Not happy with StarzHD quality
- Thread starter Mark Strube
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I'm having flashbacks to the final days of Voom...the MPEG-4 quality got quite spotty, and someone was always "aware of the problem, and working on it". That was a well over a year ago...you'd think that the MPEG-4 encoder issues would've been worked out by now (I know E* may be using different hardware, but still, they didn't just start working on this when the new recievers were released--did they?). Hmmm.
Really? I thought that was all the discussion on the tail end (last couple of months of Voom sat service), that the compression/encoding was being 'played with' and it was because they were testing their MPEG-4...?
nazz said:
I switched to 129 last night and Dredd looked pretty good. Been watching some today and picture seems to be smoother.
Had to go back to 61.5 because my level was heading down again.... It was 50 when I went back to 61.5 it was 89.
If this a sign of things to come when they switch over to MPeg4. We should let them know that this type of encoding sceme is not accectable. Mpeg4 is uses predictable compression. Thusly the blured and jumpy frames. Dont wait till they have racks and racks of bad equipment and force all the channels to use this authoring device. Speak up now> dishquality@echostar.com if your seeing this as a problem.
long_time_DNC said:
Dear Valued Echostar Customer,
We appreciate hearing from you and are sorry that you are experiencing difficulties with reception from the 129 satellite location. However we are not the least bit surprised to hear of your problems, as we know we have a dying, low-grade satellite at that location, one that we normally would have never pressed into action in a primary satellite location. However as HD customers make up such a small portion of our subscriber base, and as the all-important East Coast markets don't use 129, we decided it was "good enough" for the time being.
We'd like to say that the situation will be fixed in the near future. And maybe it will, if we can find another good deal on a used satellite, as we did from Rainbow Media. In the meantime we urge you to remain confident in our ability to address the problem, although we cannot commit to our eventual solution being at the 129 location or any other location that your present dish configuration is set up to recieve. Should you lose signal from a 129-based channel, then there are plenty of other channels to watch from our more reliable satellites at the 110 and 119 locations.
Sincerely,
Dish Management
I got the same email about we have identified and confirmed the problem and we are working on a fix but please be patient, yada yada yada.
I am sorry but I suggested to them untill they get this mpeg 4 crap down they need to put the STarz channel up in mpeg 2 with a mpeg 4 tag , so we can enjoy the channel now while they monkey with the testing. That is another thing. They have had a whole lot of testing channels for months now and they still haven't figured out how to do this?
The mpeg 4 locals in hd look great on Abc and Fox but the Cbs looks like the STarz hd channel. It is unwatchable. I don't understand why they can do 720 p channels just fine but the 1080i channels look like a jerky mess. I actually get ill from trying to watch these channels.!sadroll
Thank God , I am not epileptic or I would have swallowed my tongue by now .
I am sorry but I suggested to them untill they get this mpeg 4 crap down they need to put the STarz channel up in mpeg 2 with a mpeg 4 tag , so we can enjoy the channel now while they monkey with the testing. That is another thing. They have had a whole lot of testing channels for months now and they still haven't figured out how to do this?
The mpeg 4 locals in hd look great on Abc and Fox but the Cbs looks like the STarz hd channel. It is unwatchable. I don't understand why they can do 720 p channels just fine but the 1080i channels look like a jerky mess. I actually get ill from trying to watch these channels.!sadroll
Thank God , I am not epileptic or I would have swallowed my tongue by now .
Mark Strube said:
I usually post the obvious satires without a smiley, but this time I included one.
Tom Bombadil said:Dear Valued Echostar Customer,
We appreciate hearing from you and are sorry that you are experiencing difficulties with reception from the 129 satellite location. However we are not the least bit surprised to hear of your problems, as we know we have a dying, low-grade satellite at that location, one that we normally would have never pressed into action in a primary satellite location. However as HD customers make up such a small portion of our subscriber base, and as the all-important East Coast markets don't use 129, we decided it was "good enough" for the time being.
We'd like to say that the situation will be fixed in the near future. And maybe it will, if we can find another good deal on a used satellite, as we did from Rainbow Media. In the meantime we urge you to remain confident in our ability to address the problem, although we cannot commit to our eventual solution being at the 129 location or any other location that your present dish configuration is set up to recieve. Should you lose signal from a 129-based channel, then there are plenty of other channels to watch from our more reliable satellites at the 110 and 119 locations.
Sincerely,
Dish Management
Nice one, Tom.
Starz HD is unwatchable. It's unbelievable that they can release these new channels with that type of quality. Since I couldn't watch Starz HD last night, I switched to our local FOX (KTVU) to watch the Giants game, got just audio no video. OK, so then I tried ABC (KGO), unwatchable. Pixelations all over the place and picture lock ups.
WTF? And we are paying for this product? Might as well cancel the damn package, if you can't even watch the HD channels.
RandallA said:Nice one, Tom.
Starz HD is unwatchable. It's unbelievable that they can release these new channels with that type of quality. Since I couldn't watch Starz HD last night, I switched to our local FOX (KTVU) to watch the Giants game, got just audio no video. OK, so then I tried ABC (KGO), unwatchable. Pixelations all over the place and picture lock ups.
WTF? And we are paying for this product? Might as well cancel the damn package, if you can't even watch the HD channels.
I am not really having too many issues with STARZ except the jerky motion on horizontal camera motion which I start having feeling is more due to MPEG4 reason. Other issue is smiring of picture. I have seen improvement on second issue. What is the receiver you are using? I am using 622.
211 here. I couldn't watch it at all last night, all other SD channels and most of the HD channels were fine.
Yes it is totally unwatchable in its present state. Now why can't they just go ahead and put the Starz hd channel in true mpeg 2 and use a mpeg 4 header? Why just THIS channel in mpeg 4 while the other channels they just added this week are in mpeg 2? They need to rectify this . Then they can test all they want for mpeg 4 on the TEST channels that they have all over the other satellties.
