HD Picture Quality

[redelephants]

Did anyone notice an improvement of the PQ this weekend. It appears that the PQ improves for the weekend and then decreases during the week. Perhaps dish is increasing Bit rates for the weekend due to the amount of viewers during this time, then decreasing them back down during "non-peak" viewing times?

[hclarkjr]

i have, i noticed it was pretty bad during the week but noticed an improvement this weekend during the college football games.

[mike123abc]

Core channels should be the same day in and day out. They are pretty much fixed in place and rarely are adjusted.

The RSNs are changed all the time based on the number of games in HD. So it is possible for them to vary day to day, hour to hour. If there is too many games in HD at the same time Dish will even not show some of them since they run out of room.

[redelephants]

Obvisously "core channels" are not the same day in and day out. I have noticed a decline once again today of the Picture Quality. What I don't understand is that even my CBS affiliate I receive OTA via 722k has the same problems.

[whatchel1]

Sounds like you may have other problems. Could be the unit you have is having problems. Have you check to see what the OTA looks like direct to the TV?

[MikeInAlaska]

My HD channels look killer, all the time. Sometimes they show a low quality recording on an HD channel and the impression may be a drop in quality, but its not a "true" quality problem with the channel/Dish network/etc.

For example HD Theater was showing a "American Chopper" episode which was obviously SD quality. When it drops to commercials though, they are stunning.

[mike123abc]

You can watch the uplink forum and see when/if they move HD channels. The uplink forum filters out the sports moves since they happen all the time as they add/remove games. It is pretty rare to see a cable channel moved, it is something that is more like once a year, not every weekend.

[Volmaul]

I am critical of the picture quality on Dish at times, but I must say that the Star Trek movies on HDNet Movies were absolutely beautiful on my tv last night. If the sports channels looked like that I'd be VERY happy all the time. I will not leave Dish for cable simply because at this time Dish uses superior technology. They have the potential to make everything look great once the growing pains from transitioning everything to HD and getting more satellites with greater capacity are over with.

MPEG4 is not only more efficient than MPEG2, it just plain looks better at realistic bitrates when it is not just used to reduce the bandwidth required and squeeze in an extra channel. This is the same encoding used on the vast majority of Blu -ray movies. I'd like to know something. With 129W being a relatively new satellite, what are the chances that dish is able to increase picture quality and add more channels once the 61.5W satellite is replaced? I would assume that 129W is capable of much more than 61.5W at this point since I have read that only around half of the 61.5W transponders are able to be used. This seems like it could be a significant bottleneck. And I'm sure Dish wouldn't want about half of their customers in Eastern Arc markets to switch "arcs" if the viewing experience were much different.

[janko]

Very disapointed with pq with dish lately.It looks like its zoomed in somehow.Now i can say this for sure..Dish hd picture can never be compared to Comcast hd picture.

[MikeInAlaska]

Man I just dont see how thats possible, the HD 1080 quality (off 129W and 110W) is simply stunning when the source material is right. When the source material sucks, well, nobody can transmit it pretty.