last night the sopranos-deadwood was 98% perfect..a couple of pixelizations ,studder and 2 times screen went to black for a second
Same here. My concerns, however, center around the over usage of compression, not the pixelization, blackouts, stuck pixels, etc. Those particular artifacts are most probably due to software decoding errors, signal locking problems, or transmission/reception problems, and I feel confident that those problems will be cleaned out as time goes on.
The problems which concern me, and should concern most everybody, is the potential over compression. These artifacts show up as washed out colors, very soft image, posturization, macro blocking, and other similar problems. If we don't complain, then Voom will think that we are perfectly happy watching this kind of image and will continue to keep up the heavy compression. Remember, the more compression used, the more bandwidth is freed up, and the more stations that can be added, so it is in
Voom's best interests to add as many stations as possible within their alotted bandwidth. It is, however, detrimental to the end user's (us) picture quality.
Since the PQ problems seem to have become more prominent since the latest software update (5.68), I have to wonder if Voom actually caused their own problems in an attempt to fix some of the other bugs. Maybe by rewriting some of the decoding algorithms, they may have accidentally lowered the PQ by introducing new errors in the code. I haven't had Voom long enough to make any meaningful judgements, as I only had the default sofware (5.08 I think) for 2 days. It might have been coincidence, but those were the two days that the PQ was the very best!
At any rate, I know what I have been seeing, and Saturday night, for example, the PQ on all of the HD stations was pretty poor by HD standards, and for whatever reason it was like that, we shouldn't have to tolerate it for any length of time. Sunday night the PQ was back to very good and maybe even excellent. What is going on, Voom?
As long as Voom is aware that they have a problem, and are willing to fix it, then I personally will be patient and give them time to get the work done. If, on the other hand, they are trying to up the compression in order to fit in more channels, then I will be gone. Like I said before, I bought high definition television and that is exactly what I expect to get.
