Sky Digital Picture Quality

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tiz

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#21160 17-Apr-2008 14:56

Howdy,

I am not impressed with the picture i am getting on my tv from sky tv. I checked in my sky settings and signal strenth was rougly 95% but signal quality was hovering around 65%. The ber. was jumping around all over the show. (What does that actually refer to?)
I'm a newbee to all this but is there anything i can do to improve the picture quality?

Cheers
Scott.

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#124407 17-Apr-2008 15:33

Well I suspect that it's raining quite hard outside at the moment :)... The BER = Bit Error Rate, so if you dish is out of alignment or it's heavy rain (or both) then you will get a BER rate of more than 0 (which is what it should be).

I suggest you ring sky, get them out to fix up your dish as you are getting "Rain Fade"... perferably if you get it when it's a clear sky and not raining then they should fix it without charging you.

tiz

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#124409 17-Apr-2008 15:41

Thanks for the reply, but this has been happening all over summer, so i dont think the weather is playing much of a part in the problem.
What numbers are 'normal' for the BER?

sbiddle

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#124411 17-Apr-2008 15:45

What aspect of the picture quality are you unhappy with?

What sort of TV do you have and how is the Sky box hooked up?

Sky TV do run very low bitrates for their channels, if you've got something big like a 50" TV Sky TV's picture does look very poor, especially in comparision to Freeview or Freeview|HD.

cyril7

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#124412 17-Apr-2008 15:49

does depend a bit on what box you have, but if the dish is correctly aligned the quality should be pinned at the top an theBER should be showing 1xE-7, or at least 1xE-5 of better 1xE-6 or 1xE-7 is better than 1xE-5. It is normal if its not pinned to the top to jump all over the show, but if correctly or reasonably aligned it should always be better than 1xE-5.

Even if it fell to 1xE-3 or 4 you should see no degredation in the picture, first thing that happens is the audio starts chirping and the picture gets stalled blocks in it, but from there it goes to full picture quality, no inbetween.

Cyril

tiz

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#124414 17-Apr-2008 15:53

sbiddle: What aspect of the picture quality are you unhappy with?

What sort of TV do you have and how is the Sky box hooked up?

Sky TV do run very low bitrates for their channels, if you've got something big like a 50" TV Sky TV's picture does look very poor, especially in comparision to Freeview or Freeview|HD.

I have a Q series 42" samsung plasma and its connected to sky via component cables. Sound is feed through component cables to a yamaha amp.

When i go home tonight i'll confrm the BER numbers that i am getting.

cyril7

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#124416 17-Apr-2008 15:57

The deinterlacers and scalers in some digital panel displays dont work well with low bit rate material. Samsung is one that comes to mind as being particularly bad, fine if the bit rate is what can be achieved on DVD, but once things get under 4-5Mb/s (which many/most of sky feeds are) then things can go bad.

Try ensuring the DNie stuff is off and the sharpness is down, ie only in the 30% of full range area.

Cyril

tiz

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#125112 20-Apr-2008 17:28

OK I just checked my sky signal quality thing and my BER was hovering around 1.5E -0.4... Was does that mean??

Scott.