If you're interested in analyzing ATSC HDTV picture quality, you can combine our analysis tools with a USB 2.0 ATSC Tuner from Elgato, in combination with their excellent EyeTV software.

EyeTV does some significant treatment of the image as it displays it - which is the right thing for them to do - delivering the best perceived picture quality to the customer. For technicians, however, we would rather see the bitstream images as they were encoded.

EyeTV has Tivo-like PVR functionality, and so you can easily schedule it to record single or recurring programs off the ATSC broadcast, from any number of channels.

For the best workflow with our software, you should have the following:

1. Apple PowerMac G5 Dual or Quad, as fast as possible.
2. Apple Cinema 30" Display, 2560x1600 resolution, with the fastest possible video card, preferably NVidia.
3. Elgato ATSC HDTV tuner box (includes bundled EyeTV software).

Schedule the programs you want to analyze. They will appear in the list of recordings of EyeTV (see screen captures).

Both MPressionist Pro HD and MPressionist HDTV can analyze ATSC HDTV bitstreams. Pro HD has less analysis, so it achieves a faster framerate on playback, but HDTV gives you access to all the variables encoded in the bitstream. Personally, I use them both, depending on what I'm analyzing or focussing on. If you buy our HDTV analysis software, we'll give you one or two copies of Pro HD if it helps you be more productive in your work.

Once you have a program recorded in EyeTV, you need to demux the bitstream. Although EyeTV stores it's transport streams with a .MPG file extension inside a package wrapper, our demuxer has problems with them. So far, these are the only MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 muxes we haven't been able to decode. But that's okay, because EyeTV can demux them for us, and the resulting bitstreams drop right into our analyzer.

Using the mouse, right-click on the recorded program item. Choose Export... and then select MPEG Elementary as the stream format. By default, EyeTV will affix a .mpv file extension, so you should change that now to the more appropriate .m2v.

EyeTV will batch up these export tasks and run them in parallel, and as soon as they are done, you can open them in MPressionist Pro/HDTV and begin analyzing them.

Here's some 1080i examples culled from a couple of problematic sequences. First off, we have Robert X. Cringely's PBS special on ATSC HDTV. Amazingly, this program was broadcast at around 7Mbits/s. Pretty amazing, but there are some artifacts. During his show he rebroadcasts an original television commercial about the introduction of Color TV. The compression artifacts in this segment made me want to grab and analyze it. Here are three screen grabs of the analysis:
the intro - low textural complexity, low motion and very clean picture (PBS is not employing cutscene detection/I-frame injection), Mr. Cringely - espousing the benefits of the flat screen and the Color TV commercial from the 50s with significant artifacts. On the other hand, 1080i at 7 Mbits/s is a wonder in itself.

Here in LA, of the major networks broadcasting in HD, I personally find CBS to be leading the way. In particular, their primetime leader CSI has excellent picture quality and is broadcast in 1080p. It has a very cinematic quality and demonstrates the possibilities for HDTV for everyone. Here are some analysis grabs from SportsCentral. As you can see, this program is encoded at around 12 Mbits/s (1080i). There is a significant amount of noise in the source material, especially the studio work. And the title sequences, with their rapid motion and crisp edges are giving the encoder some problems. Sports programs probably prove the greatest challenge for the broadcaster.