The past week I’ve been watching the Australian Open. It’s been really awesome to watch, and that’s coming from someone who is normally bored stiff of just about any form of sport.
But one thing struck me over and over again: the Bunnings ads had horrible MPEG rendering artifacts at the end of each one. At first I thought it was due to poor reception, but this weekend we completely re-wired our house’s coax connections with quad-shielded cabling to our TV antenna and bought a new masthead amplifier, which greatly increased our signal quality.
(And no, we didn’t replace it just to watch the Bunnings ads.)
But this remained:
Yuck. That is definitely not signal loss — that’s crappy encoding. I can give people a (non-reencoded) AVI file of the original if they want proof.
I think it’s mainly a result of the fact that the ad is being rendered at 1080i with the outdated MPEG-2 codec. We desperately need an upgrade to H.264, or even better, Dirac.
No, that’s definitely signal loss. It’s just presumably signal loss during the transfer of the ad from Bunnings to the TV station.
And Dirac? That’s less efficient than MPEG-2.
I somehow doubt that Bunnings would be submitting the ad in anything but a lossless format.