We have been a long term DN subscriber, but starting a couple of years ago became more and more dissatisfied with the decline in their PQ, particularly HD programming. A year ago we dropped our remaining premium movie packages via DN and shifted these to 4DTV (HBO and STARZ). The price was a little higher, even with a one year subscription through NPS, but the HD quality was well worth it. Alas all HD movie channels have since disappeared from 4DTV. To NPS's credit or perhaps my pit bull instincts, we did receive a real refund for the remaining months of our 4DTV subscription.
We did consider cherry-picking several of our favorite SD channels with a 4DTV a la carte plan through SRL to further drop our DN subscription. But the additional cost was simply not worth the improved quality. Regardless, these were marginal channels to us. There was simply not enough left on 4DTV to fully eliminate a DN subscription.
Whether DN HD-Lite is better or worse than 4DTV SD has been debated here before. I have had the pleasure of working with the finest SD sources since the 1970s through work and hobby. Forty years ago it was amazing, but now I watch SD only for content. I have spent considerable time building up several HD theater systems for the family, and naturally we have an interest in getting some ROI on them.
With decades of personal broadcast experience, and R5000s in both our DN and 4DTV receivers, it was child's play to compare these (and 4DTV HD while it was still available) on the same feeds objectively and subjectively. I have done frame-to-frame comparisons and considered everything from artifacts to bit rates to resolution. 4DTV SD lost every time to DN HD-Lite. Sad but true. HBO's 4DTV HD channels were far superior to either. However STARZ's 4DTV HD turned out not dramatically better than DN HD-Lite. I did hate STARZ's frequent flashing logos on movies and their blatant advertising over movie credits. These things matter to me.
We ended up subscribing to SD (the provider, not the format) as a means of retaining better quality HD while further reducing our DN subscription. Overall it has been worth it. I moved the 4DTV R5000s to the SD receivers, and that has afforded some comparisons to DN HD-Lite and 4DTV HD/SD. However the feed is now never the same, so there are multiple, uncontrolled variables involved. Furthermore, with SD the bit rates vary all over the map, even on the same channel. I have short sequences from the same movie where SD's encoders were apparently able to grab a phenomenal number of bits by stealing from other channels in the same TS. Far more than I saw on HBO's corresponding 4DTV HD streams, or in fact ever on HBO's 4DTV HD.
But sometimes the SD rates seem pathetic. I'm slowly coming around to the view that for the most part, SD employs rather extreme, but well chosen settings on their encoders. When the scenes have little change frame-to-frame, the bit rates go WAY down. However this allows for a higher probability that when much higher bit rates are required, there will be enough excess in the pool with the other channels to make this possible. Most of the time it seems to work. But there are TPs where they have stacked too many channels. I'm waiting for the Stanley Cup process to finish and hopefully there will be more bandwidth afterwards.
To be fair, we are seeing what I consider to be an unacceptable rate of TS corruption on one HD TP with SD. I have eliminated most possibilities on our end by using different receivers and completely different signal paths. I even employed the 1.8m Prodelin for several days with outrageously high ebnos. I still need to try running two independent, parallel collections of the full TS from that TP to determine if the glitches are the same. It's not that DN and 4DTV were perfect either, but the error rate is higher on SD.
So we're walking a fine line with a lot of FTA programming, supplemented with SD and DN subscriptions. It's not cheap but for the most part we've been able to get the quality and the content we want. I would have loved to stay with 4DTV, but it has become so much of a niche player that there was nothing left that we wanted. Everyone will have their own needs and potentially come to a completely different conclusion.
We did consider cherry-picking several of our favorite SD channels with a 4DTV a la carte plan through SRL to further drop our DN subscription. But the additional cost was simply not worth the improved quality. Regardless, these were marginal channels to us. There was simply not enough left on 4DTV to fully eliminate a DN subscription.
Whether DN HD-Lite is better or worse than 4DTV SD has been debated here before. I have had the pleasure of working with the finest SD sources since the 1970s through work and hobby. Forty years ago it was amazing, but now I watch SD only for content. I have spent considerable time building up several HD theater systems for the family, and naturally we have an interest in getting some ROI on them.
With decades of personal broadcast experience, and R5000s in both our DN and 4DTV receivers, it was child's play to compare these (and 4DTV HD while it was still available) on the same feeds objectively and subjectively. I have done frame-to-frame comparisons and considered everything from artifacts to bit rates to resolution. 4DTV SD lost every time to DN HD-Lite. Sad but true. HBO's 4DTV HD channels were far superior to either. However STARZ's 4DTV HD turned out not dramatically better than DN HD-Lite. I did hate STARZ's frequent flashing logos on movies and their blatant advertising over movie credits. These things matter to me.
We ended up subscribing to SD (the provider, not the format) as a means of retaining better quality HD while further reducing our DN subscription. Overall it has been worth it. I moved the 4DTV R5000s to the SD receivers, and that has afforded some comparisons to DN HD-Lite and 4DTV HD/SD. However the feed is now never the same, so there are multiple, uncontrolled variables involved. Furthermore, with SD the bit rates vary all over the map, even on the same channel. I have short sequences from the same movie where SD's encoders were apparently able to grab a phenomenal number of bits by stealing from other channels in the same TS. Far more than I saw on HBO's corresponding 4DTV HD streams, or in fact ever on HBO's 4DTV HD.
But sometimes the SD rates seem pathetic. I'm slowly coming around to the view that for the most part, SD employs rather extreme, but well chosen settings on their encoders. When the scenes have little change frame-to-frame, the bit rates go WAY down. However this allows for a higher probability that when much higher bit rates are required, there will be enough excess in the pool with the other channels to make this possible. Most of the time it seems to work. But there are TPs where they have stacked too many channels. I'm waiting for the Stanley Cup process to finish and hopefully there will be more bandwidth afterwards.
To be fair, we are seeing what I consider to be an unacceptable rate of TS corruption on one HD TP with SD. I have eliminated most possibilities on our end by using different receivers and completely different signal paths. I even employed the 1.8m Prodelin for several days with outrageously high ebnos. I still need to try running two independent, parallel collections of the full TS from that TP to determine if the glitches are the same. It's not that DN and 4DTV were perfect either, but the error rate is higher on SD.
So we're walking a fine line with a lot of FTA programming, supplemented with SD and DN subscriptions. It's not cheap but for the most part we've been able to get the quality and the content we want. I would have loved to stay with 4DTV, but it has become so much of a niche player that there was nothing left that we wanted. Everyone will have their own needs and potentially come to a completely different conclusion.
