Directv HBO-HD quality  

Feel free monster.
If it looks better and is important to you, go!
I notice some softness on D* but not enough to be a major problem.
Others find it makes them crazy.
If you have an option, take it.
(Oh, and welcome to the forum.)

monster,

You can always try Insight cable (without dropping DirecTV) to compare.

I would like to know if his other D* provided HD content is good or bad. i suppose its an all or nothing deal?

Well, WanMan, it IS his first post - and he doesn't seem interested in anything positive about D*.

So a person with one post isn't entitled to comment about the poor quality of DirecTV's HD programming when compared to something else?

The guy has a valid complaint, and nothing about his post really smelled of a troll, but that's just my opinion...

Did I miss something? I thought most everyone accepted the fact the HDTV picture quality on DirecTV is not as good as many cable systems, Dish Network or Voom.

I knew this and despite the fact that I put picture quality on top of the important pile - I still just switched to DirecTV just for the HD DirecTivo.

I'll only be a DirecTv customer until someone else has a decent PVR and doesn't screw with the HDTV compression. Who knows maybe DirecTv will quit screwing the PQ but I won't hold my breath!

People just need to decide what is most important to them and go that way!

This makes no difference if its his first post or not. He seems to know what he is doing considering that he posted in the right place, which many have trouble doing.

monster, I do not think this is going to help considering the advent of variable bitrates. Also, can you comment on the quality of your Discovery HD, HDnet, and HDnet Movies for comparison? Have you rebooted your STB recently?

There is a bandwidth crunch. Because each transponder on the satellite only has so much bandwidth they do what they can with what they have. It is rumored that they are giving the HD channels around 13mbs but I don't know of a way to verify that.

It would be great if they had the space to do a full 19Mbs but they would waste too much of their bandwidth to do so.

Hopefully things will get better with the new satellite they just launched but I don't think HD picture quality is high on their list of priorities. The local markets get them more customers and thus more money...

I haven't found any HDPVR that comes close to the HD DirecTivo - the 921 from dish has hope but not much. Here in Salt Lake Comcast doesn't have an HD PVR at all - they say a couple of months - they have been saying that for 6 months now.

Anyway - here's to the future of HD!

My quality on HBO HD varies from excellent to just very good. From time to time there are audio sync issues as well. DSC is consistently excellent. HDNet is up and down the scale.
Compression for most SD channels is not so good and I've noticed it's better at times. I.E. not consistent from day to day.

I'll be making an A/B comparison with VaVaVoom this week. As a 12 year DTV subscriber, I've been through many receivers and a premium subscriber about 50% of the time. That's a lot of money!
If Voom looks as good as the SatGuys forum members say, I'll be happy to say goodbye to D.
Their free everything install and no contract was just too tempting to not give it a shot.
PVR is not important for me yet.

Good Luck Guys
E

It's been reported in the past that DirecTV was overcompressing HBO. Personally I think it looks much better now than it did 3 months ago. However 18 months ago HBO was on the 101 satellite at the full bit rate for a while and it looked stunning. DirecTV thinks that 19.3 megabits per second is a waste of bandwidth, but it's really the same rate that would fit in a standard 6 Megahertz over the air channel which equals a conventional NTSC 525 line broadcast. In other words they don't want to give HD the same bandwidth that even an old TV channel has. If HD was taking up 12 Megahertz of bandwidth, then I might agree that it's wasting bandwidth.

Hey, I aurgued the same point when the created the HD package, too. This was before I broke down and took their discounted offer for the equipment. The $99 subsidy I got for the STB, 3LNB, and installation offset the $10.99 HD Pack pricing nicely. In the end if I chose not to stay on I would have paid $99+$109.90 for the STB/dish whereas BB wanted $600 for the STB alone.

Actually they could give the full 19Mbps by putting *one* HD channel on a transponder and filling the rest of the xponder bandwidth with SD channels ... they choose not to do this at the moment because it might mean moving some core channels off of 101.

HDC