Super Bowl in 4K HDR

[signcarver]

I just wish I could get it with 3.0... I have 3 different STBs that support DRM that I was looking forward to comparing, but right now my local ATSC3 station is broadcasting absolutely nothing... currently the meter reads -79dBm for that station. It used to be my strongest signal as they had a second tower just a couple of miles away but I as told a few months ago that the arrangement they had to use 2 towers was probably coming to an end and I think it probably did as the last month or so my signal meter which would often read in the single digits (i.e. -8dBm though usually closer to -15). I know they had other issues this past week of being down but I thought they had been fixed a couple of days ago. To make matters worse the other ATSC 3 station had been getting lower and lower in signal quality that my 4K-Dev often won't pick it up but until today my flex and my STBs had no problem with it (once locked).


I just hope this was an emergency and not some idiot deciding to schedule such outage on a Sunday when it could have waited until Monday.

[clarkss12]

I just hope this was an emergency and not some idiot deciding to schedule such outage on a Sunday when it could have waited until Monday.

Hahaha, that would be sadistic on their part.....

[zaytar]

RabbitEars lists a few other CBS stations as DRM free in Richmond, Roanoke, Tallahassee, Charleston SC and Bryan, but he doesn't have updated information for them from a local viewer, and odds are they have since added DRM as they are owned by 2 of the biggest offenders (Gray and Scripps)

CBS 105.1 in Charleston, SC is indeed DRM protected - it was one of the first to turn it on around here. They briefly turned it off for a week then flipped it back on and it has been that way since.

[anonymouse]

In addition to Detroit (O&O), at last check CBS is also DRM free in [...] Portland OR (Nexstar) [...]

Yes.

[nickk]

Nice increase in cloud transcode usage. Stable bandwidth graph which suggests that people who started on ATSC 3.0 stayed on ATSC 3.0 for the duration of the game. System was running around 10% capacity which is about 6x higher than typical non-game days.

[HoTst2]

Nice increase in cloud transcode usage. Stable bandwidth graph which suggests that people who started on ATSC 3.0 stayed on ATSC 3.0 for the duration of the game. System was running around 10% capacity which is about 6x higher than typical non-game days.

That's interesting...

Must still be quite a few local CBS outlets throughout the country not using DRM yet on their 3.0 signal.

Too bad mine (the LA market) is not one of them , but did have the SB in 4K at least since we still have DIRECTV here due to the stubborn "FAF" ("Family Acceptance Factor"), that doesn't want to cut the cord yet.

[DennisFL]

I had Paramount Plus with no ads and they had the Super Bowl in HDR. I couldn't tell if it was also 4K but it looked like it.

I tried the CBS 4K channel on Fubo but it had technical difficulties --- the audio had frequent dropouts.

But the video was OK..... I then tried the ATSC 3.0 CBS broadcast which was 1080 but looking quite good.

So at the end of the day, I stayed with Paramount.

But I spent at least an hour trying to figure out where to get the Hi Res broadcast and CBS is not like FOX. There were very little specific internet facts on what was going on.

And a lot of misinformation on where to find it as well.

[yurguis]

I had Paramount Plus with no ads and they had the Super Bowl in HDR. I couldn't tell if it was also 4K but it looked like it.

I was trying to figure out the same. Paramount's feed looked better overall than my local CBS channel which was a little bit of a disappointement IMO.

[clarkss12]

I had Paramount Plus with no ads and they had the Super Bowl in HDR. I couldn't tell if it was also 4K but it looked like it.

I was trying to figure out the same. Paramount's feed looked better overall than my local CBS channel which was a little bit of a disappointement IMO.

What player were you using?? Android device, Fire device, PC, etc?

[yurguis]

What player were you using?? Android device, Fire device, PC, etc?

I was using Google TV.

[signde]

Paramount+ app feed looked really good in 1080p HDR and surprisingly was outputting 5.1 DD+ audio on my Nvidia Shield Pro. Unfortunately it started throwing "video is unavailable" errors pretty consistently even in the pregame show. After having to restart 4-5 times before the game even started I just gave up. I am wired on 1G fiber, maybe whatever CDNs I was being routed to were overwhelmed but the Paramount+ subreddit is riddled with people saying the same thing. Doesn't seem like they ramped up enough, which is pretty much what I was expecting.

[RickD_99]

The Super Bowl (will I be sued by Roger Goodell for mentioning the game name?) looked fantastic in faux 4K via DirecTV….

[Freekick123]

Watched the whole game and most of the pre-game on Paramount+ through my Roku Ultra with wired Ethernet. The 1080P upconvert to 4K looked fantastic on my LG C6 in HDR and sounded great in 5.1. I had no buffering or hangups. I'm on Armstrong cable.

[Cabal]

Austin is a non-DRM market for CBS (as noted above), and I actually got to compare the Super Bowl on 6(!) channels across ATSC 1.0/3.0, including CBS and two Univision channels.

I recorded and watched the game on CBS ATSC 1.0, because their ATSC 3.0 looks like garbage with a rotating black/pink/green horizontal line at the bottom of the screen. I have previously emailed the station engineer addresses with no response. Their ATSC 1.0 channel looked the usual CBS good-not-great.

One of the Univision channels had an incredibly blocky picture (480 maybe?), while the other had excellent picture quality. The best picture across all 6 options was KAKW/Univision (ATSC 3.0) followed by CBS (ATSC 1.0).

Alas, I didn't contribute to the SD transcoder stats, because my RockTek G2 (SEI804/Homatics/etc) natively transcodes AC-4 to E-AC-3 (DD+). Not really "alas", I guess.

[DSperber]

Alas, I didn't contribute to the SD transcoder stats, because my RockTek G2 (SEI804/Homatics/etc) natively transcodes AC-4 to E-AC-3 (DD+). Not really "alas", I guess.

You know, I actually prefer the way my ZB M1 (also with local built-in AC4 decoding, like the G2) deals with Ac4 when you "pass through" audio out over HDMI.

It sends out "already decoded discrete channel 5.1 LPCM" to the AVR, decoded just once from the lossy AC4 of the source stream. The AVR does not need to do anything but play the 5.1 PCM sound.

Seems that would be superior to the 2-step double-lossy approach of (1) decoding lossy 5.1 AC4 into 5.1 LPCM, and then (2) re-encoding 5.1 LPCM into new lossy 5.1 eAC3 (DD+) which gets sent to the AVR via "pass through" where that transcoded 5.1 DD+ stream must once more be decoded into 5.1 LPCM for getting sound to the speakers.

I was actually surprised to see my AVR display the audio coming from the ZB M1 as "5.1 LPCM", and not "DD+" (which is how I see audio from non-DRM channels via the LG HDHR app sent to my AVR, because the LG HDHR system also transcodes the original source A4 into pass-through eAC3.

I think one lossy audio (i.e. source AC4) decoded into LPCM and sent in that form to the AVR for sound to the speakers, is superior to double-lossy audio resulting from transcoding AC4 into eAC3 for sending to the AVR as encoded eAC3, where a second decoding must be done, when it's not necessary.