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BBC iPlayer better picture quality than BBC1 HD?

joebloggs
Superfast

I had a bunch of episodes of Eastenders recorded and when deleting one episode I recorded it went to the next episode delete option and deleted an episode I was about to watch.

However going from a recording to BBC iPlayer I noticed a small upgrade in picture quality.

 Just a heads up - I don’t have any pixelation or service issues

 Having both Sky and Virgin it does seem that the channels are significantly lower in quality than Sky, are they taking DVB-T feeds off channels like Really and Drama?  Only channel that looks better is Talking Pictures TV 

11 REPLIES 11

nodrogd
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

@joebloggs wrote:

633F9882-27AB-459B-BCC4-8A35BB1170BC.jpeg

 Definitely recording on BBC One HD — we pay so much for Virgin - we shouldn’t get less picture quality than Freeview - which broadcasts at 1080p on the main channels with certain shows (BBC and some others on Freeview dynamically depending on the show broadcast between 1080i and 1080p)


What you are seeing is a little trick that is built into the Freeview HD MPEG-4AVC decoder toolkit that samples the incoming bitrate & can vary the output frame by frame between 1080i & 1080p, depending on how the programme being broadcast was encoded. Freeview are the only platform to have decoders that operate this way. Sky & Virgin do not have them.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/researchanddevelopment/2011/04/software-upgrade-for-bbc-hd-on.shtml 

VM 350BB 2xV6 & Landline. Freeview/Freesat HD, ASDA/Tesco PAYG Mobile. Cable customer since 1993

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Up to March 2011 at lot of BBC content was shot in 1080p25 but within a single programme interlaced might be used for moving credits, cross-fades and studio shots. Subsequently the coders for the BBC HD muxes encoded, on a frame by frame basis, progressive frame or interlaced frame. This is why you get a mixture of 1080p and 1080i on Freeview.

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