Master Feed vs. Dish Network Shootout
- Thread starter pendragon
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Sat radio to me would be like dish network re-uplinking directv adding more compression. The master signals are already crap and then you make them crappier
Personally, I like sat radio, although I only use it for listening to the audio of NFL games from my home town.
However, the above mention of DN re-uplinking DTV reminded me of an experiment I did once with my old SA TIVO.
At the input to the TIVO's A/V input I had an A/V switch one input of the switch came from my sat receiver. Another input of the switch came from the Output of the TIVO, which I had "Y"'d so that I could also view it on TV.
The A/D and D/A conversions of the TIVO introduced a few second delay of the video going through it, so if you flipped the switch from SAT to TIVO-out, you'd continue to see the sat TV video for a few seconds, then you'd see that 3 or 4 seconds of video repeat, then repeat again, over and over.
Each time the little video clip went through the TIVO, it was processed again. I did the experiment just because I was curious about how many times it would go through the A/D---D/A processing before the video quality gets really bad. I thought that would be a good measure of just how much quality was lost in the compression in each pass.
This was probably around 10 years ago, so my memory is foggy, but I there were 3 numbers I kind of remember, one around one around 5-6, one around 10-12, and one around 20. I think what happened was that for the first half dozen or so passes through the TIVO, the video was acceptable (as acceptable as SD TIVO video can be). Ie at first you didn't notice any difference, but the quality slowly degraded, but was pretty much OK for a half dozen passes. Then from around 6 thru 12, the degradation sped up, and it was really pretty terrible by 12 passes through the TIVO. By the time you got to 20 passes, you couldn't even recognize anything in the video, it might as well have been a bunch of multi-colored paint thrown on the screen.
It was really pretty neat. If you have an old stand-alone TIVO, it's worth the effort to hook it up to a switch and try it. I was actually expecting the quality to get bad faster than it did, and was actually impressed by how well it worked.
That's a neat experiment. I have Sirius radio on my bike and In my truck. I lime it but it sounds like crap.
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