WHICH MODERN TV IS BEST FOR FTA CONTENT?

Guys, I have long wanted to upgrade our home TV and have been looking forward to a 4K OLED lately but one thing changed .... I saw free to air content at the local Bing Lee and most looked very bad. So my question is:

What TVs are best for displaying free to air content?

 

Anything with an off button

 

a model that includes (even) a rudimentary smart tv OS, but failing that, a functional HDMI port for an external smart device

but please, continue to watch FTA because SOMEBODY HAS TO for the rest of us who want to stream a spot of the programming, later

jokes aside, the sony processor on higher end models seems like its better than most at doing what you want, I'd give a very thorough, direct-plugged antenna test to some in store if you can before committing

 

Get the OLED.

You're overthinking.

 

Hilariously it's the more higher end (read expensive) TVs that have the better scalers in them...
Better scaling, processing and smoothing can only do so much though, so be prepared to be disappointed by the bitrate of FTA

 

Sure maybe, but every TV on that wall looked shit with FTA content and that's most of what the missus watches. Also we are using a Fetch box if that has any influence on the outcome.

The 15 year old FHD plasma finally died so I will have to buy something in the near future.

 

Make sure they're not using a HDMI splitter or matrix to display content on the TVs, it usually results in the same shit quality on all the TVs.

 

FTA "content" (using the term loosely, it's all directly or indirectly advertising), is 1080i at best. most of it is worse (720p or 576i). and in an effort to squeeze in more channels of home shopping they've reduced the bitrate of every channel because the bandwidth they have is limited, so for more channels, you've got to make each one worse.

any hi-res TV will make it look bad.

 

i think my C2 does a pretty decent job with SD content and I don't even turn on most of the processing, just filmaker + warm 50 and i'm off.

FTA probably looks fine but i'd never know as i don't use it, at worst I watch a rebroadcast of something on a streaming service like 10play or 9now.

 

I don't watch much FTA tv, but moreso internet content + foxtel. When I do watch FTA the content the LG oleds I have are absolutely fine. I don't sit particular close to them which helps eliminate some of the blocky look to a low quality feed.

 

The above covers the reason, but the direct answer to your question is: The smallest TV possible will provide the best FTA experience.

You have limited pixels being received and therefore the smaller screen you can fit them in then the less horrible it will look. If you want 4K (and you should), then go a smaller one and also remember in the store you're probably standing closer than you will sit at home. The smartest solution is just go whatever size you're generally happy with for all other content (and make sure it's OLED because they just look better)

 

They may not have even been on the HD FTA channels! Some retailers just don't care

 

Yeah you'll need to get them to plug the TV directly into the antenna and then go to the channel YOU want to check to be able to compare
The display can only show you the best it can depending on the signal put into it..

 

So, this is mostly a thread about FTA. I'll say stuff about that in a moment. But despite that, and despite being a huge OLED fan, I'm going to tell people to not blindly buy OLED.

The Internet is filled with people whinging for days about brightness problems. Especially people trying out high quality HDR content for the first time. Dig a little deeper, and yup, sure enough, these people raced out to buy OLED based on hype (somewhat deserving hype, mind you) and did so with zero investigation into what they actually need for their super bright living rooms filled with sunlight as they watch content in the middle of the day.

There is no "best TV". There is not even a "best TV technology". OLED isn't objectively "the best" - it's an amazing technology for low light or night time HDR film watching, and likewise for low light gaming. But you're going to have a bad time putting even the brightest OLEDs in a very bright room.

Sites like RTings cover this well by letting you choose what you actually want to do with your TV, and then recommending based on that use case:
https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/best

This is the right way to recommend TVs. Don't buy on hype. Buy on what you need. Again - I own and love my OLED. But I have a nice dark living room and watch/play almost all of my content at night time. You might very well be better off with a nice high bright QLED or even LCD - honestly, there's some fucking amazing looking LCD TVs out there today, and they do exceptionally well in bright environments.

Back to the OP...

Free to Air TV in Australia is broadcast in two different formats: either SD 576i, or HD 1080i.

What this means is either the picture is 576 lines tall (i.e.: needs to be scaled 3.75x to fit on a 4K screen), or 1080 lines tall (i.e.: needs to be scaled 2.0x to fit on a 4K screen). But worse than that, is it's interlaced. You get half of those lines in the first 1/50th of a second (the odd lines), and the second half of the lines in the next 1/50th of a second (the even lines). There's movement between these, so to stitch them together you get a "combing" effect, where the odd and even lines don't match up on fast motion content. Here's a real world example, borrowed from wikipedia's page on interlaced video:




Very easy to see the "comb" effect there. This is entirely left over from CRT displays, where these odd and even fields could be displayed just fine on a CRT screen (which draws a beam left to right, top to bottom, and the interlacing worked well to give a suitable resolution-doubling effect without noticing the combing). Modern flat panels can't draw pictures like this, so they have to combine the interlaced fields into a single frame. They try to post-process this away with various deinterlacing and decombing filters. But even those can only do so much. For example, here's a "fixed" version of the above:



Still pretty gross, right? Now scale that up 2 to 4 times, and it's just gross scaled.

More info from where I took these images from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced_video

How do you fix this? Well, we can't really. The answer is that Aussie FTA needs to get out of the dark ages and move to progressive scan. But if you work with broadcast engineers (and I do), it's literally like going back in time to when steam engines were peak technology. I love my retro gaming. I love my CRTs. But they are hobbies. Sadly for Australian broadcast television, that's still the modern era.

So finally answering your question - which TV is best for free to air? None of them. And people will tell you to go watch the "catch up" apps instead, where most of the content is served at 720p instead. I have some bad news though - all of these files are just taken from the 576i/1080i content, software deinterlaced and stored as even lossier-bitrate video files than the ~10Mbit FTA digital channels broadcast at.

FTA is the problem, and not because it's not IP/Internet based or not file based - not even compression/bitrate based. Simply because our country is still using broadcast standards from the previous century. Simply changing to 720p/1080p would rectify the problem. But having over two decades of experience in this industry, that change is very unlikely to happen.

(Footnote: why did your old Plasma look so good then? Mostly because Plasmas were blurry as hell, and kind of hid the problem. I know folks love them, but the technology was flawed from the get go for a host of other reasons. Our sharper modern tellies really show off how bad this looks).

 

Me either.

I own two of them.

OP get the OLED and don't look back. It is by far the best experience of all current TV technology.

FTA is rubbish in general, it also won't be the only content you view on the TV.

 

Another thing to consider in addition to elvis 's post is that FTA includes a lot of static logos - That can cause major burn-in issues with OLED.

I'm not across how the current generation handle this long-term wise but I have experienced this issue with my LG OLED from 2017 and luckily LG replaced the panel for free last year, but it is something to seriously consider. I still will go OLED every time for me since FTA isn't used often (it was during COVID for the MIL only).

 

Oh so that's why all the Linux ISOs I download from channel 10 are choppy af.

Off topic: Does anyone know if plex is supposed to be able to handle interlaced content? I've noticed 1080i stuff is really choppy on our 4k Google TV dongle.

 

Coincidence, as you mention RTINGS and I just saw this yesterday about QD-OLED burn in!

 

depending if plex is doing transcoding for you or not, determines if it's plex or your GTV to blame.

I use Jellyfin which forked from plex long time ago when plex went to crap (paywalling features), it offers 'bob' deinterlacing (just frame doubling) as an option, but that of course only works if it's jellyfin doing the transcode. if your streaming directly to the GTV, the app your using there is doing the work, so may or may not have the capability.

 

You might potentially have three issues at play here:

1) What's the codec? (The filetype / filename won't tell you. The codec is unrelated to the filename and/or container. "avi", "mp4" or "mkv" are not codecs). Is it something naively supported by your device? (Use mediainfo, link below)

2) What's the framerate? Is it PAL 25FPS content, and your playback device is in 60FPS mode, so you're experiencing judder as the framerates don't match up?

On Google TV devices now you can set framerate matching which will fix this, as long as your screen can do 25/50FPS. Head to Display and sound settings, set "Match Content Frame Rate" to "Non-seamless". This will hard force the Google device to output the same framerate as the content (if your TV's EDID information tells the Google device that it's supported). This is essential for 23.97/24 FPS content watching too if you're sensitive to judder. The default setting is "Never", which just brute forces all content to a 60FPS display, and then hopes your TV deals with it (via things like 3:2 pulldown, vsync, frame interpolation, etc - all of which have downsides that impact visual quality).



3) Is it interlaced content? Again, use mediainfo to find out. But if it is, is Plex doing the deinterlacing, or is your player doing it? See cvidler 's post above for more on that. Like him, I use Jellyfin, so the frame doubling feature works pretty well, although at the expense of extra bandwidth/bitrate (only an issue for remote users).

Mediainfo link here. Use it to identify your specific media:
https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

A note though, you mention you're downloading these direct from channel 10 (I'm assuming getting their catch-up content and holding it locally). If you are, copy these files to your PC/laptop, force your screen to 60FPS (if you've got sexy 120/144 or higher FPS monitor, force it down to 60), and then play the file in VLC or MPV. How does it look? The problem might not be your player at all, but potentially the shitty deinterlacing that Channel 10 do when they turn their 1080i25 content into 720p content for serving via catch-up services, in which case there's nothing you can do because they've already fucked their own media.