HD to 625 lines?

[timbo]

Hi all,
Looking on YouTube, the picture quality is terrible. I don't remember old TV pictures being so bad
on the old 625 lines telly's. Is there an app/box or something that can convert flat screen LCD televisions
back to the older system to sharpen up old videos?
Many thanks,
Tim.

[TonyO]

The enemy of video quality is copying, in the old days an-alogue formats degraded every time you made a copy of a copy until all you have is a mush of grain with a hazy Image, The Digital era was hailed as crystal clear copies that could be copied forever without losing any clarity, in practise digital has the same problems but for different reasons.

In the early Digital days when a programme is filmed in a particular format all the detail could not be stored on the tape so not all the detail was stored by reducing the sampling rate to what could fit on the tape, this compression murders picture quality as unlike an-alogue it chucks away some of the detail it sees as not important, done once it does not look disastrous.

Unfortunately its not done once but hundreds of times as formats change and different companies adopt their own forms of compression for internet and tv streams etc, there is a huge raft of digital formats out there now as devices and chip storage shrinks to minute sizes.

Most Broadcasters and Net companies not only store digital formats on hard drives and tapes now but also the old an-alogue catalogue is on there as well making sure that it also suffers from the same digital disease.

[timbo]

Thank you TonyO for your detailed reply,

Don't look like there's going to be a fix for this then mate. Even if I change the quality on You Tube
It stays the same.

So, if I read you right, because of all the copying the videos are a mish mash of formats
and even if I could watch You Tube on an old 625 television, the quality would be just as bad?

Aye

[TonyO]

In one mate !

Its all about quantity, not quality, once you accept it you it won't bother you too much, sad but thats the way it is now.

[Detlef]

Hi all,
Looking on YouTube, the picture quality is terrible. I don't remember old TV pictures being so bad
on the old 625 lines telly's. Is there an app/box or something that can convert flat screen LCD televisions
back to the older system to sharpen up old videos?
Many thanks,
Tim.

If you are happy with the HD quality from an HDMI source, I have been pleased with a little USB device, from that well known ******* site, that allows HDMI to be streamed to a USB (2) device such as a laptop or PC. Such professional devices were around €350 but this version was around €20.

I bought it to archive some recordings on a Sly digibox. I needed to play around with the box output format and the format of the saved recordings to get an optimum AV file but once done, it worked well. One point to note is that the device gets very warm so needs to be used in free air.

[timbo]

Thanks Detlef,
Will have a little look for that device.
Tim.