Sky updating more channels to HD

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richms

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#2434483 8-Mar-2020 14:14

rugrat:

So now we know that actually lose sound information on Sky streaming products.

Copying left and right channels only and with National Geographic been caught out as speech lost in conversion.

If they left the sound alone and streamed DD, wouldn't be a problem, except they seem to see streaming as a competitor to decoder box so have to lower the experience from my standpoint.

I've looked at latest Air Crash on Ipad and confirm speech lost, but plays during adds advertising other Geographic shows.

Also a support nightmare to stream DD, look at all the people that complain about the levels on netflix, and then sky would have to support all the people that have their PC set up wrong so it thinks its 5.1 or 7.1 but its not, so get no audio.

From their perspective its gonna be better to compress it, downmix to stereo and have a vocal minority unhappy, than to have constant costly phonecalls about people who cant hear the voices etc. The failure to downmix this one thing is clearly an oversight they will sort out.

Richard rich.ms

rugrat

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#2434532 8-Mar-2020 14:38

Can you link the complaints Netflix DD. I probably used wrong words to search cheers. They have a setting for non DD soundtrack on Netflix shows.

They could set it as default 2 channel and then have a setting people that know what they're doing to change it to DD5.1

Either case I won't subscribe while no DD.

Have Neon free trial will unsubscribe near end because of this, watched Fantastic Beasts movie on Vodafone TV applic, had sound out all speakers but it just felt it was missing something.

Will wait for movies to come out on Netflix etc, like Justice League (Gets removed about 13th) or movie offers on Apple TV.

Don't except that service not provided because of support calls, they just like lowering the quality.

I know don't like it don't buy the product, and that's the route I will take, just pointing it out as would be nice if they offered a product interested in, I'm not paying $45 to watch movies on Vodafone TV, so box options are over priced for me, and non box lower quality.

I know this not on HD channels thing, but an issue that it's highlighted. I'm sure they'll get the speech fixed for streaming.

DjShadow

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#2522077 13-Jul-2020 13:24

Just noticed Vice (Ch 13) is now in HD, are there any others that people have noticed?

fe31nz

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#2522520 14-Jul-2020 00:03

DjShadow:

Just noticed Vice (Ch 13) is now in HD, are there any others that people have noticed?

Everything except the SD channels broadcast as part of Freeview DVB-S on 12519 is now DVB-S2 and has been for a long time. Last time I checked, there were still some channels that were 576i, and the last thing I recorded from Vice on 28/5/2020 was 576i, so it is good news if they have changed that to their "HD" format. The actual bandwidth broadcast for "HD" varies, but it is always better than the old SD channel version. Calling it HD is debatable though - it is usually 1440x1080 interlaced as broadcast, but with a 16:9 display aspect ratio setting that makes it play scaled up to 1920x1080 (1080i). It is usually a decent H.264 profile: High@L4 typically, with CABAC, and around 7000 kbit/s, so the picture quality is quite decent. But there is still room for improvement - why not broadcast real 1080p? H.265 would be nice too, but I presume the Sky boxes can not handle that.

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