Sorry to say but I won't be Vooming anymore! (Edit: Totally Back)

[vurbano]

Jmschusta,

Make sure you get the antenna pointed correctly. I was amazed at HD and SD OTA. I will NEVER give it up. You will then see what real SD and HD can look like. Frankly, no broadcast can compare to CBS 1080i if your affiliate is transmitting full bandwidth with no sub channels robbing the bandwidth. If so it will be the reference you can measure all other channels against. In my opinion the entire SD and HD TV viewing world needs to be introduced to the world of digital antennas. It will do nothing less than create pressure on all providers (sat or cable) to meet that standard of quality. Ever wonder why your cable box doesnt have a digital OTA tuner? even if your cable comany cant give you most of your digital locals? maybe it is because they really dont want their viewers to realize that the first 100 channels they are getting are analog? like here with cox cable!!! lol

 

[Mr. Biggles]

Sopranos and Deadwood picture quality as far as I'm concerned was absolutely excellent. I saw one micro-stutter in two hours of viewing, not a single audio-dropout, no compression artifacts and no pixelation.

If they can do that to all the HD channels 24/7 I'll be as happy as a Pig in sh*t.

Edit: Pardon my French.

 

[tattootearz]

GUYS....

Please help me to understand this... I am not a trouble maker and this comment is not to cause any issues.

Sean your one helluva moderator and my hat goes off to you. I've been coming to this site just for the VOOM discussion now for about 3 weeks. I have been a paying member at www.hometheaterspot.com for about 3 yrs now... I come here because our VOOM discussion area is not as developed yet.

Please someone help me to see the difference between SEAN canceling his VOOM service and lets say some Joe Schmoe guy cancelling?

I mean, arent they both CUSTOMERS? I have seen at minimum 7 threads within the past few weeks concerning the cancellation of VOOM service and NONE of them have garnered this type of support. I understand that Sean moderates here but truthfully... he does spend green money like everyone else. VOOM should be encouraged to make ALL customers a priority.

I dont wanna call you all a bunch of kiss asses or anything... but if ANYONE wants to cancel VOOM for reasons like Sean, me and so many others have mentioned.... VOOM should be compelled to take NOTICE! All of us in our own right have some degree of influence in terms of spreading the word about a company.... and VOOM should be made aware of that.

 

[oddwunn]

I watched The New Guy tonight and the PQ was excellent once again. My question is, though, are they playing the compression shell game or are they fixing a problem? Once again, some communication from Voom would go a long way.

Hey, it's Easter Sunday...Let's cut them some slack, shall we?

 

[squicken]

TTZ. All customers aren't the same. Sean has been here since the company started. If he stuck with V* till now, you know things must be going bad. I have agreed with your posts. In fact, you and GeneWildersHair have been really on this subject more than anyone, and I'm glad your both active forum members. I think this week's going to be important for we Voomers on this forum. This is becoming a revolt, and I think a lot of us will be upset if V* doesn't at least tell us what the problem is. But no one has satisfied me that there is a clearly superior HD content supplier right now, so I'll probably give them some time to work it out.

 

[digideal]

I didn't think I had experience much of a PQ difference recently until today. Watching the Masters OTA in HD was just about the most amazing sporting event I have seen. I switched over to Rave and it was good, but not like the OTA. The exclusives are neat for showing off or if you have a school that is studying fashion or pottery...but really are services that should be free for a service like this.

I agree that we are early adopters, but if we are now paying about $100 a month for all channels plus equipment, we shouldn't be experiencing a PQ outage on the one, sole reason we are all Voomers--the HD Content. Sean, you are right...why put up with this when D* has as many stations? The answer is that V* is comitted to more HD while the others are servicing a much broader market. For someone who has spent the tens of thousands of dollars for the equipment, I am sure you can appreciate the addition Voom has made (and appreciate the frustrations). They are growing and will only get better...we have to keep that in mind.

Consider buying a new car. Millions of dollars are spent on the design of the car and prototypes are created to test what the market might want out of that purchase. but, when they leave out the cup holders of the final shipment and buyers complain enough, they will create a cup holder for you to put in there. It has happened to me with two cars bought in the past 10 years. I always get something else AFTER the purchase with our without my complaints. Voom is creating their own priority lists and is responding to things when they can get to them.

To quote Scarlet Ohara, "Tomorrow is another day".

 

[GeneWildershair]

I watched The New Guy tonight and the PQ was excellent once again. My question is, though, are they playing the compression shell game or are they fixing a problem? Once again, some communication from Voom would go a long way.

Hey, it's Easter Sunday...Let's cut them some slack, shall we?

I also watched "the new guy" and wasn't very impressed at all. With quick movements there were pixelation issues. When cheerleaders were flipping, and doing cart wheels and stuff, it got ugly! Also the picture looked a little soft to me, when compared to HBO, or showtime HD on D*. Sure I know it was different material playing, but it just doesn't have that 3-d pop effect like D* has on the VOOM Premium channels. I have to say I didn't notice the micro stutters that much during the movie though. Maybe 1 about every 15 minutes or so. I'd have to say that is at least an improvement for the micro stutters.

 

[1080iBeVuMin]

Wow! I am glad I never did sign up. I am still leery of install issues, and now this leaves me cold. I'll stay on the sidelines.

 

[txdude]

As I noted in another thread:

With all due respect, I feel that some members here are being a tad dramatic about the problems that they are having, either that or their equipment is not functioning properly. It doesn't make sense to me as to why there would be such a huge difference between what I'm seeing and what they are seeing unless that is the case. Granted I don't watch TV 24/7 or scan all channels for glitches every hour, so maybe there are problems that I'm missing. In any case, I strongly urge potential Voom subscribers to test the service out for themselves first before they let someone else decide for them. Of course it is up to the individual, no sense in paying for a product that you are not happy with. I'm just pointing out that not all of us Voomers are having these problems. I'm quite content with the service that I'm getting from Voom at the moment

 

[compson]

I wonder if the disparity in experience is due either to the output or the age of the tuner, combined with the software updates of last week. I'm watching through component cables and haven't noticed any problem in the last week. My tuner was just replaced a week ago (part of the switching out of the early tuners.) Just wondering if the people with problems are watching through DVI or older tuners.

 

[LOBO2999]

I e-mailed voom (calling didnt seem to help )about the issues of the PQ and wanted to know what was going on and this is the response i got.

Response 04/11/2004 11:14 PM
Thank you for contacting VOOM.
The problem you are experiencing could be a number of things and is difficult to address via email. In order to better assist you please give us a call at 1-800-GET-VOOM once again thank you for contacting VOOM - HDTV Delivered!
Jerimiah D. Weekly
VOOM Customer Care
customersupport@voom.com
1-800-438-VOOM

 

[txdude]

how many of you people that are having trouble are using DVI?

 

[rad]

There must be trouble in paradies when Sean jumps ship. I was always thinking about giving Voom a shot, since my old E* Dish 300 is just sitting there looking at 61.5, but I always wondered how they were going to do all the content that they said they would with only 13 transponders. Maybe when they upgrade to MPEG 4 they can shoehorn all this in but it didn't make sense with the current state of things. Maybe someone in the executive suite will get the word that their loyal supports are leaving and wake up and do something about it.

 

[Lucky]

Will you guys all calm down, because VOOM had one bad week. Give these guys a chance to fix the problem. Wilt just posted this in the yahoo group :

I'm/we're taking all the complaints seriously and are testing and checking everything. I've said little because there's no much data at the moment.
Wilt

http://tv.groups.yahoo.com/group/VOOM/message/8441

They have one bad week with some problems, and you are all ready to jump ship already ? Talk about lack of patience.

 

[ddeloach1228]

My advice is to hang in there. Wilt has indicated he is collecting data at this time to get a handle on the problem. He also encourages users to call in and outline their problems.

 

[vurbano]

Everyone should go to grandmas house and watch a couple hours of standard cable. Then come home and take another look? I saw some degredation early sunday evening, then the picture looked pretty good on HBO from 8-11pm. Im not ready to join the hysteria just yet. I never saw "micro stuttering", I saw isolated drop outs, isloated instances of pixelation, but I saw more of that on Directv. Thats why I came here!!!!!!!!!!!!! That and the measely offerings and the future plans to waste the new 7s on more local in local. D* says :"we are gonna double HD?" OK, 6x2=12. Adding starz HD and other pay paks along with Fox pretty much does it. Big deal. Sorry but I get all of that now.

What will Mpeg4 do for voom? Is any other reciever even capable of using that compression scheme? But the reciever is junk? I think it will enable voom to add some channels a ton of them or add a lesser amount of channels and turn the bandwidth back up. I think I will wait and see. No provider except your local OTA providers uses no compression. It is simply a matter of finding the right balance. And I think that is what voom is going through.

My guess is even if I went back to D*, id tire of going through the 6 channels in a couple of months , time enough to get tired of the reruns on discoveryhd and the insulting stretch and upconvert of espnhd.

Someone please prove to me that D* has reduced the amount of compression that they were using a month ago!! Not these constant statements that life is fine in D* land. Ive had life in D* land and all is not rosy. Infact they recently moved HD channels around and some have been having problems with it on AVS forum.

 

[rudolpht]

I would say, if HD is a priority - even with PQ issues which are hopefully temporary - Voom is still it for DBS, with home networking it will be untouchable. The real competitor is cable, and the offerings are improving there, which is the only reason I'll be leaving Voom if the install/reinstall policy is in place.

 

[Sean Mota]

When tattootearz and Jay were reporting the PQ problems, I saw the same thing that they were seeing at one point or another. The fact is that these problems (stutter, pixelation, macro-blocking) have been there since Bravo-HD+ was added. Bravo-HD+ along with other channels were added on 3/4/04. Right after, some of us saw these problems, they were posted here and at Yahoo. Wilt responded that it was due to the encoder/decoder replacement or maintenance (do not know exactly what is being done). I bought into this explanation as well. Now a month later and still the same problems are there and yet one more has become evident -- softness in the picture. The 3-D effect is gone from the picture. I tried yesterday to go through every channel to see why and compare HBO & Show & DHDT on E* to V*. The softness was there. For the first time (and you can read all my previous post), I could not find that the V* picture was equal or better.

Now, another posted mention that these problems are not apparent on TV screens less than 42". You need to have a monito or TV screen greater than 50" to see these problems. As tattootearz and Jay had mentioned look for fast action movement and you will notice some of the problems.

Now as to Sopranos and Deadwood yesterday was acceptable. There were a couple of moments of macro-blocking and some stutter but as Mr. Biggles said I also can live with these since it was not much.

I want to share with you another post that did a more technical review of the PQ degradation. This one comes from avsforum and was posted by Bob Sorel. If you look at Bob's post he is a no non-sense guy who would not post without enough evidence of what he is seeing:

AVSforum link to post

I've been studying the HD picture quality problems for most of the night tonight and have come to the conclusion that we are seeing the results of too much compression. I can see MPEG2 artifacts on just about every HD channel. It's just that some material is more revealing than others, so you have to know what to look for and what the artifacts look like. You also have to know how to spot imperfections in the source material and know the difference between source imperfections and encoding errors and compression artifacts.

For HD video (as opposed to film) material, the Voom picture is very very soft (loss of resolution), with slightly washed out colors (loss of color space information) - artifacts of over compression. Complex textures seem to "crawl" and I even spotted macro blocking and aliasing errors - all typical MPEG2 artifacts. When I saw Analyze That tonight, I threw on the DVD and synced it up to the movie the best I could, and my DVD actually looked just as good than the HD signal. My DVD of Star Wars looked considerably better than the HD version shown on HBO tonight.

I have a 9" CRT projector projected onto a 100" x 56" screen, and is one of only two CRT projectors made that can fully resolve 1080p (yes, 1080p, not 1080i), so my gear is well up to the task and is extremely unforgiving of poor source material.

When I first got Voom on Monday, the PQ looked almost as good as the 1080p Windows Media Video 9 files that I have played back on my system, and to this day WMV9 running at 1080p produces the finest image I have seen anywhere...period. Since about Wednesday or Thursday (I didn't take note of the actual time, as I wasn't expecting a problem), the PQ has gone down to that of an average DVD, and I am not even considering the pixelization, frame drops, and stuttering problems. Had I not seen what Voom was capable of outputting, I would have canceled my account based on the current picture quality.

Just as a check on my sanity, I tried the same tests on my little InFocus X1 (my bedroom projector), and the results were the same. I also asked a few of my video trained friends over, and without telling them anything, showed them the Voom HD channels tonight....they were not impressed in the least.

I truly hope that Voom has merely got a problem that needs repairing and that this is not going to be the status quo from now on. They have chosen to enter a market where their early adopters are bound to be a very picky bunch, and handing them anything less than the best PQ possible will just serve to kill any chances of this service taking off. I mean, what good is the motto "HDTV delivered" if the signal is not up to HD standards? Voom has demonstrated that they certainly have the capability to deliver the goods - now the question remains "Will they?"

 

[vurbano]

I would say, if HD is a priority - even with PQ issues which are hopefully temporary - Voom is still it for DBS, with home networking it will be untouchable. The real competitor is cable, and the offerings are improving there, which is the only reason I'll be leaving Voom if the install/reinstall policy is in place.

Hd is my prority. I do believe it is the reason I bought a big widescreen.

 

[Sean Mota]

Here's another post by Bob Sorel responding to Ken Ross questions:

AVSforum post link

Hi Ken

No, I didn't do any direct comparisons between the same channels on D* and V*, as they require the use of the same audio/video chain. My observations are based on the incredible PQ I got the first couple of days on Voom. I was in complete awe of the signal quality, as I considered it quite a bit better than anything I had previously seen from D*, and just about equal in quality to the 1080p signals I have viewed using WMV 9. I know my method lacks any scientific approach, so please take my observations with a grain of salt.



quote:
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How does the HD News look to you? The studio shots seem very very sharp with excellent detail.
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It still looks very good, but not as good as the first couple of days. MPEG compression, when pushed up slowly, will be barely noticable if viewed day after day. Most people will just think to themselves that the initial "wow" factor is wearing off. Also higher compression affects different qualities of source material in different ways. Really good video based source material, like HD News, will handle the extra compression without looking too bad, while a 30 year old film based source (which is probably grainy to begin with) will show the artifacts much more readily.

Here is a quote from another Voom user:


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One easy way to spot the artifacts of over compression in MPEG2 is to watch a sports feed. Look at the field. These artifacts are clearly visible in DirecTV local broadcasts of NFL or any other field sports.

Even when there is no action on the field the grass crawls, or blocks. You end up with something that looks like a shifting quilt of unusually large patches of grass. Add fast movement and the blocking gets worse.

When I first got VOOM I REALLY enjoyed soccer on WorldSports because this artifact was not there. Now you can see it in almost every game. Not nearly as bad as D* locals but definitely noticeable.

Another example is anything lit with strobes. You really need full bandwidth and good encoders to avoid artifacts with strobes. The Grammies (sp?) on CBS OTA and the Britney Concert are perfect examples of this problem. The more the information changes from one frame to the next the more bandwidth is needed. As one can imagine pretty much the entire screen changes during each frame with strobe lighting.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



And I agree with him 100%. What I am concerned about is the over compression. A lot of people with smaller or lower resolution displays may not notice the difference in quality loss as the compression gets higher, but if tolerated, then Voom might continue to increase the compression for as long as they can get away with it. If you want to see the results of horrendous compression, just take a look at any of the D* locals (satellite, not OTA) - they are barely even watchable IMHO.

Like I said, I fully support Voom's efforts to deliver HDTV, but the increased use of compression will simply negate any good that they have done. My hopes and dreams are that the lowered PQ is just a problem with the equipment (encoding) and needs to be repaired, and that they are not trying to sneak (actually it's more like being clobbered over the head) up the compression on us. I can put up with all of the other bugs in the system - the poor program guide, the mapped OTA stations (as opposed to scanned stations), and the occasional lockups. I know they are growing and are expected to have growing pains. The one thing I won't tolerate for any length of time is the lowered PQ - I bought high definition television and that is exactly what I expect to get.