A thread to rant about "HD-Lite"

[mlb]

I just saw the local cable's hd picture and it had hum bars on all the channels and was not as sharp as what I get on dish.
I have never seen a cable system that has as good a picture as dish. If you love cable pay for it but if you really want the best that is presently available get or keep dish or just go back to sd and live with it.

Maybe you haven't, but I have. My cable company definitely has better HD (or they have no downrezzed channels), but they have less total channels and cost more.

 

[MSG]

AT&T just got OK for TV distribution via fiber in CT similar to Fios.
Hope this is a future for NON HDLITE.

 

[korsjs]

FiOS looks real nice.

 

[Van]

Sean, its only tv.

 

[focusmold]

AT&T just got OK for TV distribution via fiber in CT similar to Fios.
Hope this is a future for NON HDLITE.

Funny comment to go along with this is that AT&T(formerly SBC) just annouced a huge investment in fiber in Indiana and with deregulation that they won they could start selling TV service. They never mentioned in any of the news reports that they would provide more or higher quality TV content just that it would be CHEAPER!!!! They never mentioned HD. This is the driving force of the consumer.

 

[BFG]

Sean, its only tv.

 

[HDTVFanAtic]

No reason to have HD Lite channels with MPEG-4 compression. I believe that they have the ability to do it right, they are just refusing to do it.


"I am just freaking mad about this non-sense and the lies..."

GOSH YOU MEAN THE 15Mbps THEY ARE GIVING STARZHD IN TEST MODE WITH MPEG4 ISNT GOOD ENOUGH TO 1920x1080i?.

I would point out that 110W HBO, Showtime, DiscoveryHD and TNTHD don't have anywhere near 15Mbps with MPEG2 and those are not set to 1280x1080i - but I fear that would give them ideas......

 

[Harold]

Remeber in the HD chat, the exec. from voom said they are doing true hd in 1080i.
Now Dish is saying they are not down rez'ing voom. So which is it?

CharLIE is alot like Bill Clinton
"I did not have sex with that woman"
"We did not down rez voom"

 

[Sean Mota]

GOSH YOU MEAN THE 15Mbps THEY ARE GIVING STARZHD IN TEST MODE WITH MPEG4 ISNT GOOD ENOUGH TO 1920x1080i?.

I would point out that 110W HBO, Showtime, DiscoveryHD and TNTHD don't have anywhere near 15Mbps with MPEG2 and those are not set to 1280x1080i - but I fear that would give them ideas......

it may look good today but I fear that these folks will give 15mbps today but what guarantees that tomorrow they won't give 7mbps? I agree do not give them any ideas because they sure to look into this.

 

[Sean Mota]

Sean, its only tv.

Say that to the money that every HDTV enthusiasts has put into getting what is supposed to be the best HD signal and it won't be TV only but lots of $$$$$. It is not TV. It translate to $$$ being falsely taken away from consumers for a product that it is inferior.

 

[philhu]

it may look good today but I fear that these folks will give 15mbps today but what guarantees that tomorrow they won't give 7mbps? I agree do not give them any ideas because they sure to look into this.

Maybe they are giving 15mbps for today because of the summit and the announcement? Make it look real good for the announcement day

 

[mlb]

Say that to the money that every HDTV enthusiasts has put into getting what is supposed to be the best HD signal and it won't be TV only but lots of $$$$$. It is not TV. It translate to $$$ being falsely taken away from consumers for a product that it is inferior.

Until you can prove that MPEG-4 @ 1920x1080i is encoded without problems I'm not sure you can have that argument. It very well could be (and I believe 99.9% the reason) that the encoders and algorithms just are not good enough to do the full 1920x1080i resolution on the fly (they instead have all kinds of errors during bandwidth intensive scenes). 1440x1080i in MPEG-4 may just look better given the current limitations.

If you wanted to argue getting rid of MPEG-4 all together (switch all to MPEG-2) I might be able to buy your argument, but to say that they can do MPEG-4 now and they are just being cheap about it is totally off base, IMHO. In the end, the technology is still in its infancy, but the only way to improve it is to have some real world applications running so that they can have constant feed back to their changes, such as the handful of MPEG-4 channels they have on the air right now.

 

[Sean Mota]

Until you can prove that MPEG-4 @ 1920x1080i is encoded without problems I'm not sure you can have that argument. It very well could be (and I believe 99.9% the reason) that the encoders and algorithms just are not good enough to do the full 1920x1080i resolution on the fly (they instead have all kinds of errors during bandwidth intensive scenes). 1440x1080i in MPEG-4 may just look better given the current limitations.

If you wanted to argue getting rid of MPEG-4 all together (switch all to MPEG-2) I might be able to buy your argument, but to say that they can do MPEG-4 now and they are just being cheap about it is totally off base, IMHO. In the end, the technology is still in its infancy, but the only way to improve it is to have some real world applications running so that they can have constant feed back to their changes, such as the handful of MPEG-4 channels they have on the air right now.

There are two issues here. The Voom channels are not MPEG-4 and are at HD Lite. NBC HD is MPEG-4 and HD Lite at 1440x1080i. If Dish is having problems with their encoders why don't they say so and I will stop bitching and close the thread and everyone will be happy. Instead this is what they say:

People are happy with the current resolution and there are no TV to decode 1080i anyway, so we are giving all of you inferior HD (HD Lite) but you (customers) have to pay us the same amount of money still because we like you as fools.

 

[Sean Mota]

It was an HD Lite dream

 

[ChetK]

If Dish is having problems with their encoders why don't they say so and I will stop bitching and close the thread and everyone will be happy.

You're not serious are you? When was the last time you entered one thread here where "everyone was happy"?

 

[Tom Bombadil]

I can buy that the MPEG4 decoders are not there yet to do 1920x1080i.

If Dish was using 1920x1080i or 1280x720p for every channel that could be carried in those formats (read MPEG2 right now), and down-rezzing the new real MPEG4 channels to 1440x1080i, until they could be bumped up, then I would be fine and happy with them. They would be making a good faith effort to air true HD.

But as long as channels that are in MPEG2 or fake MPEG4 are being down-rezzed, then we have a company that is telling (& selling) us they are providing HD when they are really serving up HD-lite.

 

[goaliebob99]

I can buy that the MPEG4 decoders are not there yet to do 1920x1080i.

If Dish was using 1920x1080i or 1280x720p for every channel that could be carried in those formats (read MPEG2 right now), and down-rezzing the new real MPEG4 channels to 1440x1080i, until they could be bumped up, then I would be fine and happy with them. They would be making a good faith effort to air true HD.

But as long as channels that are in MPEG2 or fake MPEG4 are being down-rezzed, then we have a company that is telling (& selling) us they are providing HD when they are really serving up HD-lite.

Agreed!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[mlb]

There are two issues here. The Voom channels are not MPEG-4 and are at HD Lite. NBC HD is MPEG-4 and HD Lite at 1440x1080i. If Dish is having problems with their encoders why don't they say so and I will stop bitching and close the thread and everyone will be happy. Instead this is what they say:

People are happy with the current resolution and there are no TV to decode 1080i anyway, so we are giving all of you inferior HD (HD Lite) but you (customers) have to pay us the same amount of money still because we like you as fools.

Maybe I misread it earlier, but I could have sworn that Scott was told that they are having encoder issues to give them the full resolution when using MPEG-4. They then added the part about people not being able to tell a difference (I call BS on that statement).

As far as the Voom goes, I 100% agree that those need to be fixed. However, I'm not sure that anybody has the whole story on who's fault it is. Both companies are pointing the finger at each other.

 

[waltinvt]

I just want to know why you guys can get away with saying things like (and I'm paraphrasing here):

"Dish is saying people are happy with the current resolution...and there are no TVs to decode 1080i anyway"

"Both companies are pointing the finger at each other"

"..then we have a company that is telling (& selling) us they are providing HD when they are really serving up HD-lite"

but I simply point out that "Dish makes a practice of using lies and deceit to keep / attract customers" and I get jumped on or shunned or accused of "killing" the thread......I'm starting to get a complex here.

 

[Van]

Say that to the money that every HDTV enthusiasts has put into getting what is supposed to be the best HD signal and it won't be TV only but lots of $$$$$. It is not TV. It translate to $$$ being falsely taken away from consumers for a product that it is inferior.

Everything is a gamble, betamax, mini disc, yugo, zenith laptop computers, rear projection big screen tv's, mini polaroid camera pictures, this is still a fledgling technology and the future of its life span is in the dark. As to what any provider is doing such as what dish says and what voom says I would lay money on them both being less than truhtfull though Im leaning more towards voom. As for D I have no dealings with them though that may be changing soon enough hopefully not only on the customer end but on the employment end as well.

Still it is tv no matter how you look at it and until more 24/7 real hd content becomes available and more of the general public has hd sets in their homes all you can do is sit and wait or look for other alternative providers or just chuck it all out in the front yard ( hey let me know if you chuck your tv ) and go back to candle light book reading because there are not enough unhappy hd tv owners out there to raise enough of a stink for it to get onto national news and for any elected official to consider it a worthy enough issue to put on the table over that of more pressing matters.