help- got FIOS but HD sports PQ stinks - what can I do?

There are a lot of problems with FiOS -- reasons why folks would stick with the legacy cable provider or find some other alternative -- but picture quality is not one of those reasons. The service itself, as it is delivered into the customers' facilities, is generally considered to be "reference quality" for subscription television linear service. So while it is possible that there is a problem somewhere in the FiOS realm causing your issues (assuming that they really are "issues" as such), it is the least likely scenario, and you should focus on the chain from where FiOS service enters your premises all the way to, and including, your display(s).

A few notes though. Television is not intended to be watched frame-by-frame. While freezing a frame is a neat capability to have, especially with something like sports, the equipment that the broadcasters have to freeze a frame and display that to you is far more sophisticated than what we consumers have, and perhaps will ever have. So part of what you're seeing could be inherent in the limitations of HD, itself. ESPN HD is 720p, which is the best resolution used by any broadcast network for displaying action. Even so, it is not perfect. Time is continuous, while digital data is episodic, and therefore there will never be perfection of that sort.

Again, there is no question that bandwidth does affect what you're talking about -- the thing is that no one provides consumers more bandwidth than FiOS does. (Ask around; folks here know I'm definitely not a FiOS fan, but in this, I give them their due.) Unless there is something very strange going on, utterly unique to your personal situation, that's probably not going to be a fruitful path of investigation for you.

Cgott-

Are you seeing this on EVERY sports channel? In my opinion, there are some games on ESPN HD where the PQ is sub-par, and you'll see the macroblocking that you are referring to.

How does sports look on your system directly from FiOS? If the HD PVR you are referring to is this unit, then it re-compresses from an analog input which can cause degradation. Re-compression and rate shaping are reasons that the image degrades on other providers.

As mentioned, the issue could also be ESPN HD, which has had numerous comments about poor picture quality on some games. Night games are more of a problem as cameras are often required to have more gain, especially in 720P, which causes noise. This will degrade downstream encoding quality.

(The PP did mention that he checked this two ways, with his own PVR and a cable company DVR.)

But on two different displays and setups. How a display is set will affect the visibility of blocking artifacts. It sounded like the FiOS PVR was only tested on ESPN HD.

There simply is no better PQ than FIOS except maybe CBand. Id look at that DVR its recording off of component cables. Perhaps its defective or the cables are having a problem. I would get a real DVR like a tivoHD. I have 2. As far as sports go those feeds come from various sources and are sometimes bad.

Well, it is not clear yet that some thing is necessarily wrong. You may just be expecting more clarity than is available. Screen shots of what you're talking about will help readers better understand precisely the manner of degradation you're experiencing.

To assess FiOS picture quality, you need to connect the Verizon HD STB/DVR directly to your projector via HDMI and/or component. You're not going to get the results you want with the Hauppauge HD PVR.

I'll assume that you already have the Happauge HD PVR set to 13.5Mbps CBR; quality is awful if you don't. Even at the 13.5Mbps CBR setting, the Hauppauge still isn't able to pass much of the shadow detail in the image, so you're going to notice a softer image. The Hauppauge HD PVR also has more difficulty, quality-wise, when recording high-definition video with lots of movement. If you have a smaller screen, you may not notice; on a projector with a large screen, it's going to be obvious.

I wouldn't reach any conclusion based on that 58" DLP. I suspect some of what you saw was a 1080i output setting coupled with poor deinterlace performance of their particular TV. Many older DLPs effectively downconvert any 1080i signal with motion to 540p (i.e. they don't do motion-adaptive video deinterlace).

As alluded to above, production conditions / equipment vary by venue. As a result, some games will look noticeably better than others.

^^^Might review the threads in the HD recorders section about 1394 firewire on STBs and the thread on 1394 to Windows XP . (No idea whether FIOS STBs now/will output 1394.) -- John

All FiOS channels (aside from locals) are encrypted through Firewire, so that's not really an optionf or him.


You have no way to get coax to your viewing location?

Assuming you can get a high-speed network connection (but not coax) to your viewing location, then could get the Moxi + extender or a TivoHD + TivoHD to take advantage of multi-room viewing. For multi-room viewing, Moxi currently offers the better implementation.

Many local HD channels use excessive compression, as necessary to provide bandwidth for one or more subchannels. Verizon passes local channel as is, so you get whatever your affiliate offers (good or bad). If you want to see how they look without the Hauppauge, add an OTA tuner to your PC.

With a 720p60 sports broadcast on ESPN, you may have the "triple whammy" of lost motion information due to (a) 720p60 -> 1080i conversion, (b) low-cost, real-time MPEG-4 encoding, and (c) poor PC deinterlace of 1080i into whatever progressive resolution you send to your display.

That looks more like motion lag, not compression. It's definitely not a FIOS issue.

If you're referring to the comment directly above yours, it means your display is the issue, not FiOS.

But not independent of the path from digital video stream to binary file.

The upscaling of 720p content from ESPN-HD or ABC-HD to 1080p for use with your Projector will have PQ problems. I suggest that you try some HD sports content that is broadcast at 1080i from CBS or NBC so that no upscaling has to occur. The de-interlacers used in current 1080p display products do an excellent job of applying motion compensastion for 1080i content.

If NBC or CBS HD works at 1080i then you need to consider having your FIOS box do the upacaling and send 1080i to your PJ instead of you sending 720p to the PJ and having the PJ do the upscaling. One of them may do a much better job then the other.