The Summer Olympics in High Definition

Australian cyclist, Anna Meares, keeps an eye on Ukraine's Lyubov Shulika, following close behind. Click to enlarge

HDTV isn't new, nor is London 2012 even the first Olympic Games to be shot in HD, but it is the first Games where one can sit down in their living room, and watch it live on Irish HD terrestrial television. I have been busy recording DVB MPEG stream snippets whenever I get the opportunity.

I'm an old-school "vid-capper" [wiki], spending much of my time in mid to late 1990's making horrendous quality digital images from VHS cassette tapes. I still have six or seven 3-hour tapes of the Atlanta 1996 Games. It was Atlanta '96 that started off my vid-capping craze actually. In recent years I keep myself busy screen-capping netcasts [Riemann's Cut].

Comparing then and now, there is a huge leap in not just quality, but also ease of capture. Back in the bad old days, there were noisy RCA composite video connections, and slow computers to deal with. Now it's all done from the original digital stream contained on a flash drive. The streams are interlaced, which is a little bit annoying, but easily dealt with, and the quality is [relatively] phenomenal . Inspect this 100% crop of the screen-cap above:



All kinds of details shine through with HD, it gives a new perspective on things; a new depth. And apparently parts of this years Olympics have been shot in Ultra High Definition [wiki] which introduces outrageous resolutions such as 4 and 8 thousand scan lines, or for people in the megapixel mindset, 8MP and 33MP, respectively.  

When UHDTV becomes mainstream, we're going to need very large flash drives; very large indeed.