Need Help! Poor HD picture quality on VIP 222

Sir, you are both outgunned and outclassed. :D

To those with open minds, I recommend the following taken from the federal government website here:
In other words, there is no easy way to prove much of anything about DTV, even if you do have the specialized equipment recommended above.

Edit: Almost forgot this amusing comment. The last time I checked, H.264 is MPEG-4 part 10.

oops. respomdend to the wrong post of yours, but anyway...

try disney hd. that will make you irate no matter what tv/ configuration you have.

rush? well, its been a bit since i used that as a 'showcase channel' it was on 129 for sure, and looked far better than all other hd programming ive seen.
ill look for it tommorrow.

so signal quality eh?
your saying that, if the signal is 20 percent lower YOU can notice a picture difference, or are you saying that anything in the system (switch, cable, etc can cause a degraded picture without signal loss or pixelation?)

anyway i was i making sure the OP had receiver set to 1080i (not some setting on the tv)
and hopefully he's not judging the quality by watching dinsey hd or something.
ive seen that channel on cable, dish and direct, its awful.
 
your saying that, if the signal is 20 percent lower YOU can notice a picture difference, or are you saying that anything in the system (switch, cable, etc can cause a degraded picture without signal loss or pixelation?)

anyway i was i making sure the OP had receiver set to 1080i (not some setting on the tv) and hopefully he's not judging the quality by watching dinsey hd or something. ive seen that channel on cable, dish and direct, its awful.

Yes, good point on the receiver setting to 1080i. Takes some of the variability out of the equation. I think we've all seen HDTVs, even sets that are good on HD programs, do a terrible job of upconversion. (My cheap Sylvania 32" comes to mind.)

I claim Rush is a Rainbow Media channel broadcast overseas and fomerly part of the Voom package no longer on Dish. I don't think you'll find Rush on the air or cable or satellite anywhere in America, and certainly not on Dish network. Since I didn't upgrade to HD before Voom was gone, I can only imagine the quality. But I hear it was quite good. ;) I'll have another look at Disney HD (looking for crappy SD upconverts?) but I don't recall the HD programs in the morning looking bad at all.

People talk about the "cliff effect" and digital being all or nothing, but in fact it is not. I am not saying "20% loss" at all; interesting error compensation techniques are employed when we get a signal, but the bit error rate is higher than the rate at which the errors can be corrected completely. All the good/bad picture degradation happens in a relatively small range of signal strength I think... But any component could cause this, and the signal stength could actually be too high (such as with my channel 24 which is 2.5 miles away). Anything that causes the BER to go up in the range where compensation is possible can cause visible degradation in PQ short of freezing all (or part of) the picture.

Now if I'm looking at a particular degraded digital picture, I don't necessarily know if it's error compensation I'm seeing, or the operation of a statistical multiplexer, or overcompression, or a crappy conversion, or an awful source to begin with. Several of these problems can produce the same effect. But, based on my knowledge of what each step in the process does, and while watching my error rate meter (they raraely show signal strength these days), my best guess is that sometimes I'm seeing error compensation part of the time, and not the other causes. But I also didn't give up and accept crappy PQ, or ignore the "signal strength" mete, as others in this thread have suggested. I kept at it, peaking my dish, changing components, and in particular for OTA broadcasts, fiddling with my antenna position and orientation and amplification for many hours over the course of a couple of months, until I have good "signal strength" on all channels we want. And I almost never see these effects. Had a big thunderstorm go through last night and I was quite amazed at how well the picture from Dish stayed perfect.
 
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dont know much about ota. i do notice that some dish hd channels always look great, no matter the signal, and some always look bad.
history, discover, hbo, max, sho, these always look good.
disney hd, tnt, and some others LOOK hd, but there are pixels visible, blocky picture if you know what i mean. the face will look nice, but the body looks like a picture taken then blown up. or whatever.
our locals look much better off the antenna than they do off 61.5. its a shame, and people notice.
 
dont know much about ota. i do notice that some dish hd channels always look great, no matter the signal, and some always look bad.
history, discover, hbo, max, sho, these always look good.
disney hd, tnt, and some others LOOK hd, but there are pixels visible, blocky picture if you know what i mean. the face will look nice, but the body looks like a picture taken then blown up. or whatever.
our locals look much better off the antenna than they do off 61.5. its a shame, and people notice.

Over compression by Dish to save space. When AAD started offering DNS, the feeds were so compressed they looked about like a .jpg photo compressed down to 10%. OTA? I Have 2 friends in Memphis that swear the locals OTA look better than what DirecTV gives them. They switch to attic antennas for network sports.
(I mention D*, because i am the lst person in my circle of friends still with DISH)

OP:
Try to set the output of your VIP222 to 720P instead of 1080i. See if that makes a difference since your Toshiba will only have to upscale/convert a "P" to a "P" instead of an "i" to a "P". See if you can find a review in Home Theater, Sound and Vision or other sources. See how they rate the processor used in your model or series. (different series usually use different vidio processors). If the VIP222 can be set to "native output" try that also. (I don't have a VIP222 so I don't know) Then your Toshiba will tell you what it is being fed off each channel, 480i, 720P, 1080i.
I can't speak for DISH HD, but most OTA stations are only 720P on their HD feeds. NBC and CBS are 1080i.
Just my 2 cents worth.
John
 
And most important of all: ignore HighDefJeff when he talks about digital signals and HD Quality. His conspiracy theories have been disproved again and again and again, and yet he continues to spout the same gibberish. (Not so fast...)

If he talks about grounding, LOS or anything other than picture quality, he's almost always right and I would quote him any day (and love his graphic showing where the signals actually come from on an offset dish).
Thank you for the very kind compliment!
So, if that is the case,
then let me ask you this...
If what I say otherwise is good information, then why would I jeapordize that good information with what you say, is a lie (and a really big crazy lie?)

To get people to the website? How stupid and shortsighted would that be?

The Lord is my provision, not the website. The website offers free information that many people use and benefit. I do not ask for money or donations from anyone.

I tell it so that the truth be known and more people get to see good HDTV!

It doesn't take much digging to see who I am; that I abhor lying, and seek justice and truth in all things. Here are links to myspace and youtube:

Warrior Of the Word (Jeffrey Johnston) | MySpace
YouTube - warrioroftheword7's Channel

It's a digital signal so it's either there in it's full pristine quality, or it's going to pixelate horribly and be gone.

And I'm working up a new graphic I hope you'll like...
 
Yes, good point on the receiver setting to 1080i. Takes some of the variability out of the equation. I think we've all seen HDTVs, even sets that are good on HD programs, do a terrible job of upconversion. (My cheap Sylvania 32" comes to mind.)

I claim Rush is a Rainbow Media channel broadcast overseas and fomerly part of the Voom package no longer on Dish. I don't think you'll find Rush on the air or cable or satellite anywhere in America, and certainly not on Dish network. Since I didn't upgrade to HD before Voom was gone, I can only imagine the quality. But I hear it was quite good. ;) I'll have another look at Disney HD (looking for crappy SD upconverts?) but I don't recall the HD programs in the morning looking bad at all.

People talk about the "cliff effect" and digital being all or nothing, but in fact it is not. (You are correct! The "cliff effect" describes a very small portion of the graph of the BER curve. The digital cliff is actually in the form of a "waterfall". I am currently changing orientation and marking up one of these BER graphs to show where we all stand...http://www.aero.org/publications/crosslink/winter2002/images/04_side1_02.gif
I am not saying "20% loss" at all; interesting error compensation techniques are employed when we get a signal, but the bit error rate is higher than the rate at which the errors can be corrected completely. All the good/bad picture degradation happens in a relatively small range of signal strength I think...(Right again! Small increases in signal strength create large reductions in BER. The reverse is also true, meaning that small decreases in signal strength make large increases in BER.) But any component could cause this, and the signal stength could actually be too high (such as with my channel 24 which is 2.5 miles away). (That counts only for OTA. With the current "standard" satellite equipment, you will never achieve near the amount of signal for linearity(pixelation/signal loss) to occur.) Anything that causes the BER to go up in the range where compensation is possible can cause visible degradation in PQ short of freezing all (or part of) the picture. (Right again. Since 2006, I have studied, researched, and observed low signal digital television. Daily, I have watched marginal signal in my home. I even took the amplifier back off my Dad's antenna (they're always on Dish) so that I could watch the effects of marginal signal on his HDTV's when I visit. Guess what...there are more artifacts with digital than with analog!

CAN CAUSE
is subject to two criteria.
1. The viewer's perception.
You first have to have eyes to see. If you haven't ever regarded the differing picture qualities between sets/systems, or you aren't searching for better quality, then you probably wouldn't even see it.
2. What part of the information is getting corrupted or lost? (I'm talking OTA, for now...)
A. You could see nothing at all wrong with the picture. (But if you turned on the closed captioning, you might see jumbled and mispelled words.) Closed captioning information corrupted.
B. If you left your HDTV on Auto format (as my Dad will attest) your picture can "scale" in size on your TV. Meaning the TV picture will go from say, full screen to postage stamp, during a program or commercial, and the format won't change it. (Satellite receivers do not use Spatial scaling, but I believe most, if not all, TV's and converter boxes do use spatial scaling.)
C. You could have lip sync problems. Timing information corrupted.
D. You could see a lower resolution picture. Video packets corrupted.
E. The brightness of the picture may vary.
It depends on what information gets corrupted or lost and how much gets corrupted, as to the resulting picture quality or plain old system performance.

Now if I'm looking at a particular degraded digital picture, I don't necessarily know if it's error compensation I'm seeing, or the operation of a statistical multiplexer, or overcompression, or a crappy conversion, or an awful source to begin with. Several of these problems can produce the same effect.(Yes) But, based on my knowledge of what each step in the process does, and while watching my error rate meter (they raraely show signal strength these days), my best guess is that sometimes I'm seeing error compensation part of the time, and not the other causes. But I also didn't give up and accept crappy PQ, or ignore the "signal strength" mete, as others in this thread have suggested. (Found the truth!) I kept at it, peaking my dish, changing components, and in particular for OTA broadcasts, fiddling with my antenna position and orientation and amplification for many hours over the course of a couple of months, until I have good "signal strength" on all channels we want. And I almost never see these effects. (BINGO!) Had a big thunderstorm go through last night and I was quite amazed at how well the picture from Dish stayed perfect.
(That's right! I'd like to get a record of your signal strengths to compile with a couple other systems.)
 

chicago on 61.5

vip622 not displaying in HD via HDMI

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