Anyone noticing Man Utds red shirts occasionally leaving a streaky shadow on TNT sports Ultimate

[Popeye13_Official]

Its crisp as £%@$, yes.

Have a look at the 'TNT Sports Ultimate LIVE' logo on the top-right of the screen. Does it have a perfectly formed edge around the 'TNT' circle, or is it blurry & blended like the HD channels' logos are?

[Colesy7]

This is part of my argument with it. The Ultimate logo is the sharpest part of the screen. The actual camera on the game is ok at best.

Did you experience bt sport ultimate?

[Popeye13_Official]

Yes, and i can honestly say that TNT UHD is a far better experience. The difference in quality compared to the BT era is like night & day for me. Both HD and UHD quality is a massive step-up compared to BT, where it was really poor, over-processed and sharpened. 

[Colesy7]

Glad you’re enjoying the service! 

whats your setup if you don’t mind me asking ? Tv etc

[Popeye13_Official]

ROKU Streaming Stick 4K direct into the TV, with audio on pass-through to a Sonos system.

[naylor2006]

I was doing some testing last night cause of  @Colesy7 's other post and got curious. One thing that I noticed last night is that on the Discovery Plus App on my Apple TV the audio was just Stereo and not even basic surround on the UHD HDR steam. Although I can use NOWTV app or Discovery Plus in the same room I favour the BT Pro Box because of being able to pause and so on, I prefer it there than on the Apple TV.

The picture quality was the same last night for the app and the bt box, I cant monitor the app closely but the BT Box was running at 57.7Mbps for the City game on the Ultimate HDR Channel. I have seen better quality than last night and the night before to be honest. The away leg of Porto vs Arsenal looked noticeably better, colour and clarity was better and the throughput was around 70Mbps, some one else on these forums also noticed it.

With that said I find it hard to compare generally because I have a 65" LG C3 now, the 10" increase in size (ooo err) from my old B8 (which I still have in another room now) has washed the image slightly, so the content looks better on my B8 which is a 55" OLED from 2018, but that can be said about any image stretched further. Of course its worse for NOWTV which is always 1080p because they just wont offer a UHD main event feed for it cause theyre mean... 

TNT Sport Ultimate and BT Sport Ultimate which came before will never look as good as a RAW bluray, sports like football will always suffer too because of the camera being so zoomed out and the players are so small against a giant green background. It asks alot from a TV, the higher frame rate of sport helps but its only 50 I think, 120 would be nice but would double the bandwidth requirement for everything.

My advice to anyone watching content is to switch off ALL image processing on the TV side, even Tom Cruise did a video clip about this. If you have any image smoothing or noise reduction on then it will smudge, if you have image sharpening on then you will get weird artifacts. You could have all 3 of these switched on but get 10 different results from 10 different sources, the smoothing of a 24p film would look very different to the smoothing of a 50fps football game, if a certain image is noisier then the noise reduction will have to work harder and artifacts could be more prevalent. I use Game Mode to avoid having to micro manage all these settings, it just switches it all off and leaves the content how it was originally presented, for me this has always reduced streaks or any kind of associated issue. Your TV could take a firmware update which could change the 'effectiveness' of certain image processing which effects your view, with Game Mode its not switched on anyway.

Given I am a United fan I have watched all of their games on Ultimate when they are on, I've not noticed any streaks and I would because Im a real nerd about this sort of thing and AV is somewhat of a hobby for me.

@Colesy7 for one is absolutely adamant that the quality is worse now on TNT then it used to be on BT, surely from a backend point of view nothing changed, it was a re-brand but as I didnt have the equipment back when I watched BT Sport I was unable to monitor the bitrates like I can now....so the subjective debate goes on.

[Colesy7]

I haven't been getting Atmos on 433 all year, not sure this is meant to be case. Although could anyone confirm? 465 always has Atmos and I know this because it shows ATMOS on my bar and also the TV gives me a pop-up.

I agree that the picture quality was the same on the app and also the Guide channel for the game last night. The image last night again was very average, the players looking blurry and the image just overall lacking in sharpness. The colours however I thought were very good. The image served up last night was consistent with what I've seen all season on TNT Ultimate. Switching from that channel to watch my recording from BT Ultimate, the difference is massive. The BT coverage is sharp and obviously 4K whereas this TNT is like upscaled 1440p. 

I too have a 65" Oled and I am no longer wowed by the image on TNT Ultimate, it's obviously better than the 1HD channel but still not 4K. I noticed the difference between the 2 services right at the start of the season when I watched Sevilla vs City in the Super Cup. I remember thinking "what have they done to the image quality?" The difference in the image was huge and this is how its been for me all season.

In regards to the TV settings, I tried using Game mode as you suggested but the image looks no different to any other of the picture modes. I also have all the processing switched off (at least all the ones in the normal settings, not sure about the settings in the service menu). 

Unfortunately I am a United fan too- what a terrible season we are having! I haven't really noticed the streaking effect since the first couple of games, so they must've fixed that.

I still stick by my argument that TNT is inferior to BT in terms of the ultimate channel. Just stating what my eyes see, they've been lasered so I see very sharply lol. What I would suggest to anyone who thinks I'm waffling is to go on the EE TV app on the Box Pro, type in "4K" some old Europa League games will come up. Watch them and compare them to TNT Ultimate and you cannot tell me the picture quality is better on TNT...The footage of the games on there IS 4k and the sort of quality you'd expect from a premium channel. If you get 5 mins to do what I mentioned above it would be interesting to hear your opinions.

I also tried to upload some photos I took of the game on 465 to illustrate my point however the file size is too big....

[Colesy7]

 this is exactly what I mean, others are noticing!!! This needs to be investigated. Can a dev try and get an answer? 

[naylor2006]

Whats the link to this post on AV, im a member over there i'd like to go have a look.

I wish Sky werent so annoying with their UHD, you can watch TNT Ultimately on Sky and pretty sure that was always the case for BT Ultimate too but you cant watch their UHD content with anything other than a sky device. I would to do a direct comparison now, folks used to say Ultimate was better than Sky's UHD.

[Brucemeister5]

@naylor2006 IIRC BT Sport Ultimate was only made available on Sky in the final year of its existence. I remember thinking at the time that there must be a reciprocal agreement in the offing. I hadn’t realised that TNT Sports Ultimate was going to be made available to all subscribers at no extra cost on Discovery+. We still wait for Sky Sports UHD on EETV, although it is available on Virgin Media for an additional £7pm I believe.