Never stop believing!
I am sorry that you have not been informed of MPEG's SVC extension that was adopted back in 2005. It is not your fault. Dish Network has concealed this information from every technician. (So has the industry concealed this information from all of us.)
Digital picture is completely and absolutely dependent upon signal strength.
Signal strength increase will ALWAYS result in improved picture quality(assuming that we stay below the point of linearity in digital receivers).
This proof (below and link) doesn't require that I explain the science, so I hope and believe, that we can settle this once and for all, so that no more people are denied the digital quality that they paid for because technicians are not properly trained or taught.
From: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 17, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2007
"Overview of the Scalable Video Coding Extension of the H.264/AVC Standard"
The abstract should be enough, but I've included the link. Fascinating read!!!
Abstract—
With the introduction of the H.264/AVC video
coding standard, significant improvements have recently been
demonstrated in video compression capability. The Joint Video
Team of the ITU-T VCEG and the ISO/IEC MPEG has now also
standardized a Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of the
H.264/AVC standard. SVC enables the transmission and decoding
of partial bit streams to provide video services with lower temporal or spatial resolutions or reduced fidelity while retaining a reconstruction quality that is high relative to the rate of the partial bit streams. Hence, SVC provides functionalities such as graceful degradation in lossy transmission environments as well as bit rate, format, and power adaptation. These functionalities provide
enhancements to transmission and storage applications. SVC has
achieved significant improvements in coding efficiency with an
increased degree of supported scalability relative to the scalable
profiles of prior video coding standards. This paper provides an
overview of the basic concepts for extending H.264/AVC towards
SVC. Moreover, the basic tools for providing temporal, spatial,
and quality scalability are described in detail and experimentally
analyzed regarding their efficiency and complexity.
H.264/AVC, MPEG-4, Scalable Video Coding
(SVC), standards, video.
And regarding this:
"it's not a grounding issue, it's to do w/ multi path, etc... when mine does it, i hit the pip button & there's a dead OTA channel there. it's a usually strong channel, but w/ ducting, etc, the signal drops & i get the aquiring signal screen on sat or DVR... i then do a swap, set the pip source to another sat channel, turn pip off, & it never happens again until the pip gets left on an OTA... "
Check your signal strengths and grounding.