Local NBC won't going into Widescreen

[phatal]

Hello all! Just discovered this site recently. What a great resource for satellite users!

Anyways, my local NBC channel suddenly started acting up and was trying to determine why (who's at fault). I have a vip622 with a Dish1000 dish. I think it was Friday night that I noticed that my local HD (digital) NBC station, which is KARE11, wasn't going into widescreen mode. Whenever an HD show was on it was a "squished" 16x9 picture, and when a SD show was on it displays a "squished" 4x3 picture which looks really bad. I don't know if E* or NBC is to blame here. All other HD channels are just fine.

Has anyone else experienced this? BTW, I've done a check switch and a (power cable unplug) reboot of the 622 but didn't seem to help. I believe I'm receiving NBC on 129 transpoder 9.

Thanks!
-Brian

[garys]

Hello all! Just discovered this site recently. What a great resource for satellite users!

Anyways, my local NBC channel suddenly started acting up and was trying to determine why (who's at fault). I have a vip622 with a Dish1000 dish. I think it was Friday night that I noticed that my local HD (digital) NBC station, which is KARE11, wasn't going into widescreen mode. Whenever an HD show was on it was a "squished" 16x9 picture, and when a SD show was on it displays a "squished" 4x3 picture which looks really bad. I don't know if D* or NBC is to blame here. All other HD channels are just fine.

Has anyone else experienced this? BTW, I've done a check switch and a (power cable unplug) reboot of the 622 but didn't seem to help. I believe I'm receiving NBC on 129 transpoder 9.

Thanks!
-Brian

Chances are it is your local NBC, my ota locals do this from time to time and it has been them messing up. By the way D* = Direct, E* = Dish (Echostar).

[Bill R]

I agree with garys; it is likely your local station's fault.

At a lot of the stations the switching between the network HD feed and the local breaks (SD) is still manual. We have one local station (a CBS affiliate) that quite often "forgets" to switch between HD and SD. This happens usually after 10 PM and occures, sometimes several times a week, during Letterman's show.

Also, if you have a weather warning in your area it may be because of that. Many locals stations can not display the weather (or other) warnings on their HD feed so they switch to SD during the warnings. The local ABC station did this last week during ALLIS, LOST and INVASION and got (according to the chief engineer) hundreds of complaints. They have now figured out a way that they can stay HD and still display the weather warnings so that should not happen any more.

[phatal]

Well just for kicks I plugged my OTA antenna back into the 622 and pulled the local NBC channel from that. Guess what? It looks just fine. I contacted Dish tech support to have them look into why my local NBC feed is messed up. We'll have to wait and see what they discover.

In case you're curious why I don't have my OTA antenna plugged in normally...I use the 622 in dual mode and don't have enough cables to support all of them and haven't run the needed line yet.

-Brian