Ah, if this is true, then I'm confused. Anything that I watch through my 722 receiver/DVR is first recorded, and then what I'm viewing is from that recording (this is how it can be paused, rewound, etc). So doesn't it stand to reason that everything I view through the 722 is compressed with mpg4? What am I missing?
OK- the nature of a digital signal is that EVERYTHING is compressed in that signal. Just a matter of degree. OTA uses MPEG-2, never MPEG-4, as it's not part of the spec which was drawn up for ATSC (done before there was MPEG-4). Satcos and even cablecos can move faster than the government and hence, MPEG-4 is coming into use. MPEG-4 allows greater compression (less bandwidth) for equivalent PQ. Or higher PQ for the same bandwidth taken up by an MPEG-2 signal. Your DVR records the signal exactly as sent. There is no MPEG-4 (or other) encoder built into it. The exact satellite stream is recorded, the exact OTA signal is recorded. No further compression. If your direct connection to your TV looks better than when you run the signal thru the DVR, then your TV has a better tuner (decoder) than your DVR. Or you have connections issues.
There is no question that the picture with the antenna lead directly into the TV is superior. It is *frighteningly* good. As good or better than any BluRay disk I've seen.
See the last two sentences in my reply above. It seems to be almost a secret, but properly done OTA is the highest quality PQ you are likely to see. Blu-ray could match it, with very high bit rates, etc, but satellite and cable are unlikely to, Dish's current 1080p claims notwithstanding. Heck, I keep reading here where some people think getting a free TV signal over the air must be illegal!
Great, thanks. Hadn't heard of TR-50, nor do I know what brand! I'll go Google it up. No fee? There's got to be a catch!
Well, I do expect they will have some "coin of the realm" requirement before they hand it over to you. They can provide an EPG in at least two ways. One, is to build it from the PSIP stream that each digital station transmits, like the DTVPal does. The drawback to this is that many stations transmit little or no information, or even wrong or improperly formatted information. This will eventually be self correcting, but may take years. But for many programs, the title is about the most you can hope for, with little or no information about the episode. We're spoiled.
The second way is to provide something like TVGOS. TV Guide On Screen. Many recording devices have provided this info, this full EPG info, for years. They paid TVG a fee for each device using the info. The TVGOS info was sent out mostly by local analog PBS stations. As analog goes away (soon, really soon), TVGOS needs to be transmitted digitally. This is mostly done over local CBS affiliates. The digital version of TVGOS is not formatted the same as the analog version. Whole new system, and it hasn't rolled out completely yet. Nor, dare I say, have they worked out all the bugs yet.
PSIP is free. TVGOS costs the device provider (Echostar for the TR-50) an up front fee. Both are free to the user, except, of course, the TVGOS equipped version will be more expensive, to cover that up front fee. I hope for the TR-50 to use TVGOS, even if it is still imperfect. As a DVR device, I suspect they will go that route, if they have confidence in it's working properly, more or less, and being fairly widely available.
