I have an older Dish receiver (pre-hopper). I've always been able to choose between SD and HD for many channels (ie TCM). (I have much more SD space available on my DVR for recording than I do HD.) Recently my guide is not showing the SD option line for TCM and certain other stations. Do you know if these SD options have been dropped? Are they now HD only in availability?
TCM in HD only now?
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If you have a 1000.4 satellite dish (for reception of satellites 61.5, 72.7 and 77) then it’s because about a week ago Dish discontinued its use of satellite 77, which carried for the most part SD versions of channels. Quick way to check if this is you is Menu > 6 > 1 > 3 , this will show you the model of your LNB (labeled as DPP 1K.4 or similar) and what satellites are you set up for (Guessing you are on a ViP system).
Thanks, you are dead on. I show DPP 1K.4. So I guess not getting satellite 77 is the cause. There is a Dish service rep coming by my house tomorrow to check my system out. Is this something that he will be able to remedy, or will this probably end up just being a hopper sales pitch visit?
There is nothing wrong with your system. Dish no longer has transponders on 77 and with that is the loss of all the SD channels that were there. An upgrade to a Hopper will not change that. Although the Hopper 3 has a much larger hard drive for storage than whatever receiver you are using now if archiving in HD is your issue.
Well, besides going Hopper for the extra storage space, there is only one solution I can think of. And even if it works, you will still lose something.
What could be done is changing your arc to Western arc instead of Eastern arc (EA =61/72/77, WA=110/119/129).
Issues with this are as follow:
#1, if you are to far in the NE of the country satellite 129 may be to low in the horizon, and even just being in the eastern US may make 129 more problematic with trees and such. EA is called like that because it is by design to be used in the eastern part of the US, because they are higher in the sky there.
#2, Depending of what City/DMA you get your local channels from, these may not be present on the WA set of satellites, or only be present in SD. If you know the city you get them from or don’t mind providing your zip code I can check (or you can check yourself here).
#3, Even if the previous points are good-to-go, WA SD channels are encoded for the most part in MPEG2 instead of MPEG4 on EA, which means that the picture quality will be worse since MPEG4 is far superior at keeping a decent image quality in a small container. So the resulting recordings will still be lighter then HD, but look worse then you are used to. HD is not affected by this, both arcs do HD in MPEG4.
If you are reluctant about going Hopper, maybe recording stuff in HD and adding an external hard drive to get more space is a solution? It would depend on your use case.
What could be done is changing your arc to Western arc instead of Eastern arc (EA =61/72/77, WA=110/119/129).
Issues with this are as follow:
#1, if you are to far in the NE of the country satellite 129 may be to low in the horizon, and even just being in the eastern US may make 129 more problematic with trees and such. EA is called like that because it is by design to be used in the eastern part of the US, because they are higher in the sky there.
#2, Depending of what City/DMA you get your local channels from, these may not be present on the WA set of satellites, or only be present in SD. If you know the city you get them from or don’t mind providing your zip code I can check (or you can check yourself here).
#3, Even if the previous points are good-to-go, WA SD channels are encoded for the most part in MPEG2 instead of MPEG4 on EA, which means that the picture quality will be worse since MPEG4 is far superior at keeping a decent image quality in a small container. So the resulting recordings will still be lighter then HD, but look worse then you are used to. HD is not affected by this, both arcs do HD in MPEG4.
If you are reluctant about going Hopper, maybe recording stuff in HD and adding an external hard drive to get more space is a solution? It would depend on your use case.
Yes; it's trivial, and it's free other than the cost of the external disk. We are not supposed to use USB-bus powered drives, so make sure it has a wall-wart transformer to power it separately.
Harrisburg is on 110 SD and 61.5 HD, so if you do change arcs this would be all that changes, the ones received by your OTA antenna would be unaffected. What receiver model do you have? It’ll be on the bottom left of the front panel. IIRC VIP receivers support an external hard drive of up to 2TB, so just making sure.
I've had my *knocking on wood* 2 TB on my 722K forever it seems. Just don't go bigger than that. FYI, you can't organize folders on the EHD like you can on the 722k hard drive. It'll organize individual programs into folders, but that is it. So 2 TB... that'll get a little messy over time. As already stated, you need a powered hard drive that plugs into an outlet.
Okay, since the addition of an EHD will solve my DVR storage space issue with the loss of SD feeds, should I just cancel my Dish tech's appointment tomorrow since it won't be necessary to change to the western arc(?) and there really isn't anything else he can do to fix the loss of sat 77. Do you think he'd want to help me with my EHD set-up?
how long as TCM had HD feed on dish? for as long as i can remeber it always been SD. and now that i look at it, it no longer has little sd next to it maybe when the killed sd verison they change my favorites to use the hd verison?
If I were you, I would cancel it. There is nothing to do to set up an EHD but plug it in and let it format.
Okay guys, I cancelled my Dish tech appointment and will be heading up Walmart tomorrow to get me a 2TB EHD. If I have any problems with hooking it up, I'll be back on this thread later tomorrow. THANKS for all your help! I came to the right place!
You'll want to run a check switch to get the 77 out of your matrix.
Press 6, 1 ,1 on the remote and Check Switch
