Quote:
Originally Posted by gordyb
To say that a vast majority say there is nothing wrong with the SD on Tivo and a very small amount of people have problems with the SD on Tivo is ridiculous,there is a far bigger round of people who are not happy with the SD quality than you are saying,if you want the evidence look around its not difficult to find.
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I didnt say the vast majority where happy and I didnt say a very small amount of people where unhappy. If you check the Tivo support forum its split 50 50 between people who are happy with the pq and people who arent. Sort out the signal levels seems to improve the pq.
Heres two qoutes from one person over there: Maybe of some help to you Ken
This is his initial thoughts
"I just switched from Sky, and the picture quality on most SD channels is really terrible. I'm pretty technical and have some experience in the DVR building area, so I don't know if maybe these observations tie in with anyone elses experience or understanding...
1. There is an element of this that is down to the TiVo upscaling badly. This is confirmed by the fact that if I set the video output of the TiVo to 576p only (so all the upscaling is being done by the TV), the quality of SD channels increases noticably (to the point where they are at least comparable to Sky). Unfortunately this is not a "solution", because then the whole interface and all the HD content is output at only standard def.
2. It is not *all* down to the scaling, because one of the main problems that I see (especially noticable on scrolling text on the BBC News channel for example) is a lot of compression artefacts around the edges of the text (i.e. "macroblocks"). Now my first assumption was that the stream coming in from Virgin was very compressed, but based on the fact that people here are saying that reverting to a V+ box gets better quality, the only remaining explanation that makes sense is that on TiVo you are not seeing the live stream even when you watch live - it is compressing/storing the stream and then you are watching the output of that process.
On the upscaling front, I guess it comes down to whether they scaler is hardware or software. If it is software, and if there is enough CPU headroom on the box, then it is conceivable that they could push an update that would improve the quality, but if it's a hardware scaler then we're permanently screwed. The only light at the end of the tunnel here is that i think it must be a software scaler, just on the basis that I can't imagine a hardware scaler ever being that bad
For the compression - that's just irritating. They've given me a box with a *terabyte* of storage, there's absolutely no need to be heavy handed with the compression. You'd seriously hope that they could either flick a switch to turn down the compression (at the expense of the amount of TV recordable of course), or at least give the option to change the quality settings.
Out of interest, for anyone who switched from Sky - the reason Sky doesn't have these problems is that the Sky box just records the exact incoming bit stream, and then plays recordings back in exactly the same way they were coming in live - TiVo on the other hand has to reconstruct the incoming stream into a displayable format, then recompresses itself, so it is inherently going to be a little lower quality than Sky.
And to the people on these forums who are blaming the old codecs used for the problems - that's not really a fair argument. Newer/better codecs allow for better picture quality at any given level of compression, but there's nothing about the old ones that is inherently going to give you a worse result, it just means that you are going to have a larger file size to get the same level of quality.
Now I have the extremely difficult choice of having to decide which is more important to me - TiVo features, or Sky quality (in which case i've only got a few more days in the cooling off period to get Virgin to get rid of the TV service).
I suppose I could stick with Virgin TV now and get them to take the TiVo and give me a V+ box, but i've heard fairly bad things about the usability of the V+ box, and I wasn't actually unhappy with Sky - I only moved because of TiVo. Anyone in the same position?"
And after an engineers visit:
Ok, interesting development/s. The Virgin engineer found that the (signal strength?) was way out of acceptable tolerance (whatever he was measuring, he said that it should be between -2 and -15, and that he found mine to be +5). So he fixed that. I also did a "connect to the virgin network" thing in the settings/network menu, which i'm guessing maybe among other things checks for firmware updates? (just a guess, but whatever it did it took frickin' ages to download something). I also rebooted the box for good measure.
The result of these three things (the engineer's change, the update and the reboot) is a really significant improvement in SD quality, definitely in general clarity of the picture, but I swear there are also fewer compression artefacts. I'm not saying that the level of compression changed somehow, but anyone would notice the difference. I have photos of some of the artefacts on BBC News from before, and they are barely visible now.
I don't know which or how many of these actions contributed to the difference (and i'm kicking myself for not having noted the software version beforehand). I'd love to think that a firmware update happened / made a difference, because that means that Virgin are actively improving things all the time, and makes me optimistic that some of the other minor niggles (some menus not in HD, the ~3sec delay to get the Home screen up, the occasional missed keypresses where the interface doesn't keep up with you, the stuuupid PIN situation and the long hangs when editing some series links for example) might well get addressed too.
Anyway, i'm definitely much happier, and definitely going to stick with Virgin/TiVo.
NickO - Good to see you guys read your forums and take notice. What's the proper/preferred mechanism for reporting non critical bugs and feature requests? If I keep calling customer service about them they're just going to think i'm a crazy person. "
So some hope there for you MrOliver
Regards
John