Not happy with StarzHD quality

[ripnbigc]

Still, I'd rather watch OAR. I dvr'd Armageddon on Starz HD. The picture looked great. But it reminded me of old TV broadcasts.. starts out in OAR but once the credits are over, Mini P&S.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Still, I'd rather watch OAR. I dvr'd Armageddon on Starz HD. The picture looked great. But it reminded me of old TV broadcasts.. starts out in OAR but once the credits are over, Mini P&S.

Yeah, but compared with the non-anamorphic HUGE black bars (you instead of the 1" bars, it has about 2" bars on top and bottom) on the DVD of Armageddon I own, the HD version is awesome.

 

[ChetK]

I just cancelled HBO and Starz because I have a PS3 and watch Blu-ray in OAR.

 

[whatchel1]

How many

I just cancelled HBO and Starz because I have a PS3 and watch Blu-ray in OAR.

So how many B-R disc are out in comparison to the number of movies on HBO & Starz? I know that B-R & HD DVD's have superior image quality but I will wait out the format war a while so I can get a combo player at a reasonable price. Notice you said nada about Showtime. Didn't sub to it or still have it due to the original series they have on it.

 

[HDTVFanAtic]

Interesting. I wonder why there's no true MPEG4 on 129, just headered channels...?

Huh? You saying that ALL the different market HD LIL, NFL, HGTV, Food etc are all MPEG2 on 129W?

Been a while since I checked but I would be shocked that all those channels and transponders are back to mepg2.

 

[ChetK]

I don't have Showtime. I preferred HBO's original series' over Showtime's anyway. I just got tired of HBO's good original series' getting canceled or too long between seasons. Especially when I can watch them once they end on Blu-Ray in better picture quality without having to wait a week in between episodes. Much better that way.

There are more movies on Blu-Ray now (with more to come) than I have time to watch as it is. HBO's non-OAR policy combined with their rate hike coming in early '07 made it an easy decision for me. Starz' non-true-hd on E* made that and easy choice too. Sub-par HD is no longer going to cut it for a lot of people and I expect a lot of subscribers to bail out on their movie channel subscriptions.

 

[bytre]

Digging up an old thread.
So wanting a good copy of this movie, I decided to give it a try. Over the past 5-6 weeks, I recorded the movie 5 times. The first four were all mediocre. But the one I captured on 12/10, and just took a peek at tonight, was good.

It might be interesting to keep recording it to see if it goes back to mediocre.

 

[ripnbigc]

I'm gonna Dvr Underworld Evolution to compare the picture to my upconverting Dvd player.

 

[Tom Bombadil]

It might be interesting to keep recording it to see if it goes back to mediocre.

Good suggestion. So I did it. Today's (12/24) showing. Looks the same as the last one, the better one that I kept. Minimal compression artifacts, fairly sharp. Always hard to tell how good it could have been at full res and high bandwidth without a direct comparison.

This is an encouraging sign. Maybe E* is getting better at this MPEG4 thing.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Good to hear that Tom.


Starz has been good for me lately except for The Island, which had lots of pixelization.

 

[JimK2]

Good suggestion. So I did it. Today's (12/24) showing. Looks the same as the last one, the better one that I kept. Minimal compression artifacts, fairly sharp. Always hard to tell how good it could have been at full res and high bandwidth without a direct comparison.

This is an encouraging sign. Maybe E* is getting better at this MPEG4 thing.

Aren't they still xmittng MPEG2 in a MPEG4 wrapper. When they do or already have switched over to MPEG4, there should be 11%-12% improvement coding efficiency over MPEG2. Mark Jackson says if they could process off line, 50%
efficiency over MPEG2 could be achieved.

Some how there going to have to come up with a multi-pass VBR MPEG4 encoder that process in real-time.

 

[Tom Bombadil]

StarzHD off of 61.5 is in real MPEG4. And I believe it has been in MPEG4 from the first day E* offered StarzHD.

 

[gdarwin]

STARZ on 61.5 has been looking real good this week.

 

[dfergie]

Had no problems with 8 below last night off 129...

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Had no problems with 8 below last night off 129...

It looked great when we watched it a few weeks ago.

 

[gdarwin]

I'll add that we watched it yesterday - no problems.

 

[long_time_DNC]

I watched it earlier this past week...aside from signal loss incidents, it looked fine on 129.

 

[ripnbigc]

Armeggedon and Underworld evolution looked great on 61.5. Thanks E*, keep it up.

 

[dfergie]

I got slight Pixalation on Armageddon in a few scenes last night from 129, but it was certainly watchable...

 

[Tom Bombadil]

Caught a few minutes of "Cliffhanger" tonight on StarzHD. No compression artifacts to speak of, but it was soft, soft, soft. There was essentially no fine detail. Really sad HD. Looked more like DVD quality than HD.