[TelstraClear] New to digital TV

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lurker

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#7996 26-May-2006 20:47

Been a highspeed/phone plan customer for a couple of years and recently decided to sign up for Digital TV - I love the History Channel amonst other things. I'm a little shocked though at the compression artifacts I am seeing on some channels. Some of it is truly awful - almost unwatchable at times. I read a few similar posts in this forum so I take it that it's not anything to do with my setup - it's just the way it is for everybody? I certainly wouldn't recommend this service to anybody at this stage, but is this the way digital TV has to be? Is there not enough bandwidth on the cable? The FTA channels are fine most of the time but I didn't need digital TV for that to begin with.

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#36767 26-May-2006 21:49

lurker: Been a highspeed/phone plan customer for a couple of years and recently decided to sign up for Digital TV - I love the History Channel amonst other things. I'm a little shocked though at the compression artifacts I am seeing on some channels. Some of it is truly awful - almost unwatchable at times. I read a few similar posts in this forum so I take it that it's not anything to do with my setup - it's just the way it is for everybody? I certainly wouldn't recommend this service to anybody at this stage, but is this the way digital TV has to be? Is there not enough bandwidth on the cable? The FTA channels are fine most of the time but I didn't need digital TV for that to begin with.

What channels are you having problems with?

Part of TCL's problem is that they are simply reencoding Sky TV channels. Since Sky are compressing the hell out of some channels because they have such limited space TCL reencoding an already heavily compressed picture combined with a decoder that only has composite out can obviously cause problems.

cokemaster

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#36771 26-May-2006 22:45

I find that the quality varies on different channels (and is it just me but programmes as well?).
Movie channels seem to be the most sharp for me.

Though I'm using Sky Digital (using Scart to Scart in component mode), not Telstra cable.

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#36784 27-May-2006 09:16

cokemaster: I find that the quality varies on different channels (and is it just me but programmes as well?).

Movie channels seem to be the most sharp for me.

Though I'm using Sky Digital (using Scart to Scart in component mode), not Telstra cable.

Movie channels are the best because they are played straight off tape (or disc now that Sky are finally moving to digital) and only reencoded once to send to their satellite. Some other Sky channels are received by satellite which is generally compressed anyway, then reencoded by Sky to retransmit up to B1. TCL are then reencoding some of those channels again for their digital platform which is why some TCL channels are crystal clear and some others really crappy.

ljbade

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#36786 27-May-2006 09:49

Why do Saturn re-encode Sky content?

Both Saturn and Sky use MPEG-2 so why not pass the data on bit-for-bit untouched? Surely it must be possible.

lchiu7

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#37014 29-May-2006 13:02

Not sure if they re-encode the video but if they do, perhaps because they want a different bit rate?

Also I have been told that TCL encode the movies that Sky Movies show so I am guessing that those movies would be passed along unchanged and also the best quality of any of TCL feeds.

From my experience the best channel is DW TV! Trouble is, I can only watch about 50% of the programming since I don't undertand German

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lurker

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#37083 29-May-2006 20:20

The compression does seem to vary, eg tonight's TV3 broadcast was poor, and the sports section was absolutely horrible. During the day, on kids's channels the Wiggles and Hi-5 can sometimes be very poor - hard to make out faces and with all the action the artifacting can be quite noticeable. Any channel with sports (ESPN etc) can look very poor plus programmes with a lot of fade effects, eg on the Living Channel a lot of the artsy programs seem to use a lot of fades which don't compress very well and can instead look like some mosaic transition. At the moment it doesn't appear to be constantly bad on the same channel because some nights it's acceptable. It's hard to say without running two TVs side by side and comparing a standard antenna setup to the digital TV. I think having higher quality outputs on the decoder might be a bad thing if it only shows up the defects more clearly - at least now it's blurring everything together and masking some of the artifacts. :)

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lchiu7

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#37282 31-May-2006 12:44

The difference is quite obvious to see for me. I run the coax directly into my TV and tune into the FTA channels to view them. I also run the composite video out from the box to the TV. I am using a 52" Toshiba RP DLP.

Switching from the composite video input to the antenna input it's pretty easy to see the differences. The digital signal has less noise but often is softer than the analogue signal( this could be the compression). TV1 seems okay most of the time. TV2 is fine for the most part but TV3 is markedly poorer on digital than analogue (for me).

Of course there is about a 2 sec delay between the digital and analogue picture which can be amusing at times!

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