[mythtv-users] OT: Why 1080p?

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 13:14 -0500, Rich West wrote:
> 1080i is technically lesser quality than 720p.

This is just wrong.

The long answer is that 720p is has higher vertical but lower horizontal
resolution when displaying high motion, think basketball. For movies and
low motion sports, think baseball and football, 1080i is better. This is
because 720p is 720 lines at 60 frames per second, while 1080i is the
is 1080 lines at 30 frames per second. Movies are only 24 frames per
second, so they will always look better in 1080i. Basketball and tennis
are high motion sports so they are filmed at 60 frames per second and
benefit from being shown at the lower resolution and higher frame-rate
of 720p.

People are confused about this because in modelines:
  1080i at 60fields-per-second = 540p at 60frames-per-second
but the two odd and even lines of 1080i do not sample
the same region of the image so this is also true:
  1080i at 60fields-per-second = 1080p at 30frames-per-second

Also, the networks that only broadcast in 720p (FOX & ABC), run lots of
ads saying 720p is better. Unfortunately this is just a bald faced lie
which they perpetuate so that people don't complain about how crappy
movies and baseball look on those networks. They broadcast at 720p
because the lower resolution format requires less bandwidth, so they
can put crappy extra channels in the extra space. PBS also adds
crappy channels while broadcasting at 1080i, but they get MPEG artifacts
due to the too low bit-rate they allow for their 1080i stream.

-- Daniel