Football on Prime

[edam]

I have posted about this before and its still the same

Watching football from Prime using the Prime App on the V6 box the quality is not good compared to watching the highlights on BBC later.

I only have 50Mb broadband and I use the wireless connection from the V6 box to the Super Hub 2 . Could this be effecting the quality

[japitts]

Does non-live content have the same issue? 50Mb/s shouldn't be an issue, wireless potentially could.

I've found the same with the autumn international rugby on Prime - PQ was improved this year compared with the last, but still not a patch on a linear broadcast channel.

[newapollo]

I've been watching the football on prime via my 360 box and althoughn the quality isn't as good as tnat on BT Ultimate, it is still a better picture than that shown on Sky Sports HD.

Sometimes the picture is slightly darker than via live broadcast TV,  however if so I just adjust my TV's HDMI  Ultra HD Deep colour setting to Off

[edam]

The picture quality on the news tonight was better than that on Prime earlier in the evening

[Richardr1]

You mean that the picture on the news was better than the picture on Prime using the Virgin V6 app earlier.

It is the same issue as last year - the framerate isn't right on the V6. If you can, use an app on your TV - on mine (an LG) the app gives a picture as good if not better than other HD pictures.

It doesn't affect non-sporting programmes on Prime, as most do not use the 50 Hz that the football wants - US films tend to be 24 Hz for example. The movement in the football shows up the incorrect framerate at its worst.

[Roger_Gooner]

I watched a couple of matches live on Prime Video, PQ was good, no framerate issues. The main bugbears were awkward FF compared with broadcast TV and no facility to record.

[ozsat]

The V6 has aways had an issue with live sport on Amazon Prime. Every other devices plays it at 50Hz but the V6 is 25Hz.

The 360 upgrade seems to resolve the issue as that switches to 50Hz for Prime sport - or you can use any other device.

[Roger_Gooner]

I think the matches were streamed at 1080p25 (so no 4K like last year) and then upscaled to 2160p25 by the V6 (for 4K TVs), it looks the same on my Fire TV Stick 4K Max. I don't see why this would be a problem as a 4K TV will routinely convert 2160p25 to 2160p50 by frame rate doubling (as did my Philips 55OLED805). A drawback of the 360 is that it provides no option for video passthrough and will therefore always upscale anything it receives to 2160p50.

[Richardr1]

Of course allowing the V6 box to upscale isn't pass-through.

Looking at the video settings on the V6 - the pass-through modes (at both 1080p and 2160p) are given as 24 / 25 / 30 fps - so assuming those are true, then the V6 box can't pass through 50 fps, which is what Amazon produces the football at.

Thus the picture is made worse by the limitations of the V6 box. There are modes on some TVs to try to reduce the resultant judder, but what appears to be happening is that the V6 box removes half of the information being streamed by Amazon, and at best some TVs try to reduce the effect of this. Far better not to throw away the information in the first place.

[Roger_Gooner]

Far from removing half the information the V6, like all STBs, has to add pixels when upscaling say, HD to 4K. And the football was streamed I believe at 25fps but, as I said, it doesn't matter as the conversion to 50fps is easily done in a way you cannot notice by simply doubling the refresh rate.