Is it me or is it getting worse?

kevjs

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My Satellite Setup
28.2/5'E Zone 1 Mini Dish connected to DVB-S Tuner into TVHeadend/XBMC with a 60cm dish bought out for Astra 1 on Grand Prix weekends. With Android XBMC box in the kitchen too.
My Location
South Notts.
I always assumed that cable was worse because it took the feed off satellite. But that's an assumption. Did anyone compare Sky's and Virmin's outputs for picture quality?

Back in the day NTL used to take the regional channels off-air from the ITV Digital signals*. BBC ONE North on the Nottingham network showed this pretty clearly at times, a little bit of breakup here and there (despite the pretty impressive aerial array they have at their headend).

I believe they now they have national headends they get multiplexed feeds direct from Sky and Red Bee (who run the BBC stuff) though.

* I've always wondered where the Nottingham TV transmitter got it's analogue signals from - the adverts used to flick between Yorkshire, East Midlands and even London. Wasn't uncommon to see adverts for various Yorkshire places including Galaxy 105 one day, then London places the near (Heart 106.2 being a particularly common one) and then localish companies the next day. The picture flicking between 16:9 L/B and 14:9 L/B on different days also implies the sources changed and Channel 4 often suffered from MPEG breakup.
 

bim

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My Satellite Setup
humax foxsat Thomson Tsr200 Pace 3100 Black pro quad dvbs2 80 and 100cm dishes
My Location
croatia Lat 45.3301 Lon 14.1822
Simple question really, I've used about 4 different receivers (Humax box, two Samsung TVs and a Goodmans FreeviewHD+ box), and the picture quality is really getting pretty naff to my eyes on a lot of the mainstream channels, never mind the low-budget ones... :blink:

So is it just me or are they messing with the bitrates to the point where it's getting unwatchable? I mean, I have TV shows I've downloaded that are far better quality than the broadcasted versions, and they're not particularly high quality or resolution themselves, heck, the music videos they put on the old Windows95 CDs are higher quality, and they're videos from the 1990s, that's how bad it seems the be getting... :rolleyes:
Simple question really, I've used about 4 different receivers (Humax box, two Samsung TVs and a Goodmans FreeviewHD+ box), and the picture quality is really getting pretty naff to my eyes on a lot of the mainstream channels, never mind the low-budget ones... :blink:

So is it just me or are they messing with the bitrates to the point where it's getting unwatchable? I mean, I have TV shows I've downloaded that are far better quality than the broadcasted versions, and they're not particularly high quality or resolution themselves, heck, the music videos they put on the old Windows95 CDs are higher quality, and they're videos from the 1990s, that's how bad it seems the be getting... :rolleyes:

I would have to agree just lately over a period of time the picture is duller even with the contrast right up. I have also noticed we have to have the sound a lot higher and being a bit mut and jeff it's no joke. But seriously something is changing.
 

Channel Hopper

Suffering fools, so you don't have to.
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I am using a Sagem SD Freeview box and Panasonic tube TV on the Crystal Palace transmitter. No issues that I can see, channel quality (CCIR ?) appears to be the similar as it was when Freeview first started.

The LCD tv next door with built in (SD) Freeview is certainly lower quality, but I wouldn't expect a modern flat screen to work as well as a good old CRT. Upscaling same channels from the Panasonic dvr does make a difference though
 
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