Why is the video quality of a TV recorded footage worse than the one seen live?

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Why is the video quality of a TV recorded footage worse than the one seen live?

In: Technology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

They have make the file/video of the show really small, with a lot of information, to send the signal to your tv. When you record it, the recorder does the same thing again so that it can fit the show onto whatever you’re recording on to. This can make the image look worse.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Digital to digital can be like-for-like, but if storage is a premium, then some people opt to use lower quality, which has a knock against the quality.

I.e. a DVR that takes an HDMI feed or can decide satellite or terrestrial digital TV can pretty much store the raw feed to watch back in its native format.

Anywhere there’s a conversion in the chain can also affect the quality, even digitally (i.e. buffer and scale to suit output).

Analogue conversion can be the hardest as cost tends to be proportional to quality.

An ADC (analogue to digital converter) has to ‘sample’ (capture the signal and determine what value it should be at that point in time)

Cheap capture equipment has a limited range. An 8-bit range would take a sample and value it between 0 and 255, which in audio and video terms is quite poor.
Cheap gear may also not be able to sample fast enough too, so quality again drops.

Software will try to ‘extrapolate’ – fill in the gaps and smooth it out, but it will never look like the original, often washed out.

As the price goes up, more expensive equipment can either sample faster, have better software algorithms, have a greater sample range (10-bit, 12-bit, 16-bit) or all of the prior, which gets a truer representation of the original signal.

The same applies to the reverse, converting digital to analogue, where to equipment and software would have to scale the image to suit the output and push it out a ‘DAC’ (digital to analogue converter), where again ‘bits’ matter to generate a better signal.