I'm in a Comcast area, and they recently added National Geographic HD... it has to be the WORST picture quality I've ever seen on an HD channel. Seriously... it looks like someone took a video off of YouTube, blew it up, and decided to broadcast it. Upconverted SD looks about 5 times better. I'd rather watch TNT Stretch-o-Vision, it's that unwatchable. Constant macroblocking, even with there's no motion on the screen.

Now, it's my understanding that Comcast prides itself on passing the straight feed through and not doing any re-compression or re-encoding on its HD channels. Is that still true? If so, is anyone on another provider seeing these huge PQ issues?

The national geographic 'sneak peaks' on DirecTV are on par with DiscoveryHD... don't know why you'd be getting such terrible PQ...

I'm in a Comcast area, and they recently added National Geographic HD... it has to be the WORST picture quality I've ever seen on an HD channel. Seriously... it looks like someone took a video off of YouTube, blew it up, and decided to broadcast it. Upconverted SD looks about 5 times better. I'd rather watch TNT Stretch-o-Vision, it's that unwatchable. Constant macroblocking, even with there's no motion on the screen.

Now, it's my understanding that Comcast prides itself on passing the straight feed through and not doing any re-compression or re-encoding on its HD channels. Is that still true? If so, is anyone on another provider seeing these huge PQ issues?

Same problem as you, it's horrible, like looking through venetian blinds, got to be some kind of technical glitch on comcast's end, it is unwatchable, I'll give them a few days, we only got the channel this week, so I'll wait before I complain too much, but it is totally fubared currently.

I would definitely agree that some of the programming looks like crap, but others look fine. The recently released programs look fine, like the Explorer series(inside North Korea for example) and the Lockdown series.

720p

720p

??

Looks every bit comparable to Discovery HD on Cox in OKC. Must be a local thing with Comcast. Although not all of their shows are widescreen, the ones that are and are native HD resolution look fantastic. :)

??
National Geographic HD is a 720p channel, but that is not the issue here. NG HD looks good to me on Verizon Fios. Most of the stuff, if not almost all, of the programs on NG HD are true HD, though there may be some upconverts in the nature footage. The problem is probably with Comcast. Call and complain about the picture quality.

Looks every bit comparable to Discovery HD on Cox in OKC. Must be a local thing with Comcast. Although not all of their shows are widescreen, the ones that are and are native HD resolution look fantastic. :)

I have no doubt it's a local issue, there are 12 thin horizontal lines evenly spaced from top to bottom, that are terribly macroblocked, but the image looks very sharp, where the lines aren't, at least on scenes without a lot of motion. It's evidently some kind of misconfiguration in the signal comcast is sending.

Comcast in Lansing got NGC back in early April and its PQ has been fine. There have been some very olf film transfers that have been grainy, but I'm assuming thats just the transfer process.

Most have been very nice presentations

I have no doubt it's a local issue, there are 12 thin horizontal lines evenly spaced from top to bottom, that are terribly macroblocked, but the image looks very sharp, where the lines aren't, at least on scenes without a lot of motion. It's evidently some kind of misconfiguration in the signal comcast is sending.

It has been fixed here, sometime today, got home this evening and it looks fine now.