alanisrox69
join:2005-03-29
LHV, PA
 ·RCN CABLE
1 edit | reply to wbertram
Re: New Channels in LV?
Well, re: Dish.
While they may have more HD channels, not all of them are True Full HD. Some of their channels like MonstersHD, HDNet, HDNet Movies, and StarzHD are all compressed to 1280x1080i/1440x1080i. All of the old VOOM channels are 1280x1080i as well, but since Dish is the only one that carries them, I guess that's the best you're gonna get anyways. StarzHD looks horrible on Dish. It's not compressed right and always has ghosting and other artifact problems. Blech!
Over the summer Dish started compressing HDNet. As you may or may now know, HDNet is dedicated in providing the highest quality HD transfers at the highest bitrate. They send all of their content out at 1920x1080i with a bitrate of ~18.5mbps. Dish compresses HDNet now to 1440x1080i and ~11mbps. And in doing so, the audio is almost always out of synch with the video, and re-compressing on the fly makes HD looks like crap.
So here's a case where more is not always better.
One thing I like about RCN is that on all of their HD channels (at least in my area), they send them out uncompressed and untouched as they are sent out OTA or C-Band (I believe they pull in the premiums via C-Band, but I could be wrong).
Service Electric in my area compresses certain channels bitrate wise, but not resolution wise (720p channels are 1280x720p, and 1080i channels are 1920x1080i). I assume because they have limited QAM capacity. Channels like ABC and HDNet have lower bitrates than they should. ABC averages 7mbps where it should be 13mbps and HDNet averages 14mbps where it should be 18,5mbps. CBS and NBC average 15mbps where they should be 17.57mbps (like what RCN provides). Luckily Service Electric doesn't compress the premiums, they only offer 3, but those are untouched.
The difference on Service Electric is not much, but if comparing an RCN capture versus a Service Electric capture of the same show side to side you can see the difference in artifacting.
As for Dish, they should just ditch some of the SD channels to open more bandwidth up for the HD ones so they can return them to Full resolution and full bitrate.
-Derek-
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