Macroblocking and FNC HD…

For several weeks now I’ve been hearing reports about alleged macroblocking issues regarding the FNC HD feed on various providers. I know it’s happening on Verizon FiOS because someone emailed me about it. I saw it myself on DirecTV yesterday during America’s News HQ with Colby and Shawn. But J$ tells me he’s not seeing it on his Comcast HD feed. So the question is: Is it real macroblocking originating inside FNC or a retransmission issue involving the digital providers? Or something else entirely?

The case against an internal FNC macroblocking issue: The fact that it’s apparently not hitting every provider. That’s usually a big clue that the problem rests with the providers themselves, probably in their compression scheme. Furthermore, the length of time this has been going on (nearly a month according to reports I’ve gotten) would seem to me to fall outside the window of when something like this would have been spotted and fixed internally, unless it was due to some buggy new software which doesn’t have a patch available.

The case for an internal FNC macroblocking issue: The sudden rise in simultaneous complaints amongst various viewers on different providers is too coincidental to dismiss out of hand. Furthermore, what’s happening in the case of FNC’s HD picture is rather odd for macroblocking. Usually macroblocking is most easily visible when there’s a lot of motion on the screen, like a sports event (football, hockey, etc) or in an action movie with a lot of explosions or fast movement. This is because there’s more information being transmitted than the available bandwidth can handle so the CODEC “fudges” the picture. In TV news, aside from flashy graphic animations, this most frequently manifests itself in cross fade transitions and the first couple of frames after a jump cut. It usually effects the entire screen and then it goes away and you don’t see it anymore.

But what’s affecting FNC’s HD picture is happening in a different manner (excluding the graphic animations which will always be “noisy” given bandwidth restrictions). First, it’s not occurring during a transition or after a jump cut but in the middle of a camera shot. So far, I’ve only seen it in studio/remote studio shots. And it’s not always affecting the entire screen but only parts of it, and includes parts that either aren’t moving or are moving so slowly that macroblocking shouldn’t be a factor. And the picture will go in and out of macroblock mode several times during the shot. I’ve never before seen disruptions in the picture of the sort I saw on FNC HD yesterday.

What have you noticed? And what’s your provider?