pianotuna wrote:
Ota here would be just 2 channels. Tubitv seems to work ok. Internet speed 640 kbps. It sometimes buffers.
That will barely get you "SD 480" quality if you are lucky.
To understand what you are up against, you have to look at what it takes to stream it and how your bandwidth/data speed affects the quality of what you get.
SD 480 is sort of the "base line" of video, fairly close to analog NTSC video if you will, it is like taking a digital picture on a camera with 1 megapixel or less resolution.. In reality matches to your PC screen resolution being set to 640x480.
To squeeze the stream through a connection of only 640 kbps that 640x480 resolution will be reduced to something a lot closer to 320x240 pixels all the way down to 160x180 pixels depending on how much storage space and bandwidth the streamer wants to allow.. Lower resolution = smaller video file to store and host.
320x240 viewed on a 17" laptop screen in "native size" is going to look a lot like a postage stamp on a envelope and expanding that to full screen will be extremely blocky/unwatchable.. Put it on a 50" screen and it is going to look horrible.
Then you have to consider there is something called "video Codecs" these are in a nutshell different ways and types of "compression" of encoding the video into digital form.. Some Codecs are horribly high data loss and result is a highly compressed video. The more compression, the more loss of data results in even worse video quality but the higher compression makes for a smaller video file to store.
This is one of those things that you cannot "have your cake and eat it too"..
Youtube is a good example of how bad some streaming video can look like.. When you upload a video to YouTube, they "re encode" the video to reduce the file size, reduce the amount of bandwidth your file will use when someone watches it. Generally really kills the quality.
A former co worker would often complain that the 4K videos he was making looked great on his PC, but the ones he uploaded to YouTube looked terrible when he streamed it back. He was using YouTube channels to distribute the videos of a band he was in to other bandmembers.. I told him that he needs to stop loading to YouTube and find a online file host to upload the unadulterated files that he can setup file sharing because of the fact that YouTube re encodes the video to a much lower quality.
Anyway, found a website that you might find helpful to understand streaming video a bit better..
STREAMING 101
