I am not sure this is new or not. In the beginning I was blown away by the true HD signal - looked so good.

But the last few days, it didn't look nearly as good. If you look at the pitches light green / dark green stripes, therre are some serious pixel artifacts visible at most times.

Players that move fast are even worse - they become a blur of pixels instantly. Close ups of people are extremely detailed, you can literally see individual drops of sweat on their brow, for example. But if they show the same zoome level in game, and the player is running or just moving his head a bit, you cant even make out the face anymore. It becomes a blur of skin colored pixels.

Slow motion looks fantastic. Obviously since nobody is moving fast and so there are no compression artifacts. Comparing true HD with Bluray, it looks exactly like a BD rip looks like when the movie has been compressed down to 1.5GB, from the original 20 - 30 GB.

Is this normal? Is it because it's 1080i instead of 1080p? Or does True simply have a bad signal? I mean, the True SD signal is terrible, compressed so that you can barely make out whats going on, so it would not surprise me if they gave their shiny new HD signal the same low bandwidth treatment. Any HD experts here?

Silly question: Does your TV have a sports setting to handle exactly what you described?

Silly question: Does your TV have a sports setting to handle exactly what you described?

Hmm... will have to check. But this is a brand new Samsung Series 4 LCD TV so I don't think it's the TV. I have noticed nothing of the sort playing HD movies from hard disk on this TV. HD movies I have are 720p or 1080p though, not 1080i - I don't know if that makes a difference.

the setting will increase the refresh rate and it is as you say in 1920 x1080i but with truckloads of compression when compare to other HD stuff out there free to air.

the setting will increase the refresh rate and it is as you say in 1920 x1080i but with truckloads of compression when compare to other HD stuff out there free to air.

So you agree the compression is way over the top? I was just wondering if that's normal for HD, or if True just delivers a particularly down-compressed signal. Now it looks like the latter, which would be par for the course for this company.

Thinking about it I am pretty sure it's compression artifacts rather than the TV. There was one moment in the game today where they had a close-up of a player. For some reason the guy was bopping his head up and down rapidly... everything around him was crystal clear, but his face was a pixel blur. A TV refresh rate issue would look different - unless there's some up- or downsampling going on inside the TV, but I don't think so. The signal from the box is 1080i and the TV displays 1080i. So this should be 1:1 as it's coming from the box.

no it is 1920 X 1080i really .. not 1:1 1080 x 1080

no it is 1920 X 1080i really .. not 1:1 1080 x 1080

I know.

I meant there's no up- or downscaling going on from the signal as delivered by the box to the TV. If the TV somehow wanted to convert the signal then it would be possible the artifacts are due to that. But I dont think it's doing that - I think the True signal is just very bad, e.g. using very strong compression. In other words they are using a low bitrate. This is fine as long as there isn't too much movement, but becomes very obvious at fast scene changes, or, in sports, when things generally move quickly.

I mainly wanted to figure out whether all broadcasters use the same bitrate for their HD signals, or if it's just up to them and they can use whatever... I can't imagine the world cup signal is of low quality.

Maybe this should be a general question about HD TV and the bitrate used for satellite feeds. Is there a standard? A minimum quality criteria?

I googled around a bit, and it sure looks like broadcasters can do whatever they want with the bitrate. The BBC for example suddenly halved theirs, leading to a much diminished quality. So there we go. Going to disconnect HD (and True) once my 6 months are over...