I guess not even E* is safe from HD Lite

[Sean Mota]

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?threadid=528672

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Just FYI, I have just heard some buzz that Dish may launch a few HD channels soon in hiopes to snag some VOOM customers and also to better push the 942.

If I had money to bet I would says Universal HD and ESPN2 HD could be coming soon to Dish Network.

 

[Sean Mota]

So this is maybe why they are joining the HD Lite crowd...

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Possibly, btw what I said above should be considered a rumor, but if you think about it, Charlie almost HAS to do it to keep people from flocking to DirecTV,

 

[MarcelV]

If I had money to bet I would says Universal HD and ESPN2 HD could be coming soon to Dish Network.

They really have to do better than that to get my money. If that's in addition to what they have, sorry but OTA will be enough. I really will miss Voom21 and if they are not bringing on some of them, they can forget me subscribing to their HD tier. I still have their AT150 or whatever it is these days in addition to Voom. Yes, I know, a bunch of duplicates, but couldn't get the wife move away from a brainwashed Tivo and some shopping channels....

 

[BFG]

It's only thw PPV channel. that they now charge $5.99 to anyone that actually might watch. I can't imagine how many people actually are paying to watch something on that channel though. I wouldn't call that HD-Lite. At least those TS files still had 18 MBps directv does a double dose of re-compression and bandwidth limiting

 

[Sean Mota]

here's an excerpt from the poster:

Just a heads up, E* has now joined the HD-Lite club.

Both Ghost In The Shell 2 and Shark Tale were 1280x1080 this week.

Needless to say, I will stop purchasing PPV's from E* now and complain as loudly as I can.

This comes on the heels of them recompressing HDNET Movies with considerable errors and Showtime has been horrible for the last month - with errors/gaps that even a E* 921 cannot handle.

I thought that when D* started using 1280x1080i on their HD channels this was the beginning of them using HD-Lite. Also the poster talks about HDnet Movies and Showtime with compression problems.

 

[BFG]

they never touched the HDNet transponder, so he's wrong about that one. Maybe he's mixing up with D*? I'll give him sho though. It looked pretty bad during the free preview. But it's still getting more bandwidth and resolution then D* and V* are giving it.

 

[Sean Mota]

they never touched the HDNet transponder, so he's wrong about that one. Maybe he's mixing up with D*? I'll give him sho though. It looked pretty bad during the free preview. But it's still getting more bandwidth and resolution then D* and V* are giving it.

Can you explain and print some numbers of how the bandwith and resolution of each compares? He was not talking about D*.

 

[BFG]

Here's a scan of D* mpbs for sho time ~ 9.8 Mbps (1280x1080)
http://www.widemovies.com/dfwbitrate.html

And for voom the scan the guys at tsreader showed ~ 10.35 Mbps (didn't capture the resolution cause the channel is encrypted.
http://www.coolstf.com/Voom/12516.htm

I don't know bandwidth for E* but splitting the bandwidth equally would put sho around ~ 10.7 Mbps

So I guess I concede that all 3 DBS providers are giving the mbps for show roughly the same

 

[mike123abc]

Sounds like E* is experimenting with their compression hardware at the uplink. Perhaps they are seeing what it would be like if they added a couple more HD channels on the 110 satellite.

Right now:

1. HDNet/HDMovies share a TP that provides 39.43MBit/sec
2. HBO/TNT-HD and HD-PPV share a TP of 39.43Mbit/sec
3. DHDT/SHO/ESPN-2 share a TP of 39.43

They could put another channel on HDNet/Movies, but it would hurt PQ. Perhaps they could move the error correction from 2/3 to 3/4 or 5/6 to free up some bandwidth (VOOM ran 5/6). Moving from 2/3 at 39.43 to 5/6 (leaving symbol rate the same) would go to 49.29, almost 10Mbit/second more bandwidth!! But of course there would be increased rainfade. But, I would trade some minor rain fade risk for better HD.

They appear to be saving TP 19 for E10 (along with the LIL on CONUS on 110 TPs).

 

[BFG]

TP19 used to have HD on it, but they moved the HD channels on it (sho and hbo) to hold the summer olympics HD feed and interactive. After the olympics were over, it again hosted the election coverage app and the same thing is still sitting on it today...

The theory about testing compression for adding some more HD channels sounds good to me

 

[vurbano]

this conversation is depressing. Without HD PQ there is NO reason why anyone would subscribe to E*unless they have some kind of tree issue.

 

[Dish Roamer]

this conversation is depressing. Without HD PQ there is NO reason why anyone would subscribe to E*unless they have some kind of tree issue.

I agree. I was with D*, went to Voom, then added E* for the RSN's. The reason I went with E* instead of D* again was because they did not down res the HD. I just don't know anymore. I know one thing, after Voom is gone, I'm really going to miss the HD selection I had.

Wayne

 

[Sean Mota]

I asked these questions to the original poster:

Can you explain this a little bit more? First,

1 - are you talking about HDnet Movies and Showtime on E*?
2 - was this a temporary or permanent problem?
3 - What were the actual bitrates at which the recompressing was done?
4 - has the resolution of other 1080i channels been reduced (like HBO, TNT, or HDnet movies)?

These were his answers:

1) HDNet Movies has been re compressing the video pid to around 17Mbps for at least 6 months now. It creates errors - that you may or may not see - depending on size of the errors. In most cases they are small - around 200-1500 Bytes in a frame - and usually 10-18 of them per film. There are many threads on this if you search - including some pictures of what the errors look like. Although 2 weeks ago, HDNET was totally unusable with the errors ever 60 seconds. A typical film will look like this:

MPEG2Repair: Q:\Detroit Rock City_01.ts

Sequence Frame 8910(3-B) / Time 0:04:57 :
VideoError: Invalid frame_motion_type for macroblock. MBA=2396(1856,304)
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=2396(1856,304)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 134 bytes at file offset 720756808

Sequence Frame 44666(8-P) / Time 0:24:50 :
VideoError: Invalid Huffman code in non-intra MPEG2 block. MBA=8157(1872,1072)
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=8157(1872,1072)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 77 bytes at file offset 3612910415

Sequence Frame 55874(5-P) / Time 0:31:04 :
VideoError: MPEG2 Non-intra DCT coefficient index out of bounds. MBA=6667(1072,880)
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=6667(1072,880)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 732 bytes at file offset 4519408111

Sequence Frame 80864(11-P) / Time 0:44:58 :
VideoError: Invalid frame_motion_type for macroblock. MBA=3898(928,512)
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=3898(928,512)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 1383 bytes at file offset 6540644599

Sequence Frame 84313(7-B) / Time 0:46:53 :
VideoError: MPEG2 Intra DCT coefficient index out of bounds. MBA=2073(528,272)
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=2073(528,272)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 649 bytes at file offset 6819558050

Sequence Frame 86465(8-P) / Time 0:48:05 :
VideoError: Invalid frame_motion_type for macroblock. MBA=5204(704,688)
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=5204(704,688)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 1272 bytes at file offset 6993688091

Sequence Frame 88192(10-B) / Time 0:49:02 :
VideoError: Invalid motion vector code. MBA=5795(560,768)
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=5795(560,768)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 930 bytes at file offset 7133378429

Sequence Frame 104129(14-P) / Time 0:57:54 :
VideoError: Invalid macroblock type code. MBA=3725(80,496)
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=3725(80,496)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 1623 bytes at file offset 8422368532

Sequence Frame 110588(11-P) / Time 1:01:30 :
VideoError: MPEG2 Intra DCT coefficient index out of bounds. MBA=7476(576,992)
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=7476(576,992)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 500 bytes at file offset 8944841436

Sequence Frame 120930(12-B) / Time 1:07:14 :
VideoError: Invalid escape code in intra MPEG2 block. MBA=4076(1856,528)
VideoError: No start code at end of slice. MBA=4076(1856,528)
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=4076(1856,528)
VideoError: Missing 5 macroblocks in picture slice(s) at MBA=4075(1840,528).
FileInfo: Last video errors span 17 bytes at file offset 9781342413

Sequence Frame 131714(14-P) / Time 1:13:14 :
VideoError: DMV motion prediction not supported. MBA=3314(1184,432)
VideoError: Motion vector going out of range at MBA=3314(1184,432)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 748 bytes at file offset 10653536827

Sequence Frame 133440(6-B) / Time 1:14:12 :
VideoError: Invalid frame_motion_type for macroblock. MBA=2694(864,352)
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=2694(864,352)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 554 bytes at file offset 10793151935

Sequence Frame 137321(5-P) / Time 1:16:22 :
VideoError: MB Quantizer scale code equal to 0.
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=5909(464,784)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 1530 bytes at file offset 11107095490

Sequence Frame 150678(0-B) / Time 1:23:47 :
VideoError: Invalid frame_motion_type for macroblock. MBA=2271(1776,288)
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=2271(1776,288)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 53 bytes at file offset 12187429632

Sequence Frame 159729(6-B) / Time 1:28:49 :
VideoError: MPEG2 Non-intra DCT coefficient index out of bounds. MBA=2549(464,336)
VideoError: Failed to decode macroblock at MBA=2549(464,336)
FileInfo: Last video errors span 969 bytes at file offset 12919573377

Sequence Frame 170999(10-B) / Time 1:35:05 :

Info: End of sequence: 1920 x 1080, 29.97 fps, 65.00 Mbps.
Info: Found 170999 video frames since start of sequence.
Info: 15 video frames found with errors.
Info: 0 audio frames found with errors.
Info: 11166 corrupted video bytes in file.
Info: 0.000000 seconds of video timestamp gaps.
Info: 0.000000 seconds of audio timestamp gaps.

End of Log


Showtime went south about 6 weeks ago - though usually they play with it during the week and normally put it back on the weekend. However, they are clearly playing with it for some purpose. I noted this on this forum 6 weeks ago when they started playing with the max data rates. The errors on Showtime are MUCH worse than HDNET - causing 2-30 gaps in the movies - even with the E* 921.

2) 6 months on HDNET (except for 1 day early last week - go figure) and 6 weeks on Showtime. How do you define permanent?

3) 17Mbps on the video PID for HDNet - but who knows what is actually underneath that. That is the most confusing of all of them - as most movies aren't going to hit 17Mbps in the video PID, it seems crazy to do this and introduce compression errors. An interesting side to the HDNET compression, I have up-wards of 6 caps of the same film - all with a different number of frames - and I mean vastly different. And I see it all the time. To me this means there are other things they are doing behind the scenes.

4) E* plays with their bandwidth all the time. It is not uncommon to see different bitrates during different times of the day on the same movies. I have even seen a 4Mbps difference on a PPV in a single day. 6am to Noon were usually best times for bitrate. As for resolution, HBO, Showtime and HDNET Movies are still at 1920x1080i - for now. I have not bothered to check the others.

 

[mike123abc]

It is also possible that they could be trying out different hardware from different manufacturers, or testing new boxes. There probably is not a large market for these types of compression/multiplexing boxes. Echostar could be beta testing a box and the changes that are being seen in the stream are new software/hardware versions.

 

[Walter L.]

Great, 1st D* goes HDLite, then VOOM goes dark and now E* follows D*. I guess I'm gonna go Comcast for a while.

 

[DarrellP]

I have the email of the Dish compression tech, I will let him know if things deteriorate. I haven't watched TV in several days, so I have no clue what's going on right now.