Discovery HD PQ

vicw

SatelliteGuys Pro
Original poster
Jan 17, 2004
196
1
Southern Pines, NC
I'm currently on TWC, but evaluating a switch to satellite. I had an opportunity this week to watch my daughter's HD setup on Direct TV, and I was very surprised to see significant picture degredation, in the form of pixelization on the Discovery HD Theater channel, especially during the rapid scene switching, motion, zooming and panning in the promos that they like to show at the end of each hour, implying to me that Direct TV is compressing too heavily to maximize their bandwidth. That was quite surprising, since that Channel has always represented to me the gold standard of HD PQ, since I started watching it years ago. I know their setup is capable of a clean HD picture, since it displays OTA HD very cleanly. That makes me very apprehensive about considering Direct TV.

I don't see any of that degradation on the same material on my TWC cable setup at home, and I never saw it during the years I had Dish (up until Dec 2004).

Without intending to contribute to any Dish vs. Direct TV PQ war, I would appreciate knowing if any members with current Dish HD setups could comment on whether they see similar degredation during the promos on Discovery HD Theater.
 
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Actually people with Directv have been saying that the picture on Discovery HD is a lot better than the one on Dish Network. The picture for this channel on Dish Network went down hill for a while when they put 4 MPEG2 channels in one transponder but it has improved a bit since that move.
 
Yeah never had any issues with it and as Dish move things over to MPEG4 the PQ should improve some. :)
 
The Discovery HD channels PQ just blows me away. I think it is amazing. My 52" LCD is 720p native and that's what I set the VIP622 output to.
 
The current situation for Discovery HD Theater on E* is temporary.

They are in the process of switching customers from MPEG2-HD to MPEG4-HD and have only two transponders left.

Discovery HD Theater should be swtiched to MPEG4 some time this fall, and given the positive results from the previous switches, the PQ should be improved over the current situation.
 
Maybe I've just been lucky but Discovery HD Theater has always looked outstanding on both my HD TV's whenever I had it on.

Ditto.

Discovery HD on DISH has always had among the best picture quality of any HD channel. That's based on seeing it on a 42" plasma, a 26" LCD, and 19" LCD (all HD) TV. :up
 
Ditto.

Discovery HD on DISH has always had among the best picture quality of any HD channel. That's based on seeing it on a 42" plasma, a 26" LCD, and 19" LCD (all HD) TV. :up

That has been my experience also. Discovery HD Theater has had the most consistently pristine PQ of any of the HD channels, in my opinion.

Thanks for your and the other's comments. Presumably, you are all referring to PQ via Dish, and that the picture degradation that I observed during promos on Direct TV a couple of days ago was a problem unique to Direct TV.
 
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