Why is PQ on MPEG2 HBO (70) better than MPEG4 HBO (501) at the moment?

[VeniceDre]

I'm watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall on CH 501 and the PQ looks like noticeably soft and macroblocky, switching over to the Mpeg2 version on CH 70 the and the picture is much better. I've been using Doubleplay to switch back and forth to compare.

I'm wondering if DirecTV is screwing around with transponder compression. You can really see it in the faces.

Anyone else care to compare PQ of the 2 channels?

[studdad]

HDN, channel 79 I believe, was pristine today. I walked in the room when my wife was watching one of the Star Trek movies and couldn't believe how good it looked.

[sigma1914]

I just checked and 70 was better that 501. The test I used was background walls...501 had slight macro blocking, but 70 was nice. The other 70 range was horrible compared to their mpeg4 counterparts. ESPN's mpeg2 was AWFUL!

[djrobx]

From what I've seen, the MPEG-4 versions of HBO and Cinemax have always been very inferior to other MPEG-4 HD channels. My theory is that they take a weak MPEG-2 source (perhaps the same one they send out on channel 70) and transcode it to MPEG-4. That would make the version on 501 always inferior to the one on 70.

I just see too many "MPEG-2" style artifacts on the MPEG-4 channel. The "classic" flyover HBO intro logo breaks up horribly and loses color fidelity on both the MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 versions. MPEG-4 normally handles bit-starving more gracefully, usually resulting in blurrier areas of video, or less important areas of the video stop moving as smoothly.

Showtime and Starz look much, much better. HBO and Cinemax even looked better on U-verse, despite their heavy MPEG-4 compression.

Since I'm throwing out theories, I'll also throw in this one - this may have something to do with the fact that we don't get all the other HBO's in HD. Perhaps DirecTV wasn't successful in negotiating for the additional HD HBOs, which also might have involved DirecTV receiving better quality streams. There was a press release a long time ago that DirecTV was supposed to carry 11 HBO and Cinemax HD channels:

http://www.twice.com/article/248797-DirecTV_Reveals_HBO_HD_Plans.php

It'll be interesting to see if this all gets fixed when the new satellite goes live.