Anybody watching the game? It's hard on my eyes, the picture keeps blurring, it's a very sharp picture and then the whole picture seems to go out of focus and gets blurry. That's a CBS problem, isn't it?

Oh and please spare me the rhetoric about who cares, nobody watches line.

NFL playoffs are on, going to be few and far between watching women's hoops today.

I watched a little of it. The quality wasn't bad, but sinc UConn was killing Purdue there was no point in watching.

If it was Uconn vs Tennessee or some other similarly better matchup, I'd have watched... but in a choice between a basketball blowout vs an NFL blowout, I chose to play on the computer :)

I didn't seem to notice the focus/smearing(Purdue got smeared throughout :) ) effect as much as the game progressed, it may have just been me, or my mind may have just adapted to it. I guess some of it may be just a difference between progressive and interlaced and the way my eye/mind perceives it.

I tried to watch the UConn Purdue game, Reb, but Purdue doesn't have the team they had last year. They don't even have a winning record!

That blurriness is coming from your local affiliate's encoder. If it can't transmit enough bits when it needs to, it will overcompress a frame making it look soft. You will see subsequent frames slowly sharpening it if you watch the on-screen graphics. This often happens because a subchannel also needed a bunch of bits a moment before and the HD channel did and the HD lost, but it can also happen without subchannels. The lower the bitrate, the more often this will happen.

I tried to watch the UConn Purdue game, Reb, but Purdue doesn't have the team they had last year. They don't even have a winning record!

That blurriness is coming from your local affiliate's encoder. If it can't transmit enough bits when it needs to, it will overcompress a frame making it look soft. You will see subsequent frames slowly sharpening it if you watch the on-screen graphics. This often happens because a subchannel also needed a bunch of bits a moment before and the HD channel did and the HD lost, but it can also happen without subchannels. The lower the bitrate, the more often this will happen.

Sounds reasonable, the local CBS doesn't have any subchannels, that I'm aware of, but it definitely exhibited the symptoms you describe, it was only brief when it happened, it did look like it came back into focus slowly, it was funny that it seemed to happen in the same camera angle, but it could have just been that I only noticed it from that one particular angle, background, contrast, etc was similar everytime.

Our CBS affliliate turns off its useless subchannel during sports events but recently chose to start throwing away the bandwidth-equivalent of one subchannel from their HD channel, therefore we always have the equivalent of at least one subchannel ruining the quality of the HD channel. I assume this is to condition us for the day when stations will make lots of money off of cheap subchannels while this HD fad will be a needless expense.

The sudden blurriness problem happened to many ABC affiliates a few years ago when NBA basketball started. It turned out that many stations had a buffering parameter set wrong on their encoders.

Sounds reasonable, the local CBS doesn't have any subchannels, that I'm aware of, but it definitely exhibited the symptoms you describe, it was only brief when it happened, it did look like it came back into focus slowly, it was funny that it seemed to happen in the same camera angle, but it could have just been that I only noticed it from that one particular angle, background, contrast, etc was similar everytime.

If you are in East Tennessee and not in the Chattanooga market then the local CBS affiliate DOES have subchannels. (Don't know about WDEF in Chattanooga) WVLT (Knoxville) has MyVLT2 and WJHL (Tri-Cities) has a weather channel. In fact, when WVLT puts up their logo on the HD signal (usually only when CBS shows a UT or a Titans game) it really makes the "action" look bad. Watching both OTA I can tell a big difference between the two and the best signal ain't WVLT.

I watched a couple of minutes of the game but found something better to watch. If it had been a better game and another team besides those cheaters at uconn I might have watched more of it. :p