hd- compression

[Bulbman2]

I am dissatisfied with dish network standard pictures. I have a hd ota and the quality is exceptional- My question is??? I f I subscribe to hd thru dish will there be compression and decompression to degrade the signal like the standard
channels? Or bit shaving or any other techical mumbo jumbo that degrades my picture- Will the dish hd picture be as sharp as the ota?????


thank you



John

 

[MikeD-C05]

There will be some loss in picture quality with Dish and Directv vs ota. They do compress and use less bit rate than ota. You will have to be the judge and look for yourself and see if you are willing to lose some quality to get more quantity in hd. It is a trade off.

It still looks very good to me , EXCEPT my mpeg 4 hd locals on CBS. They do a down conversion to 720p from its native 1080i and use a lot less bit rate, which makes it look very jerky during any movement in the picture. LIke it is missing frames. Totally unacceptable.

 

[chrisw27]

Not only will it look worse on your locals, there's also about a 7-10 second delay + re-compression with the sound vs OTA. If you can, I would recommend getting the best of both worlds. Connect the antenna to the Dish HD receiver.

 

[bhenge]

In general OTA 'should' look better than the signal from Dish, but local OTA providers are also guilty of stealing bandwidth from their HD as well. My local PBS provider for example now provides 5 subchannels on one channel (4.1 thru 4.5 with 4.2 being the HD subchannel). When all 5 channels are active, the HD picture quality suffers. Occasionally they will turn off 2 of the subchannels to provide additional bandwidth to the HD channel and the picture is markedly better. I have noticed a trend in my local OTA providers of adding new subchannels (gotta have those weather radars!) so that it is getting more common to see the HD channel plus 3 subchannels or more. I think that one OTA channel can handle one full bandwidth HD plus 2 SD channels without much degradation (I am no expert about that, I am repeating what I read elsewhere some time ago....) Anyway, my guess is that if your local OTA provider is providing one HD plus 2 SD on one OTA channel, your PQ should exceed that of the satellite provided channel.... add more than 2 SD's with the HD and the difference will be less.

 

[bhelms]

I use my OTA HD PBS channel as a "benchmark" as it looks better than almost anything I'm receiving from E*. My PBS digitals are multicast with HD on 3.1 and then up to 3 more SD subs at the same time. But fortunately they seem to emphasize the HD programming (at least in prime time when I'm likely to be watching) and let the SD channels suffer. For example, 3.2 is a repeat of what's currently on the old analog ch 3. Being digital it is devoid of any interference and multipath issues that I see on the analog channel, but otherwise it often seems to look a bit worse than the analog signal with the added "blockiness" that is, I believe, a result of low bitrate. 3.3 is some BBC stuff and it looks horrible. 3.4 is other programming that also looks pretty bad. I don't really care about 3.2 - 3.4, as long as 3.1 is looking it's "best". (If I want the "main" PBS feed (on 3.2) I can watch that channel LiL from the sat.)

I will say that some of the older E* MPEG-2 HD channels like ESPNHD, HDNet and HDNet Movies generally look very good. In theory they're still in their native resolution. (I can't tell.) Even most of the "HD-Lite" voom channels look pretty good to me but the purists consider them unacceptable. I can definitely see a difference, but to me it's generally acceptable to watch, tho' I agree that we need to fight the HD-Lite trend or we will be stuck with it forever! Hopefully the denser but more efficient bandwidth allocation available with MPEG-4 will be the answer, but there will apparently be some time until the encoding issues are resolved.

 

[Bulbman2]

compression

when I had my bud up and running the picture looked a little better but still not as good as a strong signal analog antenna station. But when I signed up for D I was grosssly disappointed with the grainy ness of the picture. I guess the little satelitte guys are trying to cram sooooo many channels on a satellite that they need to degrade the picture so bad that unless enough people complain and they lose business. I have no sophisticated equipment to meaure actual lines of resolution only my naked eye....... It is really supprising to me that soooo many people think that because it says DIGITAL that it is great.. bah humbug.... I have ota on both hd and analog tvs and the analog tv with ota using a e86 is close to hd in comparison to D OR E. OK I will shut up.....


thanks for the feedback


c u guys



John