Some cable and satellite providers compress digital signals way beyond what is reasonable. You lose your detail in the darkest and lightest colors when decompressed. On demand requires extremely large bandwidth (compared especially to a digial audio -- Sirius & XM) and thus will get more compression to send you the signal than HBO or Showtime (where you pay every month to get the HD feeds).

What kind of coverage do you want, Terry. The facts are just about the only True Hi-Def signal you will receive is going to be via DVD. For broadcast purposes the highest you are likely to see is going to be 720P or LESS. Remember broadcasters are businessmen, they can pack up to 4 different SDTV channels into the bandwidth of a single true Hi-def signal. Thus and this can be seen in many markets, the CBS affiliate may send out the standard CBS channel, PLUS a channel for Classic TV, plus a channel for SportsTV, plus one for Music all in SDTV, they can get up to 4 times the ad money...what would you do. Or they could broadcast the network signal in 720P plus one or two SDTV channels.<shrugs>

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I normally don't watch SD TV but, I was watching National Treasures 2 on Starz and it looked like so bad like truly bad bootleg movie. Same thing with Swing Vote.

I have HBO,Cinemax,Showtime and Starz and Starz really look bad. I call my cable company and all they said was we can trade out the box. I also have the HD channels but the other channels and on demand channels are digital. Starz digital look the wrost of all the movie channels.

It not a cable box issue!! They are sending a tech out to see what I mean Friday.

Quoting Randall_Lind:

Quote:
I normally don't watch SD TV but, I was watching National Treasures 2 on Starz and it looked like so bad like truly bad bootleg movie. Same thing with Swing Vote.

I have HBO,Cinemax,Showtime and Starz and Starz really look bad. I call my cable company and all they said was we can trade out the box. I also have the HD channels but the other channels and on demand channels are digital. Starz digital look the worst of all the movie channels.

It not a cable box issue!! They are sending a tech out to see what I mean Friday.

I have a buddy who moved into a brand new 14 story high rise and it offered, 6 appliances /black marble countertops as well as  cat-5 and coaxial as well as  high speed everything.
A real so called hi-tech bachelor pad.., and his Hi DEF TV setup  was deplorable.. It was dark/fuzzy and not very  impressive. He calls me over and I went thru all his wiring and took out anytype of questionable splitters, redid the whole hdmi/cable/digital box to hi-fi stereo etc etc  and could only recommend better wiring, (or a new TV,)  then we phoned the cable supplier had the 'box re-zapped.''., still the picture was not acceptable..
Cable tech came over later that week,  did what he could..... still nothing.
He was stuck with this scenario for days weeks ,, until FINALLY  after numerous calls the HI-DEF outlet or computer 'system' was checked from the source to the basement of this apartment tower and it was found that someone had not converted over the signal to some sort of special digital 'black box' that had to be upgraded to the apartments wiring., In other words the hidef signal was only normal grade ...  ....................   

Pardon me I meant BD DVD.

And I'll wager that you knew that, which leaves me to wonder, no not wonder, exactly what your motive was, as if I didn't know. Cliff a word of caution, I have forgotten more about video than you are likely to ever learn.

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Even if a signal is broadcasted in 1080p, it will in most cases still look less good as for example Blu-ray. Not only the resolution matters but also the amount of compression.

For example, I can make a 1080p encode of a movie that is only about 500Mb by compressing the hell out of the video and audio signal. It'll still be native 1080p, but the picture quality will be horrible because of the compression (loss of detail, pixelization, banding, etc).

Due to bandwidth constraints, I'm pretty sure that HD broadcasts have to compress more than Blu-ray and can't broadcast lossless audio as well. Perhaps in the future, that will change but I don't think it'll be in the near future.

Still, HD broadcast look much better than SD broadcasts, of course.

Quoting SpaceFreakMicha:

Quote:
Quoting Taro:

Quote:
Even if a signal is broadcasted in 1080p, it will in most cases still look less good as for example Blu-ray. Not only the resolution matters but also the amount of compression.

For example, I can make a 1080p encode of a movie that is only about 500Mb by compressing the hell out of the video and audio signal. It'll still be native 1080p, but the picture quality will be horrible because of the compression (loss of detail, pixelization, banding, etc).

Due to bandwidth constraints, I'm pretty sure that HD broadcasts have to compress more than Blu-ray and can't broadcast lossless audio as well. Perhaps in the future, that will change but I don't think it'll be in the near future.

Still, HD broadcast look much better than SD broadcasts, of course.

In addition to that: A very complex image is more difficult to compress using a low bitrate, TV broadcasts often use a master which has been "smoothed" (removed grain by using Digital Noise Reduction filters). The result: a less detailed picture which is easier to compress. Instead of more compression artifacts you'll get a soft picture which lost some of the details.

So resolution is nothing if all resolution details are filtered out to achive a better compression...

These are well-delailed versions of what I cited in post #2 above. Well done!

Probably that's the result of some broadcasters/channels applying more (or more smoothened) compression than others. Over here it's no different.