Quality - Friday night lights

[Mike_H]

Watching a recording of Friday Night Lights from last night and I'm shocked at the poor quality. The entire first part of the show spent a lot of time on close ups of people's faces, and you can see significant compression artifacts.

This is off my KARE local on dish which comes off the 129 bird on transponder 9. I get signal levels of 78.

Was this a network issue, i.e. NBC sent it down like that, or should I be talking to Dish Quality?

I'll have to watch some NBC shows live tonight to see if it keeps up.

Thanks

 

[Mike_H]

Watching CSI right now and the picture ist terrible. All kinds of artifact issues in dealing with dark issues as well as issues with faces. Very grainy picture as well.

This us on a 1080p Samsung 56" dlp connected via hdmi to the receiver and the image quality and dark colors are usually much better. I'm sitting about 10' away from the screen.

I've sent an e-mail to dishquality.

 

[MyDogHasFleas]

Can you get it OTA for comparison?

 

[Mike_H]

Gonna try and pickup an antenna this weekend so I can compare it. Noticed some mistakes on recording of The Office from last night. Looks like the guys at KARE11 screwed up as there was a border top, bottom, left and right on the HD signal for the first 3/4 of the show. Then all of a sudden it blew up to full screen, but was cutting off some of the image.

Watching Law and Order tonight on Kare11 in HD i'm seeing the top of the actor's heads cut off a lot.

Nothing back from dish yet.

 

[Mike_H]

Dishquality ignored me, drove me nuts on Thursday night so I called tech support. Did a reset, checked some things, and in the end they are RMA ing a new box out. The guy said that after the tests their sheet says pull it in for testing and send out a replacement box, so that's what they are doing.

 

[wkilpatrick]

I had to wait till Saturday night to even record FNL. Our local NBC decided to show the Blazers Game instead of FNL.

 

[griz_fan]

I doubt it is a hardware issue, most likely a local affiliate issue. I know our local NBC affiliate, despite doing rather well financially, does a poor job with their HD broadcasts. We had a problem with signal strength fluctuating quite a bit, causing drop outs. Most common any more, though, is they fail to switch back to HD after a commercial break that includes local commercials.

So, MIKE_H, get an antenna and do a stare and compare against OTA. Also, do your other non-local HD channels show any signs of problems? Again, I strongly suspect the problem lies with the local affiliates sending garbage to your receiver.

 

[ClevelandRob]

Friday Night Lights has ALWAYS looked bad on my OTA from my local NBC. A ton of macro-blocking and motion artifacts. It is probably the worst show I've seen in HD on OTA. I can't compare with other markets, but it definately is bad on the Cleveland affiliate. All other shows look great on the network though.

It's one of the few shows I don't mind watching in SD (since my wife is watching that god-awful American Idle!). The HD is obviously better, but it's not typical HD quality so I usually record in SD.

 

[sprintcarcrazy]

Hey, American Idol rocks, I started watching it 1st episode this year and I am hooked, never had watched it before. They have some great female talent on there this year, it should be a hard choice pick at the end. And Carrie Underwood came from that show and she is sweeeeeeeet !!!

One of my top OTA HD shows is CSI Miami, the ocean shots are just spectacular.

 

[Mike_H]

I doubt it is a hardware issue, most likely a local affiliate issue. I know our local NBC affiliate, despite doing rather well financially, does a poor job with their HD broadcasts. ...

I believe it is a combination of problems. I would have called it a local issue but then I was watching a show on StarsHD and it started acting up. the initial problems were noticed on the NBC affiliate, but then a few days later the CSI episode started and it was totally hosed up, and that was on the CBS affiliate.

So mark up every HD channel I've watched, Starts, Rave, NBC, CBS and that's what pulled the trigger on the dish folks saying we want it back. I got the distinct impression that they have a check list they go through and then if it meets certain criteria, dish engineering wants the box back.

It could also be that my box is a fairly old one and needs the HDMI upgrade, even though HDMI had been working fine on it for me.

I'm going to get a uhf antenna and mount it in my attic this spring. I need to clean up some cabling and I'll do that at the same time.

 

[drummerguy]

To me, it seems like it's NBC. I have all locals OTA, and NBC shows have lots of artifacts in not only FNL, but also Heroes, and especially in their football coverage -- anywhere there's fast moving action. CBS always looks incredible, and ABC and Fox, even at 720p, look better than NBC.

 

[Mike_H]

I wonder if it has something then to do with the software on the dish multiplexing system? ABC and Fox broadcast in 720p and NBC, PBS and CBS broadcast in 1080i.