TV picture quality

[chris42]

I'm in the UK where we get IRL on Sky Sports. Yesterday's race was spoilt for me by the lack of a quality picture. Unless it's a close up, you have no idea which car is which. It's also virtually impossible to read the graphics. I know this probably has something to do with the conversion to PAL, but I just wanted to check that it's not a problem for viewers elsewhere in the world - particularly in the US - before I sent Sky Sports an email about it.

[Down F0rce]

I wasn't just blown away with the quality either, what really got me though was the fact that they put off showing the race for an hour to show cricket highlights

[chris42]

At least they updated the EPG, so we knew when to expect it - unlike a certain other channel (that shows a lot of tennis...)

[rustyfan]

Originally posted by chris42
I know this probably has something to do with the conversion to PAL

I doubt it, unless Sky Sports screwed it up. I know MotorsTV showed it live as well, and the quality there was good (from the vidcaps I've seen, anyway).

(edit) Then again, I'm not sure Sky Sports actually does the conversion - could be that it's converted even before being beamed out to the other networks around the world.

[Ian-S]

Motors don't show IRL Pete, if they did Sky'd go bust

However to give them their due, they just re-transmit a poorly encoded video, it's ESPN International who beam the pictures over and they are about as useful as an ice cream satellite rounding the sun, last year the "international feed [RIP]" was terrible quality too.

I've noticed the general picture quality of all retrans getting worse this year, bandwidth costs money as they say...