It's about 9 days to the DTV transition. Let's check in with the over-the-air ATSC HDTV signals and see what the big networks are doing with that 27 Mbits/s channel that they've been granted by the American public. It's a priviledge, not a right!
Hmmm. The local NBC affiliate is only using 10 Mbits/s of the 27 Mbits/s channel:
![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uFniWWgHG7VpQPXqJY4QkrBVWQahHpmvldEXvJ9bGaF09uw7lt3BInNbz39T3hh25D32Tew8FKhTAo54cOOtkL5LepZhpWqeRL4gFVW1naXRn8QubgION5Ayrtkem9=s0-d)
Leading to spikes in the compression, resulting in a low picture quality at critical material:
![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vEnq7goi6E_v7faTAtMuyiLsO6ScuDhvP7Ac97JNEwupgsYoo8B3peRW_BCYNEcJqxm_M1vBZESzOySzdy4rw8QCvK2hxNsjvL_iz7-tBxXQUFONgY1E66Z1fVog=s0-d)
That guy in the black shirt is annoying! Who's he supposed to be again?
![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_ur7YeKwuW4Pc31TN9QSOqB-0d5KAE_OeNXohz6ZwJU84OGDoMoP4BSsAxEavZB-T4TOOgsDUJpXCBNgDEaT-LWkbUENAV-0y1XUM5F8yZH88_iU4BsBt3kE_Z__hw=s0-d)
Wow, those guys look like a bunch of hockey players. Unfortunately, hockey players and movies about hockey players are only famous in Canada.
Speaking of Canadians. The encoder used by this affiliate inserts I-frames, or key-frames, whenever it detects a scene change.
![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tbzzfjq92SsgudB5FJdpsDciuQQ0UJjHVkP6rkYG0n0OrLc_lXmBmWt2sOttFTr5TKgpdSFDMydfvlhIiYQ003jyHKmgiIlhkhon6W72pIN3FoHf6GGSV3roueWTZOaDLRLQ0X=s0-d)
Back from Hell-eh? And ready to party. NBC broadcasting SNL in 1080i, top field first, resulting in about 30% wasted bandwidth.