVDs. I've never seen OTA videos marked as such. As I don't pull movies from DVD, I've not seen it in action.

I have video from the local NBC affiliate when NBC was still doing MPEG-2 feeds and there are no markers in that video either. The local affiliate had their encoder set wrong in that the video was marked for display as 1920x1088. They finally fixed it. VRD had to fix their program so that I could edit 1080 material with the screwed up 1088 material (even though the video is technically 1088 in size, display at 1080).

So, who is supposedly using MPEG-2 at 23.976 marked for 2:3 pulldown when displayed at 29.97?

If statements like that are in books used by broadcast engineers and written by people who ought to know better, it's no wonder that digital TV is still a poorly understood mess. There simply is no requirement that redundant fields/frames be removed. There exists the capability to do so, but it isn't mandated. Please cite the actual portion of ISO/IEC 13818-2 that requires it, and not some third party's interpretation.

And it's not like a show that is shot at 24p can even be 100% reversed to that by the time it gets to the viewer. Snipes inserted by the networks and local stations are done at 60Hz, which means that every field with that stupid CW "TV, that thing you used to watch before the internet" snipe or the local station's "watch our crappy local news and win a free iPad" promo is unique and can't be removed by the encoder, and breaks the cadence of anything trying to reverse the pulldown. And that's even assuming it was clean 24p to begin with. Modern editing gear can handle 24p easily, but older stuff was normally pulled down to 60Hz before editing, so scene changes will often break the cadence, and anything added in editing like supers for credits will have the same problems as the network snipes, at least during fade ins, fade outs, or if the supered object moves around the screen.

I agree with you that the problems with the decoders stem from the decoder, which is why I said "Too many broken decoders choke on it". It shouldn't be a problem because it is a part of the standard, but licensing bodies are more concerned with collection of fees than they are with certifying technical compliance. Workarounds do need to be used, and the main one is to just not use film mode unless there is a reasonable expectation that the decoder can handle it correctly. Fairly safe assumption if you're HBO and only targeting a few dozen different set top boxes from a handful of manufacturers, not so safe if you're Fox Broadcasting and your signal is going out relatively untouched to 200 million homes with hundreds of different devices trying to play it. In fact, I seem to remember a problem that Fox had after switching to their new encoders with some viewers seeing stuttering video. Ultimately, the network had to change their encoding parameters. I don't think that it ended up being related to film mode, but it just goes to show that even some of the best minds in the industry still get it wrong sometimes.

@mrvideo, if you'd like, I can supply you with some streams that do utilize repeated fields, for research purposes of course. Drop me a PM if you've got somewhere I can send them.

While professional gear may not be able to IVTC the video, AVISynth filters can. One filter that is used for frame detection has a "do not look here" parameter, where you tell it which lines to not use in the comparison search. For 1080 video, i have it set for 750 thru 1079 (0 = first line). Most of my material is snipe free, but for the shows that aren't, I think I have raise the bar, as the A-hole snipes are not confined to the lower third anymore. They have gotten higher and higher and yes I'm talking about program suppliers like you, SyFy Channel. Their snipes are extremely obnoxious.


A prime example of that are the syndicated Star Trek shows. Shot on film, with the elements transferred to NTSC video and then edited.

I think it is this weekend to promote their new show House of Lies and the season premiers of Shameless & Californiacation.

You can do a reasonable job of it, though it will leave uneven motion and interlacing on the snipe itself, and it still doesn't help when certain networks do a snipe that affects more than just the lower third.

That was one I was thinking of, and I believe Seinfeld was done the same way. Primetime animated shows are also a big source. For the older seasons of The Simpsons (back when everything was still hand-drawn on cels), any edits that weren't complete retakes were done at 60Hz, which leaves some scenes a complete mess, even on the DVDs.

More info at http://www.sho.com/site/freepreview/home.do .

I could care less if the snipe was frak'd up, since it didn't belong there in the first place.

That is why CBS is on my sh!t list. When they started doing those damn bright snipes with flare that covered the whole screen, I was done with them. I no longer capture CBS network feeds. I gather that they've stopped that flare crap, but the snipes are still large.

I used to capture the Star Trek first run syndicated feeds on Umatic-SP tape and edit them. I noticed that the pulldown cadence was lost at pretty much every cut

Did you get my PM?

I hate to interrupt the lengthy video editing discussions and whatnot going on, but I have an actual HDTV-related issue to bring to this thread...

Somewhere is the last few weeks we lost channel 12.1/12.2. I am an OTA viewer, no cable/satellite. I have rescanned the tuner thinking maybe they altered the signal or whatever, didn't help. Never had a problem picking the station up at all, ever, nor with any other channel. I live in the Eastern portion of Mesa, near Apache Junction and Gilbert. Again, ever since HDTV has been offered I've not had any problem picking the channels up. I've searched around and can't seem to find anyone else with this recent problem (there are random websites with 'before the official analog to digital switch date, early 2000's era') but nothing recent.

Wondering if anyone knows if something changed with NBC's antenna or something, or why I'd suddenly lose the channel.

Just wanted to add I mean no disrespect by my opening comment - Just seems a whole lot of non-Phoenix-HDTV conversation up in here..

I will point out that we're discussing HDTV, so it's still more on-topic than our BBQ and soul food discussions in the past . No reason not to post other stuff while it's going, that's just how these forums go.

Have you tried disconnecting the antenna, scanning, reconnecting the antenna, and scanning again? Some tuners require an empty scan in order to completely wipe their channel memory and pick up changes.

No, didn't try that - Will give it a go and report back. Hopefully it'll meet some success

I have three Sony HDTVs, all connected to Cox Cable on their cable-ready tuner. Over the past two weeks, the HDTV channels (7.1, 7.2,8.1, 5.1, 5.2, 10.1, recently 12.1, 12.2 and today 15.1 and 15.2) have gradually disappeared. I rescanned several times and none of these channels came back. The other two sets continue to work normally. Anybody have an idea what happened?

I wish I could help, however, I receive all those channels.

Just tried to reprogram the channels. Only 15.1 came back.

I don't know if I'm tossing this in right, or in the right thread, but, what is the current, best option for an external hard drive? I'm running a very old external housing - DVRXpander from Apricorn, with a 1 TB Seagate 7200 Barracuda drive. It seems to be having problems - freezes, looses its connection to the 8300HD, and I have to pull the power and restart it a lot now. It's always had video/audio stutters and pauses. So, if I'm going to revamp it, I'd like to know what I should replace it with? And, when I do, will I loose all my recordings or can I swap two externals back and forth until I see/delete all off the old one? Or is there a way to transfer the recording to the new HD now? I'm a high end user - both with the DVR and computers, but I am not an A/V expert, programmer, etc. Thanks in advance.

Being a high end user, surely you know you can copy that disk to a new one, however, you may have to do a sector to sector copy.

Best of luck

Completely different issue--my 8300HD's disk failed and they replaced it with the new 8642HDC. Since that time (going on a month) I've not been able to record a show and watch it, let alone rewind a live show a few minutes due to jerky, freezing images on the replay. Live TV displays just fine, and test recordings watched after I watch the live showing with zero issues misbehave reliably. I contacted Cox and they said it is a known issue they are working on. Anybody else having this issue and does anyone know of an ETA on when it may be resolved? I'm about ready to take this unit back and ask for the old hardware again.

The only other reports of the 8642HDC running Passport are at the link below, and one person in the know confirmed it has bugs and advised to stay away from it for now. Why O why would they release a box with known issues.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r267...-DVR-Cable-Box

BTW: Can you report what the software versions are, from the Diagnostic Menu?

Tune to Channel 1999 > Scroll to Versions

ResApp Version: Passport Echo 3.1.xxx
OS Version: PowerTV 6.20.xx.xxx

Passport Echo 3.1.091
PowerTV 8.4.24.1

What is really sad is the dates that appear to be associated with those versions:
Feb 22, 2011 and Jun 16, 2010.

Thanks. I didn't know it would work. I mean, I had heard that the box could tell if you used a different hard drive. I'll take a shot at it. I have Ghost 15. Will that do it? What settings do I use? Sorry, if these are lame questions - but, I'd rather ask than not.

First have you run any HDD diagnostic tools on the current Ext HDD, like WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic tools?

G4L is what I have used (use RAW mode), Google it, it's free open-source. It works fine, Both HDDs need to be same size. Once you clone the second drive don't try swapping back and forth between the drives because the DVR is going to see them as the same HDD and the Index file may become corrupted.

I would disconnect all the PC's HDDs and just connect the two DVR HDDs and Boot from the G4L disk. Make sure you know which drive is which, i.e. connect the original as the primary, so you don't clone to the wrong drive.

Beginning Tuesday, rumor has it that KSAZ FOX 10 will be available direct to mobile devices through MobiTV using the new ATSC M/H format. FOX network owned and operated stations are somewhat out ahead of the pack with this new technology. Those FOX O&O's on VHF frequencies will roll out first.

It's already up and running in Atlanta, which is on UHF.

- Trip