Conference in HD?

So, there I was making sure the RS Broadcast went OK (the big screen remote is a priesthood responsibility ) When a couple of people asked me about getting a bigger screen.

Bigger? I think it's at least 5' wide. I quickly point out that a bigger screen means you must get a brighter projector since double the dimensions means you're spreading the same amount of light over 4 times the area - for 1/4th the brightness, but I don't know as that went far.

But that got me thinking (dangerous, I know). Bigger also means fuzzier. Church broadcasts are all in SD. But with falling prices of big screens and increasing penetration of HD in the home, how long before the membership turns up their noses at SD broadcasts?

So, the question - what is the Church's plans for HD in the future? Can it be done over the existing C-band bird or does this also mean a whole new satellite system? Within 20 years, we'll have a generation that's known nothing but HD and SD will look like YouTube.

For those who don't know about the changeover that is happening in the US, it is a very major deal.

All full-power TV stations, such as KSL-TV, KBYU-TV, etc., will shut down their analog transmitters at midnight on Feb. 17, 2009, that date was mandated by Congress. The only thing left will be alot of translators and low power stations that have only now begun to migrate over to digital transmssion.. The vast majority of full-power stations will be on different channels than they are now because of the assignment of channels they took during the transition period. Due to the compression technology, many stations are broadcasting as many as three channels, a few, like KBYU, have gotten in as many as five.

You can also run one purely high definition channel in 1080i resolution on the station, but I'm finding that to be somewhat rare.

Older TVs will still work with DBS carriers and cable systems, and a massive set-top box promotion will begin early next year for those that don't subscribe to eitehr satellite or cable.

So KSL is doing some HD, although right now it only involves really the number of lines on the screen (Fox for example plans to urn all their programming at about 875 lines of resolution and still get multiple channels on thier station feeds)

If anyone has an HD tuner here in Salt Lake and gets the signal off the air, let us know what Conference looks like and what you believe the resolution to be. Once in digital, you can use any numer of lines of resolution, so if it's over I think 525, it's in the newer ATSC format. By the way, KSL will be on Channel 38 after the transition. It is there already although your tuner will still say 5.



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I get KSL in HD through comcast. when i am on that channel, SD content is small and surrounded by a black box, News, games and programs in HD fill the whole screen (and are in wide screen).

The past several conferences i have watched on that channel have been wide screen and extremely clear, i didn't specifically check the signal, but assumed that since it filled the whole screen like the other HD content on KSL, that it was HD. It looked really good.

Just a note, also for the past several conferences, the box in the top of the screen where they show the conductor during a congregational hymn has been a 16:9 box indicating that the cameras are all HD. (you'll notice the wide box on a SD broadcast also)

I wonder how long it will be until the HD signal that we enjoy through KSL here locally will be available from a satellite feed - or if it already is

For satellite I believe that you can get HD without any change over from the current system. It just takes up more bandwidth (or better compression) but since it would take up more bandwidth you might get less channels of the other languages.

Though the internet stream I think will stay as audio or low def video just because there is too much demand on the servers by everyone staying home to watch conference in bed off the laptop.

thedqs wrote:For satellite I believe that you can get HD without any change over from the current system.

I'm sure we'd have to change out the receivers, but I was wondering if it included the antenna too.

Might the dish part of the satellite receiver look something like these two 18" DBS dishes that DirecTV provides to its customers for HD programming?

http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/global/co ... d=P4370040

The LNB part won't be the same of course on the large dishes the Church uses, but I'm wondering if the actual 'dish' part is going to have to look like the concave 'eyeglass lens' shapes seen here.

The other piece of equipment that might have to be swapped out eventually is going to be the box that is in each building that we use to get the broadcasts to the TVs in the building.

RussellHltn wrote:I'm sure we'd have to change out the receivers, but I was wondering if it included the antenna too.

The antenna just focuses the data stream into the receiver. Unless they are operating on frequencies that the dish is not tuned for I do not see any reason to have to change dishes.

As for getting two dishes I believe DirecTV just has two different satellites, one for HD and one for SD. Dish I believe uses the same dish for HD and SD since they use the same satellite.

The DVB standard now requires support for MPEG4. I believe things are moving away from MPEG2 in the satellite realm to conserve RF space. Its not cheap to put new birds up there and there is only so much RF space to go around. A new dish would only be required if the frequency or satellite changed. Even then only if you changed bands e.g. C to Ku or something.

I believe the newer DirectTV and DishNetwork boxes that support HD are using MPEG4. Those with HD packages on satellite may notice that most of the providers seem to over compress the image leading to blocky artifacts. I have seen where people in other parts of the US were dropping cable because of this. They found that the over the air HD was better quality and cheaper than paying for over compressed images.

An example of HD on some satellites is here: http://www.lyngsat.com/hd/echo3.html
On EchoStar 3 there is a mix of MPEG2 and MPEG4 HD content. The Church Satellite system is broadcasting in the pre-HD DVB format if you will. The North America feeds are on Galaxy 28 and Galaxy 25. These satellites also carry BYU-TV. Click on link below and search for BYU-TV.

http://www.lyngsat.com/galaxy25.html

The reason the DishNetwork and DirectTV dishes are strange shapes some times is because they have two LMB's and are picking up two satellites.

I wanted to say that one of the first HD broadcasts for KSL was General Conference but I can't find any articles saying that. Does anyone remember if this is true?

jkarras wrote:The DVB standard now requires support for MPEG4. I believe things are moving away from MPEG2 in the satellite realm to conserve RF space. Its not cheap to put new birds up there and there is only so much RF space to go around.

Well, the story I heard is that that church was pushed from analog into digital by the satellite folks. It could happen again.

jkarras wrote:A new dish would only be required if the frequency or satellite changed. Even then only if you changed bands e.g. C to Ku or something.

I've been told that our dish at the stake center is overdue for a change. It was built when the satellites weren't spaced as closely together as they are now, so it doesn't have a sharp enough focus to keep neighboring stats out of the signal. But otherwise, yes, I'd agree. OTOH, if the Church has to make a good sized change to the system, I hope they do look at the bands. I'm sure lots of people would like to see smaller dishes. :rolleyes: Not to mention the possibility of doing two-way/Internet connection.

jkarras wrote:I wanted to say that one of the first HD broadcasts for KSL was General Conference but I can't find any articles saying that. Does anyone remember if this is true?

I can't say, but I heard the Conference Center was designed ground up for HD. Now that the tab has been renovated, it may be in even better shape. But the real issue is distribution.

RussellHltn wrote::rolleyes: Not to mention the possibility of doing two-way/Internet connection.

From what I remember about sat internet the uplink is still 56Kb or 128 Kb and it goes through your phone line (I think similar to DSL). The downlink however is through the sat and depending on how many people are using it at the same time determines how fast you can go.

So I still would like the wards and stakes to go fiber-optic, currently possible here in Utah Valley, and then you could have the church on one large network and get access to intranet resources for church buildings only.

An off-the-wall thought: How would you watch all this on your TV if you lived somewhere remote like Africa or the Australian Outback or perhaps deep in the Amazon? I would imagine it would have to be by satellite and whatever that dictated.

RussellHltn wrote:So, there I was making sure the RS Broadcast went OK (the big screen remote is a priesthood responsibility )

We don't have a remote for ours. :rolleyes:

thedqs wrote:From what I remember about sat Internet the uplink is still 56Kb or 128 Kb and it goes through your phone line (I think similar to DSL).

There are some types of sat connections that are two way. I was thinking more in terms of backup or emergency communications, but it would also be usable for some remote sites. Broadband is still not universal, even in the U.S.

avskip wrote:We don't have a remote for ours. :rolleyes:

You lost it? :rolleyes:

Or is it that old? Of the 3 projectors we've used, I think only the 3 tube Sony doesn't have a remote. The large Sharp does as does the small computer-capable Sony.

But I don't bother with the remote myself. The truth is hauling the equipment out and getting it working is a Priesthood responsibility :sigh:

thedqs wrote:From what I remember about sat internet the uplink is still 56Kb or 128 Kb and it goes through your phone line (I think similar to DSL).

RussellHltn wrote:Well, the story I heard is that that church was pushed from analog into digital by the satellite folks. It could happen again.



I've been told that our dish at the stake center is overdue for a change. It was built when the satellites weren't spaced as closely together as they are now, so it doesn't have a sharp enough focus to keep neighboring stats out of the signal. But otherwise, yes, I'd agree. OTOH, if the Church has to make a good sized change to the system, I hope they do look at the bands. I'm sure lots of people would like to see smaller dishes. :rolleyes: Not to mention the possibility of doing two-way/Internet connection.

...

Both the stake center I previously worked at and my current meetinghouse have the first generation Scientific Atlantic huge white dish with the three-point anchor system. Neither of those locations had any problems from satellite spacing--at least not yet. I understand the slightly smaller beige SA dish on a short, fat pole was the style installed a few years later. One nice thing about an older and larger dish is it brings in much more signal so the raw front-end signal-to-noise ratio can be better than with a smaller dish. IIRC, I usually see Be/N0 numbers around 13. Now, maybe birds will be too close together in the future. If that happens, I suspect this forum is where we'll first hear about it.

avskip wrote:An off-the-wall thought: How would you watch all this on your TV if you lived somewhere remote like Africa or the Australian Outback or perhaps deep in the Amazon? I would imagine it would have to be by satellite and whatever that dictated.

You would have to use a Satellite dish. BYU TV and the normal LDS feed are free to air. You can just point an appropriate dish at the sat and get the feed with a DVB receiver. I had a friend that used a few old Dish Network or DirectTV dishes to get some free to air programing. I believe at the SLC tech talk they mentioned that something like 80% of the earth is covered for conference.

If you follow the link below it shows the sats. which BYU-TV is carried on. If you click on each one they have a link at the top labeled "LyngSat Maps" if you click on that it will show a coverage map for that satellite.

avskip wrote:An off-the-wall thought: How would you watch all this on your TV if you lived somewhere remote like Africa or the Australian Outback or perhaps deep in the Amazon? I would imagine it would have to be by satellite and whatever that dictated.

Hmmmmm, and how is that different then what we do now? I'm not following you.

RussellHltn wrote:Hmmmmm, and how is that different then what we do now? I'm not following you.

Someday I will learn to quote the "thought source"... maybe just maybe... no promises though.

What prompted my thought from "out there" was this on page one of this thread written by thedqs:

"So I still would like the wards and stakes to go fiber-optic, currently possible here in Utah Valley, and then you could have the church on one large network and get access to intranet resources for church buildings only."

I don't know if there's that much satellite RF space available anymore unless you spend major money. I would personally prefer to see the unnecessary expense for all the HD equipment and associated costs for a pretty picture (HD) spent on something else like buildings or better computers.

I've not been really impressed by what I've seen with HD thus far anyway. So what if I can see each individual hair on someone's head or the acne scars on their face. Just old fashioned I guess.

Just as long as the church keeps up with the standard I think it will be fine. In a short number of years I can see all SD looking more like our YouTube videos of today, since we will be used to all the HD content that will become standard. So it is really just a question of when instead of it.

avskip wrote:I would personally prefer to see the unnecessary expense for all the HD equipment and associated costs for a pretty picture (HD) spent on something else like buildings or better computers.

I've not been really impressed by what I've seen with HD thus far anyway. So what if I can see each individual hair on someone's head or the acne scars on their face. Just old fashioned I guess.

Notice I didn't say this is something I wanted to see. Who needs HD to see someone talking at a podium? Besides, if the members thought the picture too small, they can move up to the front row seats instead of sitting halfway back in the chapel. :rolleyes:

But it's something I can see the members wanting. And I can see some of the Church's more creative works loosing their emotional impact when viewed in "substandard" TV. So like thedqs, I think it's more a matter of when.

avskip wrote:An off-the-wall thought: How would you watch all this on your TV if you lived somewhere remote like Africa or the Australian Outback or perhaps deep in the Amazon? I would imagine it would have to be by satellite and whatever that dictated.

Perhaps this is not exactly the answer you were looking for, but when I was in Guatemala, I found my self wishing that the Church would offer a super-compressed audio only file for download; something like 12KBPS. It wouldn't be the most pleasant to listen to, but it would get the job done, and since I was paying for my internet connection by the minute, it would have allowed me to save a bit of money. Rather than stay connected for 8 hours total, I might have been able to download everything in as little as 2.5 hours.

Aaron

RussellHltn wrote:I'm sure we'd have to change out the receivers, but I was wondering if it included the antenna too.

It actually depends on the receiver in the building right now. If you were to look at the back of the new 550, and 550-2 or 550-202, you will notice that these receivers have a built in HDMI output port.

They are already capable of Receiving and outputting HD broadcasts. But first the signal would need to be in HD.

As to changing out the Satellite Dish, the current Dish be it C-Band (~11' diameter) or Ku-Band (~4 0r ~6) can remain. all that changes is the carrier settings and the modulation scheme. Right now the Church uses DVB-S, and a move to DVB-S2 could get the HD signal in approximately the same bandwidth pipe.

Doing so however would require that all of the non HD capable receivers (DVR 396/395, and Unity 500's) be changed out. Note: World Wide there are over 7,000 receivers in use of which over half would need to be replaced.