[Martyva]

i've been in electronics since 1987, have attended 9 CES, numerous line shows, and have been exposed to DTH satellite since 1994. The picture on Dish, yesterday, was by far, the best image i've seen on satellite. Wha'happened?

 

[Mark Lamutt]

It was? The picture on ESPN last night for the football game was abysmal in my opinion. What were you watching?

 

[MarkA]

The picture on the channels I've been watching the last two days has also been about the WORST I've seen. They must have shifted bandwidth from my channels to yours

 

[Martyva]

i'm happy for me.

 

[JohnH]

Funny how NFL seems to make the picture better, except for ESPN which was only using a 13mhz SR on their 4:2:2 backhauls.

 

[sampatterson]

Discovery HD PQ was brilliant last night <grin> I found if I only watch that channel I don't complain about the rest. I just complain about the number of re-runs... <g>

 

[Doug E]

I'm in Northern Calif, SF DMA, using a 721PVR. All of a sudden, over the weekend, the PQ on the locals, and the ESPN football game have gone from mediocre to outstanding! I, too, wonder what happened??

 

[Mike123abc]

I have notice improvement on a lot of channels also. Since, it does not appear that they are moving around channels much on transponders or changing the FEC rates to get more bandwith per channel, it points to better compression. It is possible that they are upgrading the boxes that do their compression.

MPEG compression can be quite good at low bit rates, given enough time to do compression. Every couple years compute power doubles and allows better compression to be done in the same amount of time.

One just has to hope that when they upgrade the compression that they do not decide to add more channels to the transponders and end up with no net change in quality.

 

[johnsmith22]

I am of the opinion the PQ is only as good as the feed, if its bad when it gets to the uplink whatever the satlink does wont make it better. I believe that is why you see such variable PQ across the channels and it has far less to do with compression on the satlink than we may think.

 

[Mike123abc]

Well unless you are talking about local channels, I believe all the other feeds come in via Cband. And I would bet that Dish has some great big 16foot dishes to receive them.

Some stations may uplink a bad signal, but that would not really be in their best interest. New cable systems do not have trouble showing high quality pictures on these channels, and they recieve them the same way. It is compression.

Local channels do depend on how dish gets the signal.

 

[xgrep]

Originally posted by Mike123abc
[...]
Some stations may uplink a bad signal, but that would not really be in their best interest. New cable systems do not have trouble showing high quality pictures on these channels, and they recieve them the same way. It is compression.

Local channels do depend on how dish gets the signal.

I think you are over-generalizing, and believe that it's more of an individual case-by-case issue than that. We get TV5 and pixellation is atrocious most of the time. This is relayed by C-band, most likely, and could be as good as they want it to be. It may be that their costs are lower if they use less bandwidth, but whatever the cause, it's clear that the feed (being the first place compression occurs) is a big factor.

x

 

[Mike123abc]

Well my experience is going to visit my parents whose cable system got a major upgrade. When I am there, it is amazing. They have 72 analog stations plus digital. They do not use digital. The analog stations are much better than they appear on dish network. There are no compression artifacts at all, even though they could be getting a digital Cband feed and use fiber in town to send the signal out. So, the signal goes digital to the neighborhood and then converted back to analog. Because they use a lot of bits, the picture is not degraded.

Watching TV on a 65" screen is a pleasure unlike on Dish. In markets that cable has upgraded they can put out a far better picture than dish does now. They can do this because they have the combined bandwidth of both Dish and Direct TV, and do not have to do more than one market of locals. A modern cable plant has the capacity for over 150 channels of HDTV at a time.

In short cable companies can put out a spectacular picture, and they get the signal from the same locations that DBS companies do. Now I have no idea what the CBand feed of TV5 looks like, perhaps someone with that channel on cband can comment on what it looks like direct from cband.