Buzzin Football

England beat Russia 3-0 at Wembley, but also the crowd-only audio channel was back on BBCi and Alan Green was quite positive! Amazing though this was, I wonder whether I had anything to do with it.

I left a comment on the BBC Sports Editors Weekend Feedback page noting my disappointment (and linking back to this site, of course) that those were missing. This evening, they’ve returned, but that may be because the BBCi channel was being used after 10pm for the extended analysis.

I noticed another benefit of having one video channel with three audio choices instead of the two near-identical video channels with different audio – a better digital TV picture!

Want to know why? Well, the BBCi channels seem to share bitrate. Bitrate basically dictates how well you can display changes: the more bitrate you have in your video channel, the more detail and action you can show. (That’s the same for internet video.) If you have two identical video channels in a multiplex, they both need bitrate at the same time, which means you can’t show the action quite as well and this usually shows itself on screen as blurring around fast-moving objects. It’s particularly noticeable if they are different colours, like a white football on a field of grass. On Saturday, five of the six BBCi video channels were in use I think (two identical football channels, plus one football highlights, then one video menu and one Radio 2 music show), so it was pretty poor compression and I watched most of the game letterboxed, to stop me spotting the blurring.

So, as well as a happier Alan Green and the option of crowd-only audio, I had a better picture tonight which I could zoom up to full-screen. I’m well chuffed.

Now, I’m off to try to watch the France-Scotland highlights on BBC One Scotland before the Women’s World Cup Highlights on BBC Two… tee-hee! The fun of satellite TV! (But why aren’t they showing the Scotland highlights on BBCi in England too?)