Virgin Media TV

[TheAnimus]

I'm really un-impressed with the quality of Sky and Sky HD.

Regular Sky is very heavily compressed, and looks worse than most rips do.

Sky HD is available on bugger all, and channels like sky one show how bad the upscaling on the non native HD channels is.

Even regular terristrail digital is better for SD.

So whats virgin like?

[BUFF]

even less HD available on VM.
I believe that people usually say that Sky picture quality is better than VM?

[TheAnimus]

SD sky picture quality is Poo.

their is sod all on HD.

[bigblue]

Then I wouldn't worry about Virgin, as there's even less HD there, and there SD pictures aren't much, if any, better.

Comparing SD pictures between the two services, there really doesn't seem to be much in it IMO. Some are better on Virgin, some are better on Sky.

There's plenty of movies and sports in HD on SkyHD now. If you don't like either of those it's not a great service, but if you don't like either of those then maybe a Freeview HD box if/when they appear would be the best bet.

I've bought a couple of Blu-Rays recently, compared them with SkyHD, and there's been so little difference between the two I've felt I've wasted my money. And I sat and watched the Blue Angels series back to back yesterday on Discovery HD, with my jaw firmly on the floor.

There's much more content on SkyHD now. Though, that said, I can watch Aquariavision every night !

[TheAnimus]

on a big screen, you can really see how badly compressed Sky's SD offerings are.

They look so much better on freeview, the word for it escapes me when the image is been overly compressed so you get a large colour difference between the larger rectangles. (you wouldn't know they educated us on image compression, fourier domain etc would you!)

As for HD, there is quite a difference between 720p and 1080p.

1080i isn't *that* bad for some things, but if you get anything thats particularly fast moving, it can become trying.

As it stands with Sky SD, a DVD is much better quality, amazing difference. Thats not to say theres not a marked difference between the Blu-ray, things like eye lashes seam more real.

(TV is a 52" 1080p samsung)

[jimborae]

First off Virgin is worse for TV, rubbish picture and and even more rubbish pvr box.

Secondly some SD Sky channels are very bad and some are very good for pq eg Channel 5 in the evenings usually looks very good. Dave on the other hand usually poor.

Thirdly is your LCD set up correctly, getting a decent picture out of an LCD, especially a large one, is not easy. Have you set it up correctly using a calibration dvd such as DVE or Sky Setup Programme which was broadcast on the Sky Arts channel.

Watching SD pictures on a large lcd is never going to produce a particularly good picture but the fact that you think you are getting a better picture from Freeview would tend to suggest that something is not right with your settings somewhere. What have you got the the Sky HD box output set to? Auto, 720p or 1080i

[TheAnimus]

720p right now, theres sod all else i can tweak.

seriously there is a marked difference in quality between sky and freeview, not only on the Sky HD, but also the sky+ on the 32inch in my room (thou i wasn't going to complain about that, as that could easily be SCART loss)

[bigblue]

Originally Posted by TheAnimus

on a big screen, you can really see how badly compressed Sky's SD offerings are... They look so much better on freeview, the word for it escapes me when the image is been overly compressed so you get a large colour difference between the larger rectangles. (you wouldn't know they educated us on image compression, fourier domain etc would you!)

seriously there is a marked difference in quality between sky and freeview, not only on the Sky HD, but also the sky+ on the 32inch in my room (thou i wasn't going to complain about that, as that could easily be SCART loss

I'd have to disagree, my day to day viewing is done on a 55" screen, and SD footage between the services looks equally poor to me. Some are better, some worse, on each service. I've viewed the various services on various TV's, and it's seemed the same on all. Guess it just depends on your sources and displays.

[nichomach]

Personally, I'm on a V+ box, and that handles SD very well; seems to scale up to the 40" 1080p Sammy nicely. There are fewer HD broadcast channels on VM, but don't discount the on demand content - there's a lot of free HD on demand stuff, and a reasonable number of pay-per-view HD movies.

[jimborae]

Originally Posted by TheAnimus

720p right now, theres sod all else i can tweak.

seriously there is a marked difference in quality between sky and freeview, not only on the Sky HD, but also the sky+ on the 32inch in my room (thou i wasn't going to complain about that, as that could easily be SCART loss)

Why is there "sod all else you can tweak"??? There's no wonder your picture is not it's best atm you're upscaling a standard definition signal twice. Once via the HD box (576p to 720p) and then the TV is scaling it again (720p to 1080p). If we're talking HD signal then you're still scaling the picture twice. Broadcast at 1080i, the HD box is then downscaling to 720p and then the TV is scaling it back up to 1080p

You want to try and scale the picture as little as possible so on the Sky HD box switch it to Auto. That will then force the telly to do all the scaling to it's native resolution without the box doing any. The Sky HD box is not particularly good at scaling pics.

Then start looking at calibrating your tv properly using the methods I mentioned previously.

[TheAnimus]

because i'm talking about SD pictures here, i've been playing at trying to get the best results, its not a case of scaling errors, its a case of compression, i really can't remeber the term for this but when we covered fourier compression methods it came up.

we get rectangles of totaly wrong colour, the adjacent rectangles can be seen to be right off. I've tried with all the settings, this is a consistant problem accross them all. Freeview picture looks a lot, lot better, even my flatmate (girl who thinks little of my tv penis extention) commented the day we had the sky installed how crap the picture was compared to the freeview.

[mikerr]

I didn't believe this at first, but there is a noticeable difference in picture quality between freeview boxes.

My newish wharfedale gives a much clearer picture than my old thomson,
I've put them on the same tv, same scart to test as I initially thought it was the difference in TVs...
Same with cable digiboxes, V+ is a better picture than the older SA4200 digibox.

As for SD vs HD, I find the bitrate is often more important than the resolution, compression artefacts, mosquito noise, poor fading etc all play just an active part in picture quality than sheer pixels.

Oh, and yes, freeview IS better than sky for many channels:

BBC resolution is 720x576 but freeview uses higher average bitrate
ITV1 544x576 on Sky, Freeview is 704x576 both 2.8Mbps
ITV2 544x756 on both Sky & Freeview with same 2.2MBbps
ITV2+1 is 720x576 on freeview (so basically better to watch this if you have freeview rather than ITV2)
CH4 544x576 @ 3.1Mbps on Sky, Freeview is 704x576 @ 3.6Mbps
Film4 544x576 @ 2.2Mpbs on Sky, Freeview is 720x576 @3.2Mbps

[directhex]

iirc virgin hd is recompressed mpeg2 from 1080i h264 sources - at a lower bitrate than the (more efficiently compressed) originals

[jimborae]

Originally Posted by mikerr

Oh, and yes, freeview IS better than sky for many channels:

BBC resolution is 720x576 but freeview uses higher average bitrate
ITV1 544x576 on Sky, Freeview is 704x576 both 2.8Mbps
ITV2 544x756 on both Sky & Freeview with same 2.2MBbps
ITV2+1 is 720x576 on freeview (so basically better to watch this if you have freeview rather than ITV2)
CH4 544x576 @ 3.1Mbps on Sky, Freeview is 704x576 @ 3.6Mbps
Film4 544x576 @ 2.2Mpbs on Sky, Freeview is 720x576 @3.2Mbps

Well I learnt something new there, thanx. Although I don't bother with Freeview as the reception is so rubbish in my area.

Going back to TheAnimus' problem then that would explain why he gets better PQ with Freeview. However I'll still maintain that the scaling is a problem that is compounding the compression issues and of course a heavily compressed image is always going to look worse on a 50" 1080p set than a 42" 768p tv.

Have you tried asking about this problem over at AVForums?

[TheAnimus]

jimborae, without been rude about it, i think mikerr has summed up what i was seeing nicely. I've been brought up an enigneer, so this wasn't me spouting placebo bollocks, and i think putting freeview back on the map might be a good option (the retarded sky engineer who did one of the worst cable installations i've ever seen, which my flatmate signed off for some reason, disconnected the UHF...) i'll run a UHF cable.

[jimborae]

Originally Posted by TheAnimus

jimborae, without been rude about it, i think mikerr has summed up what i was seeing nicely. I've been brought up an enigneer, so this wasn't me spouting placebo bollocks, and i think putting freeview back on the map might be a good option (the retarded sky engineer who did one of the worst cable installations i've ever seen, which my flatmate signed off for some reason, disconnected the UHF...) i'll run a UHF cable.

No problem mate, no offence taken

*jimborae skulks quietly off to the corner to give his Lumagen some luvin*