DirecTV's getting worse. Right now, they are sending two free concerts (Lynyrd Skynyrd and Mya) I see people jumping around the screen with absolutely NO AUDIO. All other channels are fine. If I shut Dolby OFF, I get audio. I call DirecTV and they say:
1. Switch to Spanish, then back to English ... Wrong!
2. Do the famous 5 minute reset ... Wrong!
3. Do the eraser on the card contacts ... Wrong!
4. Call Sony ... Really, really Wrong!
5. Funny, I am the only person having this problem ... Wrong!
6. After SEVERAL phone calls and a demand to be put to a manager, oh yeah, there IS a problem and I need to shut off Dolby ... no kidding!!!!
Next day, I see a message light on. Do you think it is DirecTV notifying me (and other subscribers) of the problem?? Of course not, it is an ad for more sports junk. What rotten service. I will need to upgrade my receiver for my HDTV and it won't be DirecTV.

This dish/direct reminds me of the Beta/VHS battle a few hears ago..... Beta (& dish) are clearly better products, but DirectTV (& VHS) seem to have the market share with the masses...... it's a darn shame. Why-O-why do people settle for DirectTV's 1.5Mpeg crapola when dish offers 100 % Mpeg2 on all channels..... oh yeah, the entire planet is obcessed with sports programs .... it's like feeding steak to a hog.....

"Why-O-why do people settle for DirectTV's 1.5Mpeg crapola when dish offers 100 % Mpeg2 on all channels....."

Did you not learn anything from the earlier posts in this thread? "1.5Mpeg crapola" is exactly that. Why-O-Why do people keep falling for it? The minor differences in DTV's data stream from "pure" MPEG 2 make no difference to the picture quality, according to knowledeable people who have posted here and on www.dbsforums.com (go back and read my retelling and David Hull's posts in page 1 of this thread), yet Dish supporters keep beating on the same old drum. It is quite possible that on any given channel on any given day one supplier or the other will have the better picture because of choices they have made on degree of compression to be applied, etc., BUT THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH STRICT MPEG2 compliance!

My turn to hit you with one.

Why-O-Why do Dish users put up with resolution that is CLEARLY INFERIOR when compared to DirecTV's? Dish's 480x480 signal as transmitted must be STRETCHED out to 720x480 to full your screen, resulting in blurriness. In fact, I've recently learned that the color information on Dish is even worse. Only the Y component (luminance, basically black-and-white) is transmitted at 480x480; the Cr (red) and Cb (blue) components are transmitted at only 240x240, so they have to be stretched twice as far to fill the 720x480 screen area. You can see this effect HERE on the dbsforums.com site.

According to sources I trust, DirecTV broadcasts a full 720x480 signal, already proportioned for the full standard tv screen, so its pictures don't have to be stretched out to fill the screen. That's a full 3X more signal information per screen than with Dish!
That makes DirecTV greatly superior to Dish, doesn't it?

The answer is no -- it gives DirecTV 3X greater POTENTIAL resolution, but this can be given up through choice of color depth, sampling scheme, degree of compression, etc. The point here is that one has to understand everything that is going on (I was going to say "the whole picture", but ...) in order to understand the situation.

The Dish signal is inherently more blurry than the DirecTV signal due to its lower resolution. But since DirecTV's bandwidth per channel is roughly the same as Dish's, that means DirecTV's signal must be compressed about 3X as far, thus giving up all or most of the resolution advantage. The result is a slightly different appearance between the two systems, but which is "better" is a matter of personal preference, since they both contain roughly the same amount of information.

Why the human animal seems to have this innate desire to belittle the other guy is beyond me. I'd hate to think that my self worth was that tied up with my choice of television system ...

gee Makai Guy thanks for the techo lesson..... I think
You also win BIGTIME on the sarcasm scale.

take a pill chill dude.

>>> that's Chill Pill......

Sorry my brain has suffered from watching too much inferior Dish Network programming and reading angry posts online.

And by the way we're now getting 16:9 enhanced letterbox movies on DirecTV. Is Dish also providing this service?

Steve, Dish has been sending out 16:9 for sometime (both premium and super channel -- any Babylon 5 fans out there?). Dish, like DirecTV is going to pass on whatever video format they receive from the source. Unlike audio, I would not think they could easily reformat the video attributes but I could be wrong...

Don't know about the "enhanced". If by enhanced you mean Anamorphic, I would be surprised, since the setup for this format seems troublesome for the average viewer. This is based on the number of complaints you see in consumer video mags and forums like this about elongated images. I would not think it was ready for prime time yet....

-JO

Looking for clarification on this. "Bulkhead connectors"? "RG-6 cable"? What and where are these?

Thanks,

Vic

Vic, allow me.

'Bulkhead connectors' refers to the little cable couplers used in most cable-TV wall plates. They are also used to extend cable runs. They couple two coax cables.

'RG-6' is the generally-superior of the two standard cable-TV cables. The other is RG-59. The RG-6 has a heavier-gauge center conductor, and usually has higher-quality shielding, (the braided and/or foil outher conductor) although both are available as 'quad-shield', or 4 shield layers; two braided and two foil.

The RG-6 is considered to have lower 'losses', i.e., it delivers a higher-quality signal, with less loss over long distances. You usually find the RG-6 as service drops and long interior cable runs, and the RG-59 is often the 6-foot jumpers packed with most VCRs. RG-59 is more flexible.

Larry

Thanks Larry, see my post in the other thread. :-)

Vic