FreeSat HD

Interesting...

I know one of the European Satellites (Hotbird?) already broadcasts some free-to-air HD content but it's good to see that UK broadcasters are waking up to the fact that the majority of people have bought nice new HDTVs only to find that the image quality (unless they're prepared to go to SkyHD) of the 720x576 analogue/DVB-T signal looks absolutely shocking when blown up to fill their 1280x720, or worse - 1920 x 1080 resolution panels.

All we need now is H.264 support for Windows MCE and things are getting there!

Regards,

Rob.

Well, that's up to them. Having wrestled with these issues on computers for years before HDTV came to our shores I'll remain more sceptical. Well, I'll watch upscaled pants - unhappily - until there is HD resolution content available and then switch immediately. Those that think the blown-up picture looks good can stick with that if's so good - that's up to them!

Anyway, a little demonstration for those who don't know what we're talking about...

Firstly, the notes:

1) The aspect ratio is of course all wrong, I'll allow for widescreen another time (I've only got two minutes), but the resolutions are 'to scale'

2) Obviously these aren't full resolution because it wouldn't fit in the ASN browser window, however they are true to scale. The first is 25% of an analogue/DVB-T TV size/resolution picture and the others are 25% of 720p and 25% of 1080p respectively so it's a fair example.



In my opinion blowing pixels up like that really compromises the image quality. I know some digi-boxes can apply a little sharpening and antialiasing (pixel-smoothing essentially by contrast-blending) but because of the sheer processing power required to do this at realtime 25fps on a 1920x1080 resolution image, they only do it to a small extent (ie with a very small sample size); to do it with a large sample size, and yield a really good improvement, the freeview-box would end up with a very powerful processor indeed inside it (think GeFore 8800 GPU or Intel E6600 CPU)...

Regards,

Rob.