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Satellite TV - Search TV Satellite Direct and compare prices of Voice, Satellite TV, DirecTV, DSL, VoIP, Internet and Data T-1 carriers in seconds. Version 1.2, November 2002 Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002 High-definition televisionFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Hdtv)
  High-definition television (HDTV) is a digital television broadcasting system with greater resolution than traditional television systems (NTSC, SECAM, PAL). HDTV is digitally broadcast because digital television (DTV) requires less bandwidth if sufficient video compression is used.
History of high-definition television
The term high definition described the television systems of the 1930s and 1940s beginning with the British 405-line black-and-white system, introduced in 1936; however, it, and the American 525-line NTSC system established in 1941, were only high definition in comparison with previous mechanical and electronic television systems. Today, the American 525-line NTSC system and the European 625-line PAL and SECAM systems are only regarded as standard definition. The post–WWII French 819-line black-and-white system was high definition in the contemporary sense, but was discontinued in 1986, a year after the final British 405-line broadcast. In 1958, the U.S.S.R. created Тransformator (Russian: Трансформатор, "Transformer"), the first high-resolution (definition) television system capable of producing an image composed of 1,125 lines of resolution for the purpose of television conferences among military commands; as it was a military product, it was not commercialised.[1] In 1969, the Japanese state broadcaster NHK first developed consumer high-definition television with a 5:3 aspect ratio, a slightly wider screen format than the usual 4:3 standard.[2] However, the system was not launched publicly until late in the 1990s. In 1981, the first HDTV demonstration in the United States was held. It had the same 5:3 aspect ratio as the Japanese system.[3] In 1983, the International Telecommunication Union's radiotelecommunications sector (ITU-R) set up a working party (IWP11/6) with the aim of setting a single international HDTV standard. One of the thornier issues concerned a suitable frame/field refresh rate, with the world already strongly demarcated into two camps, 25/50Hz and 30/60Hz, related by reasons of picture stability to the frequency of their mains electrical supplies. The WP considered many views and through the 1980s served to encourage development in a number of video digital processing areas, not least conversion between the two main frame/field rates using motion vectors, which led to further developments in other areas. While a comprehensive HDTV standard was not in the end established, at least agreement on the aspect ratio was achieved. Initially the existing 5:3 aspect ratio had been the main candidate, but due to the influence of widescreen cinema, the aspect ratio 16:9 (1.78) eventually emerged as being a reasonable compromise between 5:3 (1.67) and the common 1.85 widescreen cinema format. An aspect ratio of 16:9 was duly agreed at the first meeting of the WP at the BBC's R & D establishment in Kingswood Warren. The resulting ITU-R Recommendation ITU-R BT.709-2 ("Rec. 709") includes the 16:9 aspect ratio, a specified colorimetry, and the scan modes 1080i (1,080 actively-interlaced lines of resolution) and 1080p (1,080 progressively-scanned lines). It also includes the alternative 1440 x 1152 HDMAC scan format. (According to some reports, a mooted 720p format (720 progressively-scanned lines) was viewed by some at the ITU as an "enhanced" television format rather than a true HDTV format[4], and so was not included, although 1920x1080 and 1280x720p systems for a range of frame and field rates were defined by several US SMPTE standards.) However, even that limited standardization of HDTV did not lead to its adoption, principally for technical and economic reasons. Early HDTV commercial experiments such as NHK's MUSE required over four times the bandwidth of a standard-definition (SDTV) broadcast, and despite efforts made to shrink the required bandwidth down to about 2 times that of SDTV, it was still only distributable by satellite. In addition, recording and reproducing a HDTV signal was a significant technical challenge in the early years of HDTV. HDTV technology was introduced in the United States in the 1990s by the Digital HDTV Grand Alliance, a group of television companies and MIT.[5][6] On 6th April 1997, CBS went on the air with WCBS-HD from the top of the Empire State Building, New York, doing demos and evaluations.[7] The first HDTV sets went on sale in the United States in 1998. In Europe, analog 1,125-line HD-MAC test broadcasts were performed in the early 1990s, but did not lead to any established public broadcast service. Japan remains the only country with successful public broadcast analog HDTV, known as "Hi-vision", featuring a 5:3 aspect ratio screen with 1,125 interlaced lines (1,035 active lines) at the rate of 60 fields per second. It was not until the early 2000s that technology had progressed enough to deliver sufficient storage capacity and processing power to support compression algorithms powerful enough to make HDTV affordable for consumers and profitable for broadcasters and other programme makers. The main enabling factor was the transition from analog to digital TV standards. Digital compression methods such as MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 allow the bandwidth of a single analogue TV channel (6 MHz in the US) to carry up to 5 standard-definition or up to 2 high-definition digital TV channels instead. Most developed nations have plans in place for a transition to digital television, but not necessarily or exclusively HDTV; for example, on 17th February 2009, the US intends to terminate all full-power terrestrial analog broadcasting (although some smaller local stations have later deadlines), with both standard definition TV (SDTV) and HDTV being allowed. [8] Current HDTV broadcast standards include ATSC (US) and DVB (Europe, and most of the rest of the world). HDTV can also provide 5.1-channel surround sound audio using e.g. the Dolby Digital (AC-3) format. HDTV sourcesThe rise in popularity of large screens and projectors has made the limitations of conventional Standard Definition TV (SDTV) increasingly evident. A HDTV compatible television set will not improve the quality of SDTV channels. To display a superior picture, high definition televisions require a High Definition (HD) signal. Typical sources of HD signals are as follows:
NotationHDTV broadcast systems are defined threefold, by:
The 720p60 format is 1280 × 720 pixels progressive scanning with 60 fields per second (60 Hz). The 1080i50 format is 1920 × 1080 pixels (ie 2 MP) interlaced scanning with 50 fields per second. Sometimes interlaced fields are called half-frames, but they are not, because two fields of one frame are temporally shifted. Frame pulldown and segmented frames are special techniques that allow transmitting full frames via an interlaced video stream. For commercial naming of the product, either the frame rate or the field rate is often dropped, e.g. a "1080i television set" label indicates only the image resolution.[10] Often, the rate is inferred from the context, usually assumed to be either 50 or 60 Hz, except for 1080p, which denotes 1080p24, 1080p25, and 1080p30, but may include 1080p50 and 1080p60 in the future. A frame or field rate can also be specified without a resolution. For example 24p means 24 progressive scan frames per second, and 50i means 25 interlaced frames per second consisting of 50 interlaced fields per second. Most HDTV systems support some standard resolutions and frame or field rates. The most common are noted below. Standard Display ResolutionsStandard Definition usually refers to 480 vertical lines of resolution or more.
When resolution is considered, both the resolution of the transmitted signal and the (native) displayed resolution of a TV set are taken into account. Most HDTV sets contain video scalers and will "upscale" or "upconvert" the transmitted signal to that of the set's native format. Sometimes the progressive versions of these video formats are referred to as EDTV, or "Enhanced Definition Television." This is slightly misleading, for although a progressive frame contains double the image information as that of an interlaced frame, Standard Definition is already capable of displaying progressive frames, for example in MPEG video with the appropriate "Progressive" flag set. Despite this, 480p/576p signals are not currently broadcast. High-Definition Display Resolutions
High Definition usually refers to 720 vertical lines of video format resolution or more.
A common native resolution used in HD Ready LCD TV panels is 1366 x 768[11] pixels instead of the ATSC Standard 1280 x 720 pixels. This is due to maximization of manufacturing yield and resolution of VGA, VRAM that comes with a 768 pixel format. Hence, LCD manufacturers adopt the 16:9 ratio compatible for the HD Ready 1080p video standard. Nevertheless, every HDTV has an overscan processing chipset to fix resolution scaling and color rendering, eg LG XD Engine, SONY BRAVIA Engine. Only when viewing 1080i/1080p HD contents under HD Ready 1080p where there is true pixel-for-pixel reproduction, and for HD ready LCD TV, do some signals undergo a scaling process which results in a 3-5% loss of picture.
It should be noted that the numbers used for "HD-Ready" image resolutions do not constitute acceptable 750- or 1152-line video signals in most standards-compliant hardware; in this respect terms such as "720p" and "1080p" are mostly used for advertising, though that does not necessarily mean that HD-Ready TVs labeled in this manner are incapable of accepting those formats as input. Additionally, the "Clean Aperture" numbers are almost always contained within the frames of their respective "Production Aperture" numbers (e.g., a 1888×1062 rectangle would be contained within a 1920×1080 frame). This is to maintain compatibility with analogue signals, which can often become distorted close to the edge of the frame. It also increases the chance that a digital signal being played on overscan-enabled equipment will display the entire picture visibly. Standard frame or field rates
Broadcast station format considerations
At the least, HDTV has twice the linear resolution of standard-definition television (SDTV), thus showing greater detail than either analog television or regular DVD. The technical standards for broadcasting HDTV also handle the 16:9 aspect ratio images without using letterboxing or anamorphic stretching, thus increasing the effective image resolution. The optimum format for a broadcast depends upon the type of videographic recording medium used and the image's characteristics. The field and frame rate should match the source and the resolution. A very high resolution source may require more bandwidth than available in order to be transmitted without loss of fidelity. The lossy compression that is used in all digital HDTV storage and transmission systems will distort the received picture, when compared to the uncompressed source. Types of mediaStandard 35mm photographic film used for cinema projection has higher resolution than HDTV systems, and is exposed and projected at a rate of 24 frames per second. To be shown on television in PAL-system countries, cinema film is scanned at the TV rate of 25 frames per second, causing an acceleration of 4.1 percent, which is generally considered acceptable. In NTSC-system countries, the TV scan rate of 30 frames per second would cause a perceptible acceleration if the same were attempted, and the necessary correction is performed by a technique called 3:2 pull-down: over each successive pair of film frames, one is held for three video fields (1/20 of a second) and the next is held for two video fields (1/30 of a second), giving a total time for the two frames of 1/12 of a second and thus achieving the correct average film frame rate.
Older (pre-HDTV) recordings on video tape such as Betacam SP are often either in the form 480i60 or 576i50. These may be relatively easily up-converted to a higher resolution interlaced format such as 720i, but removing the interlace to match the common progressive 720p format may distort the picture or involve filtering that even reduces the resolution of the result. On the other hand, if a superior deinterlacer is used, scaling an interlaced format to another interlaced format is always best done by first de-interlacing the image, scaling the image, then re-interlacing the image. Modern cable boxes with PIP in EPG displays, use this technique to maximize the image quality of the embedded video image thumbnail.
Non-cinematic HDTV video recordings intended for broadcast are typically recorded either in 720p or 1080i format as determined by the broadcaster. 720p is commonly used for Internet distribution of high-definition video, because most computer monitors operate in progressive-scan mode. 720p also imposes much less strenuous storage and decoding requirements compared to both 1080i and 1080p. 1080p is used for Blu-Ray recordings. List of stations
Technical details
  HDTV signals and colorimetry are defined by Rec. 709. MPEG-2 is most commonly used as the compression codec for digital HDTV broadcasts. Although MPEG-2 supports up to 4:2:2 YCbCr chroma subsampling and 10-bit quantization, HD broadcasts use 4:2:0 and 8-bit quantization to save bandwidth. Some broadcasters also plan to use MPEG-4 AVC, such as the BBC which is trialing such a system via satellite broadcast, which will save considerable bandwidth compared to MPEG-2 systems. Some German broadcasters already use MPEG-4 AVC together with DVB-S2 (Pro 7, Sat.1 and Premiere). Although MPEG-2 is more widely used at present, it seems likely that in the future all European HDTV may be MPEG-4 AVC, and Norway, which is currently in the progress of implementing digital television broadcasts, is using MPEG-4 AVC for present SD Digital as well as for future HDTV on terrestrial broadcasts. In parts of Sweden the standard is already in use for HDTV terrestrial broadcasting, reaching about 25-30% of the population. Brasil was the first country in the American continent to begin broadcasting H.264 AVC video and HE-AAC audio as the main program (or multi) compression and the same H.264 AVC in LDTV 240p using AAC-LC as audio for mobile DTV devices, not only mobile phones. HDTV is capable of "theater-quality" audio because it uses the Dolby Digital (AC-3) format to support "5.1" surround sound. The pixel aspect ratio of native HD signals is a "square" 1.0, in which each pixel's height equals its width. New HD compression and recording formats such as HDV use rectangular pixels to save bandwidth and to open HDTV acquisition for the consumer market. For more technical details see the articles on HDV, ATSC, DVB, and ISDB but the ISDB-Tb used primarily in Brasil uses HE-AAC that is more flexible than AC-3 and lower royalty fees.. Television studios as well as production and distribution facilities, use the HD-SDI SMPTE 292M interconnect standard (a nominally 1.485 Gbit/s, 75-ohm serial digital interface) to route uncompressed HDTV signals. The native bitrate of HDTV formats cannot be supported by 6-8 MHz standard-definition television channels for over-the-air broadcast and consumer distribution media, hence the widespread use of compression in consumer applications. SMPTE 292M interconnects are generally unavailable in consumer equipment, partially due to the expense involved in supporting this format, and partially because consumer electronics manufacturers are required (typically by licensing agreements) to provide encrypted digital outputs on consumer video equipment, for fear that this would aggravate the issue of video piracy. Newer dual-link HD-SDI signals are needed for the latest 4:4:4 camera systems (Sony Cinealta F23 & Thomson Viper), where one link/coax cable contains the 4:2:2 YCbCr info and the other link/coax cable contains the additional 0:2:2 CbCr information. Advantages of HDTV expressed in non-technical termsPlus, high-definition television (HDTV) yields a better-quality image than does standard television, because it has a greater number of lines of resolution. The visual information is some 2-5 times sharper because the gaps between the scan lines are narrower or invisible to the naked eye. The lower-case "i" appended to the numbers denotes interlaced; the lower-case "p" denotes progressive. The interlaced scanning method, the 1,080 lines of resolution are divided into two, the first 540 lines are painted on a frame, the second 540 lines are painted on a second frame, reducing the bandwidth. The progressive scanning method simultaneously displays all 1,080 lines of resolution at 60 frames per second, on a greater bandwidth. (See: An explanation of HDTV numbers and laymen's glossary) Often, the broadcast HDTV video signal soundtrack is Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound, enabling full, surround sound capabilities, while STBC television signals include either monophonic or stereophonic audio, or both. Stereophonic broadcasts can be encoded with Dolby Surround audio signal. Brasil opted to upgrade the ISDB-T Japanese standard to H.264 AVC Mpeg4 part 10 in the video compression and HE-AAC for audio compression because Dolby is not open and the royalty fees are more expensive than that of Mpeg4 H.264 AVC and renamed the upgraded standard to ISDB-Tb that now became the International ISDB-T standard. Disadvantages of HDTV expressed in non-technical termsIn practice, the best possible HD quality is not usually achieved. The main problem is that many operators do not follow HDTV specifications fully. They may use slower bitrates or lower resolution to pack more channels within the limited bandwidth.[12] The operators may use format that is different from the original programming, introducing generation loss artifacts in the process of re-encoding.[13] Also, image quality may be lost if the television is not properly connected to the input device or not properly configured for the input's optimal performance, which may be difficult because of customer confusion regarding connections. You will have to buy the appropriate cable for example in most cases an HDMI cable or component cables. These are often more expensive. For instance, if Composite or S-Video cables are used for connections from a cable box or satellite dish then only an SDTV quality picture will be seen. HDMI provides the best picture and sound but are also generally more expensive than Component cables. As high-definition video broadcasts are digital, the disadvantages of digital video broadcasting also apply here. For example, digital video responds differently to analogue video when subject to interference. As opposed to a lower-quality signal one gets from interference in an analogue television broadcast, interference in a digital television broadcast will freeze, skip, or display "garbage" information. Broadcasters may aggressively compress video to save bandwidth and therefore broadcast more channels - this compression manifests itself as reduced video quality. In order to view HDTV broadcasts, viewers may have to upgrade their TVs which come at expense. Adding a new aspect ratio makes for consumer confusion if their display is capable of one or more ratios but must be switched to the correct one by the user. Traditional standard definition TV shows and feature films (mostly movies from before 1953) originally filmed in the standard 4:3 ratio, when displayed correctly on a HDTV monitor, will have empty display areas to the left and right of the image. Many consumers aren't satisfied with this unused display area and choose instead to distort their standard definition shows by stretching them horizontally to fill the screen, giving everything a too-wide or not-tall-enough appearance. Alternatively, they'll choose to zoom the image which removes content that was on the top and bottom of the original TV show.[14] As of 2007, broadcasters may demand, or cable-television operators may elect, to place HD signals in a premium band that requires higher cable fees. That some satellite companies offer the local HD channels as a service at additional cost (transmission comes from satellite) suggests to some broadcasters that on-air broadcasts of local HD signals must be a premium service to subscribers. Viewers may be denied some television channels that they expected, be allowed only access to the non-digital, and obviously sub-standard non-digital signal, or have to install an antenna to receive the digital broadcasts. Such issues more entail economic and legal disputes than they entail technology. Another disadvantage of HDTV compared to traditional television has been consumer confusion stemming from the different standards and resolutions, such as 1080i, 1080p, and 720p. Complicating the matter have been the changes in television connections from component video, to DVI, then to HDMI. Finally, the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray Disc high definition storage format war for a period of time created confusion for consumers. This particular format war was recently "settled" with Blu-ray emerging as the victorious standard. Contemporary systems 1. HDTV Monitor 2. HD satellite receiver 3. Standard satellite dish 4. HDMI cable, DVI-D and audio cables, or audio and component video cables Besides a HD-ready television set, other equipment is needed to view HD television. Cable-ready TV sets can display HD content without using an external box. They have a QAM tuner built-in and/or a card slot for inserting a CableCARD.[15]. High-definition image sources include terrestrial broadcast, direct broadcast satellite, digital cable, the high definition disc BD, internet downloads, and the PlayStation 3 and XBox 360 game consoles. Recording and compressionHDTV can be recorded to D-VHS (Data-VHS), W-VHS (analog only), to a HDTV-capable digital video recorder (for example DirecTV's high-definition Digital video recorder, Sky HD's set-top box, Dish Network's VIP 622 or VIP 722 high-definition Digital video recorder receivers, or TiVo's Series 3 or HD recorders), or a HDTV-ready HTPC. Some cable boxes are capable of receiving or recording two broadcasts at a time in HDTV format, and HDTV programming, some free, some for a fee, can be played back with the cable company's on-demand feature. The massive amount of data storage required to archive uncompressed streams make it unlikely that an uncompressed storage option will appear in the consumer market soon. Realtime MPEG-2 compression of an uncompressed digital HDTV signal is also prohibitively expensive for the consumer market at this time, but should become inexpensive within several years (although this is more relevant for consumer HD camcorders than recording HDTV). Analog tape recorders with bandwidth capable of recording analog HD signals such as W-VHS recorders are no longer produced for the consumer market and are both expensive and scarce in the secondary market. In the United States, as part of the FCC's "plug and play" agreement, cable companies are required to provide customers who rent HD set-top boxes with a set-top box with "functional" Firewire (IEEE 1394) upon request. None of the direct broadcast satellite providers have offered this feature on any of their supported boxes, but some cable TV companies have. As of July 2004, boxes are not included in the FCC mandate. This content is protected by encryption known as 5C.[16] This encryption can prevent duplication of content or simply limit the number of copies permitted, thus effectively denying most if not all fair use of the content. Table of terrestrial HDTV transmission systems
TV resolution
See also Wikimedia Commons has media related to: High-definition television
ReferencesCited references
General references
External links
Categories: ATSC | High-definition television | Film and video technology | Digital television | Consumer electronics
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