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NBC Cleveland

574 Views 9 Replies 4 Participants Last post by Dweezilz, May 4, 2002

melbo1

Discussion Starter · May 2, 2002

What happen to NBC Cleveland?? I have been out of town for 4 nights, I come back and there is 3 new signals for 3 but no broadcast??

Anybody know what's going on?

It was nice to see UPN 43 meet the FCC deadline, too bad there is no HD material.

Thanks for the info

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[email protected]

· #2 · May 2, 2002

melbo1,

I just checked the signal strength meter on my HiPix and it is getting a 85%. I seem to be getting audio but I do not want to fire up the Sony 10HT this late for only a minute(trying to conserve my lamp life). I will check the decoders at work tomorrow and report back in the morning.

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rlb

· #3 · May 2, 2002

I'm having the same problems with NBC. After a scan, I'm showing a 3-1, 3-2, and 3-3. Signal strength on digital channel 2 (normally equates to 3-1) is the usual 100. No picture or sound on 3-1, 3-2, or 3-3.

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melbo1

Discussion Starter · #4 · May 2, 2002

Called Rex Rickly, Chief Engineer, this afternoon at WKYC, he said they are in the process of splitting the signal into 3 componets: 3-1 will be the HD, 3-2 will be SD broadcast digitally, and 3-3 will be a radar broadcast constantly updated. He mentioned that the cable companies want to pick up the digital SD broadcast for their customers. He also was not aware that their was no video last night??

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rlb

· #5 · May 2, 2002

Melbo1. Thanks for the effort and the information.

Now does anyone know if they can "shove" these three stations into the allocated bandwidth without obviously degrading the HD signal?

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melbo1

Discussion Starter · #6 · May 2, 2002

No degradation because they are three separate signals. Example they were only using 3-1 before. I can't seem to get the audio on the SD broadcast ??

Having the weather radar all the time is way cool.

Interesting to see how the other stations handle their setups

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[email protected]

· #7 · May 3, 2002

Quote:

No degradation because they are three separate signals. Example they were only using 3-1 before

Are you sure? I have a HiPix and it displays the bandwidth the channel is presently using, this comes in handy for this discussion. I was getting 3.1 at 18mbps last week. Now it shows 3.1 @ 14mbps and 3.2 @ 4 mbps. Other HD channels are showing 17.5 to 19mbps. To me this indicates a drop in data on the main channel. I equate this to a lower picture quality. What do you guys think?

Ohh, also I am not sure about this, but the HiPix shows 28.1 @ 45 mbps. I am not sure this is correct but there analog upconvert is the best in town to my eyes!

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rlb

· #8 · May 3, 2002

Thanks Chuck. You seem to be confirming what I've previously been told. That is, each station has a fixed amount of bandwidth. They can allocate it all into one excellent HD signal; or "multi-cast" and provide additional channels by cutting into the bandwidth available for the HD signal.

It's not difficult to predict which direction stations will move. A top quality HD picture is nice; but additional channels provide the potential for additional revenue. They're in business to maximize profits, not picture quality. If we feel in the future that their HD picture is less than optimal, it's not like we can go somewhere else to get our NBC programming.

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melbo1

Discussion Starter · #9 · May 3, 2002

Interesting......I wonder if anyone else out there knows. But Chuck, your measurements seem to confirm the worse.

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Dweezilz

· #10 · May 4, 2002

Chucks description is pretty much what I've heard in the past about multi-casting and the allotted bandwidth. I don't think we need to look any further for confirmation of this than searching this AVS forum as it was a hot topic last year & Chuck is 100% on the money. When this was the topic about a year ago people were saying that HDTV might go away in favor of multicasting. Since we all love to worry about what's going to happen, it was pretty much beaten to death. All of the usual AVS experts were saying it would remain to be seen what would happen; that stations are given a limited amount of bandwidth allocated to them & because of this, they might choose to either multicast instead of showing HDTV or lower the data rate of the HDTV in order to do both. Now of course I don't know exactly how much of the total bandwidth an HDTV show takes, but most people seemed to feel it took nearly the whole bandwidth.

Here is a very generic example. (this is just an example so don't read into my 'unit' example) If a station is given 10 units of bandwidth for their station, they have a few choices. They can chop up the units into separate channels or use all of the bandwidth for an HDTV channel. If they show an HDTV program in it's full data-rate, let's say that it might take up 6 units. An SD program might take up 2 units, so showing several channels at the same time might be difficult without lowering the data of the HDTV show or eliminating it totally. So by lowering data-rate of the HDTV program to like 4 units, they can now show both, but at the expense of the HDTV PQ. The other choice, (which was the one everyone was worrying about last year) is to get rid of the HDTV totally (hello Fox) & just show 4 or 5 SD programs.

If they could multicast & show HDTV at the same time without lowering the quality of the HD show, then it would be a non-issue & would not have been debated so much. So in other words, even though 2.1 is a separate channel from 2.2 & 2.3, they each are a fraction of the total bandwidth. Ya know what they say, "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts". That is exactly the case here. If you split the bandwidth into separate stations, it can't equal the power of just one station showing HDTV!!!

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