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Post by Ken Griffin on Jan 6, 2014 10:25:49 GMT
I've mentioned it before there seems a drop off in picture quality from the earlier editions - the change from 2" to 1" perhaps ? Nope. TOTP only switched to 1" in 1982.
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Post by Paul Watkins on Jan 6, 2014 22:16:41 GMT
Big Hits is quite possibly the worse quality show that BBC has done so far. Stretched picture, blurred, poor sound levels throughout and the edits were not up to the normal standard. I hope the 79 shows will not suffer the same treatment
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Post by Matthew Brannigan on Jan 8, 2014 17:00:14 GMT
I wouldn't have minded if it was stretched out as I can fix that with my media player. As Jeff said, cropping the picture to 16:9 was irritating as on a big screen the picture looked quite bluured as a result of losing all those lines of resolution, also not much care was taken over the position of the cropped area, resulting on some strange framing.
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Post by nicadare on Jan 11, 2014 13:01:12 GMT
As TOTP was shot in 720x576 there is no advantage of watching it on BBC4 HD. The 1979 episode broadcast last Thursday was fine, and it's repeated tonight (and 5 minutes longer ).
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Post by peterfitzpatrick on Jan 11, 2014 15:27:35 GMT
So the consensus is to record the SD version and look for the longer repeat (usually Sunday night??) rather than waste disc space with the HD version?
I have an external hard drive on my freest box with all of the shows since they started the 1976 repeats. Any suggestions on the most efficient way to archive them? I was thinking of converting all the .ts files to mpeg4
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Post by nicadare on Jan 11, 2014 16:42:11 GMT
So the consensus is to record the SD version and look for the longer repeat (usually Sunday night??) rather than waste disc space with the HD version? I have an external hard drive on my freest box with all of the shows since they started the 1976 repeats. Any suggestions on the most efficient way to archive them? I was thinking of converting all the .ts files to mpeg4 No point in converting the files, they should be archived as they are. Storing such data on a hard drive is risky as it's vulnerable to corruption or accidental erasure, you should export to a blu-ray or DVD disc for archiving. If this is not possible you could at least make a 'copy' of the episodes stored on your hard drive to an external hard drive, a 1 TB drive would be ideal. This way at least if some episodes are damaged or corrupted on one drive you will still have a copy on your other drive. There is no DRM management on BBC broadcasts so you should be able to export to disc with no problems depending on your equipment. The latest Panasonic blu ray recorders have built in Freeview/HD Freeview which record ALL programmes in broadcast quality directly to the hard drive of the machine, then those recordings can be burnt with NO loss in quality to a Blu ray disc.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 11, 2014 21:15:56 GMT
I'd love to pull recordings off my Sky box to a pc/ext Hard Drive, but I don't believe it's possible
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Post by nicadare on Jan 12, 2014 10:54:52 GMT
I'd love to pull recordings off my Sky box to a pc/ext Hard Drive, but I don't believe it's possible That would be down to the limitation of the Sky Box, using blu-ray recorders with built in Freeview/Freeview HD all BBC recordings are broadcast without encryption so can be burnt to either blu-ray or DVD limitless times then those recordings can be imported into a PC or the discs copied. Other broadcasters such as the ITV channels (and most likely the Sky channels) have DRM encryption (digital rights management) allowing only one recording to disc in original broadcast quality (HD), once such a recording is made the programme can be exported to disc no more. Shelley what will you do when your Sky Box hard drive is full? Will you do a BBC and start wiping?
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Post by Deleted on Jan 12, 2014 13:54:51 GMT
Ah, well, for stuff that REALLY needs keeping, it gets copied over to DVD on my DVD recorder and into the Shelley Archives. Sadly, I have to do it in real time. I was hoping there was a way to retrieve files off a Sky box hard drive, but alas, there is not.
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Post by Jeff Leach on Jan 12, 2014 23:40:06 GMT
As TOTP was shot in 720x576 there is no advantage of watching it on BBC4 HD. The 1979 episode broadcast last Thursday was fine, and it's repeated tonight (and 5 minutes longer ). Yes the studio performances looked clear and relatively sharp on this weeks 79 as you say although the video clips were poor quality particularly the Barry White track - but I do remember them that way when originally broadcast. you'd have thought the record company could have supplied the BBC with better quality footage.
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Post by Dave Woods on Jan 13, 2014 21:02:12 GMT
I have an external hard drive on my freest box with all of the shows since they started the 1976 repeats. Any suggestions on the most efficient way to archive them? I was thinking of converting all the .ts files to mpeg4
Converting to pretty much anything will degrade the picture quality - though the difference may not be all that noticeable. The .ts files are mpeg2 transport streams. It's possible to convert these to "program" mpeg2 streams. That's lossless and reduces the file size a bit. For a file containing an episode of Disco on ZDF Kulture today the transport stream was 2.83GB, which converted to a program stream file of 2.35GB. I think you get less of a gain from BBC Four though. But you can top and tail the files at the same time, which could save you a bit.
On my Windows laptop I use the free utility MPEG Streamclip to do this but you either need to buy Apple's QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component (£14) or install the dodgy "Quicktime Alternative" that they (he) point(s) you towards. I did the former. Eventually. Google "Squared 5" if you're interested. Note that it doesn't work with HD transport streams though. I'd be surprised if there aren't other programs out there that do the same thing, but I've been using this for years.
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Post by Dave Woods on Jan 13, 2014 21:18:54 GMT
Although the resolution of the SD broadcasts should be adequate for the source material, the overriding factor is surely the level of compression in the mpeg stream. The greater the compression, the lower the effective resolution of the image you're seeing.
While HD streams are obviously also compressed, an HD stream derived from an up-scaled SD source should require much less bandwidth than one from an HD source (because it already has a lower effective resolution than the format is designed to handle). So there's unlikely to be aggressive compression on a broadcast of TOTP on BBC Four HD, whereas the picture quality on the SD channel is often pretty poor.
I recorded the SD broadcasts on Thursday and the HD one on Saturday night. For the HD broadcast I allowed 10 mins before and after the programme. The total recording (I'm talking transport stream recordings here obviously) was 2.64GB. Once I'd trimmed off nearly everything from the beginning and end, the remaining bit (i.e. the 30 minutes of TOTP) was only 1.26GB. The SD recording was a little over 900MB.
The HD recording definitely looks sharper - and the DOG is more discreet. But whether it's worth 40% extra storage is definitely questionable.
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Post by peterfitzpatrick on Jan 13, 2014 23:03:47 GMT
Thanks dwoods. In the age of multi terabyte drives I'll stick with the HD stream for now.
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Post by peterflint on Jan 14, 2014 3:01:37 GMT
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Post by Sal Mohammed on Jan 14, 2014 9:57:14 GMT
I'd love to pull recordings off my Sky box to a pc/ext Hard Drive, but I don't believe it's possible
Hi Shelley, it is possible to pull the 'free to air' programmes off your sky box like BBC4 but it means unscrewing the box to gain access to your hard drive.
You can then connect the hard drive to a pc and transfer the files using ExPVR. You'll be getting the broadcast transport stream.
It can be viewed on your pc but as others have mentioned it's possible to convert the .ts files to mpegs without losing the quality.
The other thing about TOTP in HD is the audio should be less compressed though I haven't checked if this is so. The down side is the broadcasts are in mono but by 1979 a lot of artists were miming so it's possible to synch to stereo remastered recordings.
With hard drives able to store larger amounts and the size (dimensions) getting smaller, Keeping HD files isn't taking up as much space as it used to.
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