Pixellation on DirecTV?

[harmsway1976]

i have directv and have noticed that sometimes stuff i'm watching looks slightly pixellated (is that the right term?). anyone else experience this? are all directv broadcasts like this sometimes? i'm recording straight from the satellite receiver to my phillips stand alone and have no problems with the recorder with anything else. any advice is very highly appreciated. thanks.

[themichael]

On some channels it can take as long as 3 seconds after a scene change for the picture to fully "clear". The banding and mosquito noise is really bad on the channels the 'nobody really watches'. Looks like a low bitrate WMV enode. They seem to have been shaving bitrate for a couple of years. I guess its like boiling a frog.

[Redd]

Dish has been getting these same complaints.

[Vanderlow]

What happens when you boil a frog??

[richdvd]

have you checked your signal strength?

[harmsway1976]

yes, the signal is fine. it's something that i only notice occasionally. seems like it is what teh other person said about directv shaving off bandwidth on certain channels.

[vhelp]

Unfortunately, this his is how it is nowadays. The End of superier "digital"
quality. That ended some time 3 or so years ago.., when I got my first
satellite and Directv. The quality was fanominal. Today, it's riddled with:

* pixelation (mostly Sports, News, Soaps, and other channels where
quality is not a concirn.

* rainbow pixelation or dct blocks.

You'll find this on EVERY channel, you just arent seeing some of them only
because the source agression is not enough for you to not notice it much. But,
bring in a captured source (any tv show/movie etc) inside vdubMOD and
you'll see the "macro blocks" or pixelation everywhere
everywhere
..and this is what you are encoding. I struggled with this phenomina for
over 3 years.., cause I couldn't figure out WHY my encodes were still coming
out blocky or pixelated.., till now. Well, actually a few years ago or so.

I cancelled my subscribsion in December 2003. It was a waist, because for
what I was doing (capturing "superier" quality) it was so not.

In fact, my Antenna has ZERO dct; pixelation; or any other blocks known
to man. Even though the channels are a bit noisy, the quality is so worth
it (well, only one channel comes in good - a Conneticut channel, WB20 here
in NY) but no blocks what-so-ever

I'm gonna go with "regular" Cable. My theory is, if I go for "digital cable"
I'll end up with the same results as my Satellite channels. But, I might try
and see if I have a friend who has "digital cable" and see if I can notice
the same results as Satellite. I hope not. But, either way, it doesn't really
matter. For my needs, we are just talking --> tv shows and tv movies, for
crying out loud. Not Studio Quality sources materials

Good luck with your endeavors,
-vhelp 2559

[harmsway1976]

well, i'm kind of stuck where i am. we only have one cable option here, cable one. there are no other cable providers where i live. i think cable one is in the process of trying to switch to all digital. i had their service for almost a year because of the local channels and it made my wife happy because that's what she wanted, but i couldn't get any channels i wanted. in my city they don't have comedy central and they don't carry mtv2 at all. directv has the channles i want like comedy central, mtv2, fuse, and vh1 classics. so i either deal with a little bit of quality loss and get the programming i really want or go back to cable and pay the same price or more for channels i care nothing about.

[themichael]

If you put a frog in a boiling pot of water he will try to get out....

If you put a frog in a cold pot of water and raise the temp, he stays in ....

[Nightcrawler]

You will not experience a pixeling problem with Digital Cable. If their is a problem with the line you will experience digital tiling, but this is something that can be fixed.