After watching the street all via 3 different dreamboxes, (one tuned to TCL, one to Freeview and one to the Sky MUX) the picture for the street seems to be off centre as it is broadcast from TVNZ. So they all were off-centre. And all consistantly off-centre in the same place.

I tried to record all three streams but because the EPG data was the same for all channels and I was trying to record into the same directory the recording just didn't happen as the files are recorded by their EPG name. I did remember after "the street" had finished about taking screenshots which I have done, for comparison between the quality of the three different streams.

TCL seems to be about 2 seconds behind Freeview and Sky which are only a few nanoseconds apart (freeview being slightly ahead), which isn't a huge suprise really as it is taking the freeview stream and re-encoding it.

Below are some screenshots showing the difference in picture quality / contrast between the three different feeds... I tried to get the same picture for all, but that is really hard when you are tabbing between browser windows and clicking on a button ;)..

One thing I did notice is that th TCL feed is a "smidge" stretched out / wider than the Sky/Freeview feed... I have a screenshot of the placemakers icon showing you what I mean below. I think I have figured out why that is, the TCL feed is 704x576 for TV1 & 2, whereas the Sky/Freeview feed is 720x576.  TV3 on TCL is 720x576

Not sure if sky transmit them this way but TCL re-encoded the channels into all sorts of other weird and wonderful non-widescreen res's such as 544x576 or 480x576 or even 352x576 on Nickelodeon (ewww!) but on the upside they did have Ren & Stimpy on, space madness, classic!....

Telstraclear "Worst Week of my life"



Freeview TV1 Feed:



Sky TV1 Feed:



You can really tell that Sky compress their image a lot :), plus the colours are slightly washed out on TCL, however they do look a whole lot worse on the ADB STB than they do on Dreambox. That's next weeks job to setup a media pc to do a screen capture between the two.