The bitrate is just as, or more important than, the numbers in my estimation. I base this on what my eyes see. Give me high bitrate 1080p over 4K YouTube any day.
Fox, ABC/ESPN broadcast in 720p, likely because back in the day it was better considering their equipment and infrastructure for delivering the signal. It looks fine here upscaled to 4K on my cheap to middle of the road 7-year-old TCL television.
Go by what your eyes see, not some silly numbers the provider uses for marketing.
FYI
When you see
Native resolution 1920 x 1080 in the stream Specs
Is that 1080i or 1080p??
The frame rate answers the question.
29.97 fps = 1080i, 59.94 fps = 1080p
Yeah...Channels can only give you what the broadcaster provide TVE-wise and thats usually 720p. Sometimes there's 4K but that's for select sporting events only.
If you're looking to just watch 4K content and...thats about it, then you should consider stream links and getting a streaming service that provides 4K content. There's only a handful of 24/7 4K channels at most but they're just either Bloomberg TV+, upscaled random clips or on a low powered station in Idaho
1080p can also be delivered at 29.97 fps, can't it? Or even 24fps for that matter, yes?
The thread should be titled "What is the point if everything is from a crappy source"
I see lots of streaming 4k/1080p/720p that is made from a crappy source, so it still looks bad. There's a lot more to video quality than the number of pixels that have been made from the source.
This thread reminded me that I have not updated my Excel sheet in a very long time:
Agreed, it's not the resolution it's how bad the source looks. For my provider ABC is the worst, muddy and fuzzy as all get out. Yeah it's 720p but ESPN is also and it looks way better.
I have friends that worked for ABC. They always produce video at the highest resolution and sound quality available at the time. This increases the syndication value.
But their OTA broadcast is 720p. I'm sure the bitrate and overall quality varies by market. There was a point around 2008 where the ABC affiliate here was sending 540i and NBA basketball was unwatchable. They were called out on it in the AVS Forum thread for my city and admitted they had hardware issues and that was the best they could do for the time being.
I'm guessing in another 10-15 years there will no longer be local affiliates sending signals from expensive high-powered towers. The writing is on the wall, streaming is going to be the standard, unfortunately.
Not from what I've seen, it was horrible in Atlanta and it's horrible in Orlando. I'm specifically talking about sports events like college football games. ESPN is way better and I don't know why.
I stated what they record, not what they transmit. If you are using an antenna or coax based cable, then there are other factors in play as well.
Well they need to get a grip on their affiliates because they have the absolute worst in sports.
Have you contacted them and informed them of your quality issues?
Yep. They don't care.
That's a shame
To be fair, they're dealing with a wider pop that thinks that widescreen 480p is HD. So I get it when the engineers blow people off.
I usually just get a boilerplate response (if any), and then when you try to call them there's no way to reach engineering. My latest attempt was a year or more ago when my local Fox affiliate stopped their TVE stream. But that probably wasn't them, it was probably Fox. They are Fox owned.
A simple reply so the update to this threads is more visible to those possibly interested.
Interested in what?
The results of my testing between the encoded content starting with the 720P content recorded from streaming vs the 1080i content recorded from the cable.
Maybe no one cares, that is fine. I just said I was going to do some testing so I thought I would share the results for those that MIGHT be interested.
Maybe I am a small subset of users who actually re-encode my recordings for archiving and then keep them forever to watch with emby, but on the emby forums everyone would be asking for my results.
I am happy with streaming and Channels so it is a kudos to you too.
If you have something to report, why not just post it?