Original Hopper On Demand Picture Quality

[bellevuecoug]

Ok, so just looking through some old threads and I have found that the annoying 'blinks' between HD and SD were not unique to just our Hopper ~

https://support.dish.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=6466

It APPEARS that the early June software update resolved this to the point where it no longer 'blinks' between high and low quality, but is in really poor quality all the time (SD). This is not a real fix, but perhaps it is one in DISH's view.

The On Demand also now forces a download of the entire movie prior to allowing the viewer to start watching. This is a change . . . and I had read somewhere that letting the entire movie download would help with the blinking problem so perhaps DISH has required a complete download on certain Hoppers (?).

It is tough to get feedback on this issue because (1) not all Hoppers are affected by this and I get a lot of the "what are you talking about?" responses . . . and (2) DISH CSRs are not helpful as we are sort of "in the weeds" on an engineering problem. (Us customers are, of course, not allowed to talk directly with engineering - can you imagine if we could? LOL)

Definitely not a HWS problem, but an original Hopper problem. And seemingly not all orginal Hoppers. Our ISP is not great, but is supposed to be 5 Mbps (and DISH recommends just 2 Mbps for On Demand viewing).

Sooooooooooo, is ANYONE out there seeing this same issue? Or do I push on DISH for a hardware exchange?

 

[KAB]

Definitely not a HWS problem, but an original Hopper problem. And seemingly not all orginal Hoppers. Our ISP is not great, but is supposed to be 5 Mbps (and DISH recommends just 2 Mbps for On Demand viewing).

Sooooooooooo, is ANYONE out there seeing this same issue? Or do I push on DISH for a hardware exchange?

You've got to remember those rated speeds are MAX, and are rarely steadily delivered. Any other pull from within the household can produce a bottleneck. I remember one thread where someone explained a similar problem to yours. Then he later revealed much of the time, his kids were playing on-line video games.

 

[Jim S.]

Did they ever fix the problem where, if you have a slow internet connection, even if you tell it to download the whole movie before watching it, it still downloads an SD version even if it's supposed to be HD? (Again, I think this was only reported by certain people, others said it worked fine. What the hell, Dish?)

 

[bellevuecoug]

Did they ever fix the problem where, if you have a slow internet connection, even if you tell it to download the whole movie before watching it, it still downloads an SD version even if it's supposed to be HD? (Again, I think this was only reported by certain people, others said it worked fine. What the hell, Dish?)

This sounds like the same issue. It seems like it would be pretty simple software - no matter how slo the Internet service is, down load the HD version - not SD, not an SD/HD switch back-and-forth, just HD.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Yup thats called Adaptive Streaming

 

[horseshoe]

I have both the HWS and original hopper neither one requires me download the whole thing before viewing. I have watched several movies in the last several days and started watching right away. The only thing you can't do is fast forward very far ahead until it has been recording for a while. The quality has been very good with no dropping back to SD. I have 50 mb plus download speeds so that may be helping.
Several months ago when I still had 3 MB dsl, it would take a couple of hours to download and the quality varied greatly. (usually bad)
I'm not sure if the improvement is due to a change in software of my increase in speed.

 

[Jim S.]

Several months ago when I still had 3 MB dsl, it would take a couple of hours to download and the quality varied greatly. (usually bad)

That's my point! If I say "Watch Later" instead of "Watch Now", it should download the thing in HD quality, not VHS quality! I don't care that my DSL connection is nominally 3MB, more like 2MB on a good day, that's why I'm downloading it instead of watching live! I haven't used VOD too much because of my poor connection, but I've NEVER seen anything that was actual HD quality. Even to get it up to Dish's normal overcompressed HD standards requires that the program not have a lot of movement.