I am thinking of switching from Comcast to Directtv. On the surface it seems a bit cheaper to get the full HD package (69.99 after the first year, and I pay about $82 for comcast).

Are there any hidden fees associated with DirectTv? How is the HD quality? Is it really much better than cable?

Thanks.

Glad you posted, because I have a similair post on another part of the forum asking the same exact thing!! Only my cable bill is $100, minus broadband.

Most say D* kills the image due to compression (they use MPEG4) and have to scale the image down to 1280x1080 then stretch it back up. I have Comcast in the Indianapolis area, and have been pleased with HD quality (SD are another story).

D* is also "supposedly" coming with over 100 more channels by the end of this year. Whether or not this will actually happen is another story, similair claims are being made by almost every other sat and cable company. If that is true and they come through with the added channels and bring back up the bandwidth on HD channels, then D* will be a no brainer!

Dish Network is also another option as they currently have a better HD lineup than D*, but I have heard some say on here that they are running into similair compression issues. Does anyone know D*'s cancellation policy? If we sign up for service and the quality isn't near as good as Comcast, do we have an option to opt out?

"Most say D* kills the image due to compression (they use MPEG4) and have to scale the image down to 1280x1080 then stretch it back up."

That would be slightly wrong. They use MPEG2 for their current national HD channels and all the 1080i channels are downrezzed to 1280x1080 due to lack of bandwidth on their existing sats. The only HD channels taking advantage of MPEG4 currently are local HD channels and HD regional sports networks.

"D* is also "supposedly" coming with over 100 more channels by the end of this year. Whether or not this will actually happen is another story, similair claims are being made by almost every other sat and cable company."

D* is launching two new sats to give them capacity for up to 150 national HD channels using MPEG4 and also additional spot beam local capacity. As long as the sats go up with no problems, this should happen as planned.

Personally I'd hang tight and see how the new sats go and take it from there instead of committing to a contract with either sat provider. I'm doing the same before I pay to upgrade my D* equipment for MPEG4 and get stuck in another two year contract. My cable company is supposedly going to finally offer HD also so we'll see how that goes. :)

Thanks for the reply Matt!

Will the added sats also help with the downres? Or will that continue?

No way to tell until someone can capture and analyze a stream to see what resolution it's being sent at. It was possible to modify older D* receivers to add firewire or USB outputs which could be used to capture video to a PC, this is how people figured out D* was downrezzing their channels. It's not possible to do the same thing with the new receivers.

I would expect they designed the new system to allow full resolution while using MPEG4 which can compress the data tighter then MPEG2. Starting with downrezzed channels right out of the gate wouldn't be a good move.