OTA PQ much better than Dish.

[GaryPen]

I have always known that the PQ was better OTA than satellite and cable. But, I didn't realize just how much until tonight when comparing the Stanley Cup game on NBC (KNTV 11) between the OTA and Sat tuners on my Hopper.

Not only is the image sharper and clearer, the color is deeper and more vivid. It is blatant, not a subtle difference.

I wonder if the difference is as noticeable on DirecTV, or in other cities where the local NBC station may not be as good as KNTV.

 

[primetimeguy]

I'm with you. For your typical TV sitcoms and dramas you don't notice it quite as much but it is very evident with sports. In our house any network programming for me uses the OTA tuner, the sat tuners are fine for the wife and kids.

 

[navychop]

Depends upon where you are. Here in northern VA, OTA PQ at times is noticeably better, but the sat signal does not have the weather dropouts, so I tend to record sat vice OTA. Sometimes I record both and compare.





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[Mr Tony]

yup noticed it when I was in Minneapolis. Plus Dish nor Directv carried 2 stations in HD that were in HD

 

[mike123abc]

When Dish/DIRECTV recompress a signal it will degrade, even if they use a ton of bandwidth.

Here is an interesting article on youtube's recompression and what happens when you upload a video, then download it back from youtube 100+ times: http://mashable.com/2010/06/03/youtube-i-am-sitting/

 

[GaryPen]

When Dish/DIRECTV recompress a signal it will degrade, even if they use a ton of bandwidth.

Did you mean "bitrate", not "bandwidth"? If they had a ton of bandwidth, there would be less need to compress.

 

[primetimeguy]

Bitrate and bandwidth really mean the same thing... Amount of throughput. If they allotted more bandwidth for each channel, ie higher bitrate, the picture would be better.

That being said, I've captured mpeg2 ota recordings as mpeg4 on my pc and at the bandwidth settings I used I cannot see the difference. At least not like the difference I see with Dish. But yes, in theory any time you recompress a lossy source you degrade the picture somewhat.

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