Bitrate Caps on Transponder 22 @ 61.5W

[buckchow]

I've seen Dish Network do plenty of senseless things with their bitrates, but this could be the worst yet. Just wanted to share the attached graphs here since this is likely to have quite a visible impact on PQ for some people.

The first two attachments show the bitrate on channel 9513 today with the bitrate capped, and the third attachment shows the bitrate on the same channel when it was normal yesterday. Note that all of the channels on this transponder appear to be affected pretty evenly by this bitrate capping, but since I had a graph for 9513 from yesterday it was an ideal choice for showing how much changed.

Basically the video stream is being capped at 4.0 Mbps. This is bad enough by itself since it leaves no breathing room for demanding source material, but that's not the worst of it. A fair amount of the time one channel in the mux will spike to a high bitrate (>13 Mbps) and sit there, forcing all of the other channels in the mux down to have a cap of about 2.5 Mbps for a while. The result of this can be seen in the graph as the bitrate generally alternating between fixed 2.5 and 4.0 Mbps rates.

Some of the HD channels on this transponder include TBS, A&E, MAX-E, HIST, and SHOCS, so if you notice that your picture quality keeps taking dives this evening, this may be the reason why.

 

[austinmm6]

That explains why baseball on TBS looks awful tonight. Any motion shots blur and macroblock badly.

 

[TheKrell]

Ugh!

 

[Paradox-SJ]

Aren't they still moving all HD content off of 61.5?

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Aren't they still moving all HD content off of 61.5?

They are delaying the moving of HD until next year.

 

[cfkillers]

That explains why baseball on TBS looks awful tonight. Any motion shots blur and macroblock badly.

ok so it wasnt my TV im glad i wasnt the only one

 

[cditty]

I'm curious, why are they doing this. Don't they have a ton of bandwidth on EA? 61.5 and 72.7 are both for the most part, new, modern birds... What am I missing here?

 

[buckchow]

I'm curious, why are they doing this. Don't they have a ton of bandwidth on EA? 61.5 and 72.7 are both for the most part, new, modern birds... What am I missing here?

I try not to guess "why" anymore and just wish for things like this to stop.

Yes, there's plenty of capacity on 61.5W and another transponder recently became available on 72.7W and wasn't being used as of a few days ago. Not only are there completely vacant transponders on 61.5W, but last night transponder 23 had nothing but three 6 Mbps MPEG-2 SD test channels (CBR, 544x480), and two of them were congratulating the viewer for successfully pointing at 121W. Right now there's only two channels on there, one of which continues to have the message about 121W. The rest of the capacity is null data. Obviously they must be resource utilization geniuses that none of us could ever dream of understanding.

 

[Jim S.]

Maybe they're afraid that if anyone sees real HD, they'll demand it on all their channels.

 

[TheKrell]

Not only are there completely vacant transponders on 61.5W, but last night transponder 23 had nothing but three 6 Mbps MPEG-2 SD test channels (CBR, 544x480), and two of them were congratulating the viewer for successfully pointing at 121W.

ROFLMAO! It's a time warp. At least it wasn't clamped down to 4M like the HD channels in your OP.