Re: unbiased answer needed NTL vs SKY PQ
 

Personally I would say the Ntl picture is very, very slightly better on some channel.

90% you can't see the difference but a few times some of the Sky channels have been a little bit blocky on both my boxes.

TBH its not enough of a difference to be noticeable unless you are looking for blocks etc.

Re: unbiased answer needed NTL vs SKY PQ
 

I've been pretty disappointed with the quality of the NTL stream, in comparison with the DVB-T broascast i've been watching for the past few months. I recall sky was pretty iffy as well. I'd gladly ditch all the +1 channels and the info channels and the radio channels to give the extra bandwidth to the remaining channels. I'd have thought that VOD would've given them extra bandwidth to play with. Perhaps when the entire UK goes VOD for the channels that'll be changing, the bandwidth will be redistributed?

Re: unbiased answer needed NTL vs SKY PQ
 

Or even something less sinister such as a more efficient refresh rate on the TV (100hz as opposed less)? Scart connection quality can also play a major role in picture quality.

As an example - I have sky (I don't live in a cabled area), and have two boxes connected to two 32" TV's. The TV's are different (one is Sony and the other is Samsung) and the Sony has a refresh rate of 100hz with gold plated scart leads etc..... the picture quality is marginally better than the Samsung TV... but becomes noticeable during fast paced action as you say.

Oh yeah.... Let's not forget that weather still effects the signal on Sky and during heavy wind, hail etc.. your picture may break up or freeze.

I am being honestly unbiased here - but there should be extremely little difference between the both in terms of quality. Cable should, in theory, offer better performance than a satellite stream, however I don't think that cable/fibre optic supplies have yet been used to optimum efficiency.

Re: unbiased answer needed NTL vs SKY PQ
 

According to other posters (Tristan, I think), for most channels, NTL just send out exactly the same signal that's output from Sky or Freeview (no recompression). For Sky One, and the Sky sports channels, they recieve an uncompressed signal, which they compress at a higher bitrate than Sky do.

So, in theory, the picture on those channels should be better on NTL than Sky. In practice, it depends on a lot of things, such as quality of decoding circuitry (play a DVD on a cheapy DVD player, then a top of the range one for a demo of that), quality of display device, cabling etc.

As for compression method, well, all Digital broadcasting in this country uses MPEG 2.

Re: unbiased answer needed NTL vs SKY PQ
 

I can count the number of times that weather has affected my Sky signal on the fingers of one hand. However when I had NTL DTV very hot weather always used to affect picture quality with plenty of dithering and freezing going on. A few box swaps and engineer visits never solved the problem. Swapping the NTL box for a Sky+ box did. :)