Freeview HD Digital Terrestrial (DTT) is a HD Service.

The Freeview HD supports broadcasting in high-definition, TV One, TV Two and TV3's popular programmes will be or are already broadcast in HD. The popular TV3 show Boston Legal was the first television programme to be screened in native HD on Tuesday, April 1. Now there are countless movies, sports events, reality shows and other content being broadcast in HD.

The picture quality is affected by how you connect a Satellite Receiver or DVD Player, to your TV or DVD Recorder.

You should use the best format you can from the list below. Most new LCDs and Plasmas have HDMI and Component Video. Most DVD recorders have S-Video. CRT TVs may have Component Video, S-Video, Composite, RF or a combination of the above. You may need to compromise if you have a TV with for example 1 Component Video input and 2x S-Video, you may need to decide if you want to connect your DVD player or your Satellite Receiver to the TV with Component Video and then connect the other one with S-Video.

This is a Digital Interface and provides flawless digital quality. It supports SD and HD

This is the highest quality analogue interface available and supports SD and HD signals. This is the format used for storage of Video on DVDs and in Digital Video Broadcasting, using component Video ensures that the signal is not compressed and decompressed and quality degradation associated with the compression and decompression is avoided.

The Video Signal is separated into 3 parts:

Y - The luminance signal, this is the brightness or black & white information of the Video Signal.
Pb - The Blue colour difference, this indicates how much Blue there is relative to luminance.
Pr - The Red colour difference, this indicates how much Red there is relative to luminance.
The green portion of the signal can be inferred from the above signals and is therefore not sent.

This format separates the Video Signal into 3 parts. The quality is very close to Component Video only small losses are introduced due to finite precision limiting the accuracy of the transcoding matrix.

The Video Signal is separated into 3 parts:

Red - The Red Signal
Blue - The Blue Signal
Green - The Green Signal

This format compresses only the Colour information resulting in minimal degradation in quality when the signal is decompressed. By keeping luminance and chrominance information separate it prevents most of the signal degradation that is inherent in the conversion to composite video.

The Video Signal is separated into 2 parts:

Y - The luminance signal - The Y signal is the same as in the native component video
C - The Chrominance (Colour) This is a combination of the B-Y and R-Y colour difference signals

All of the component video information is compressed into one signal, this must be separated again for display. However if luminance (Y) and chrominance (C) is compressed into one signal, it cannot ever be separated cleanly. It is not possible to recover the entire original signal. The result is that the final video image on the screen is diminished, the picture is not as crisp and clean, and the colours are not as accurate and rich as they would have been had the composite video compression been avoided.

A Composite signal is combined with a sound signal and modulated onto an RF carrier, many channels of Video can be modulated onto the cable by using different carrier frequencies. The quality is reduced even more than Composite as a result of the modulation / demodulation.