V+ : QOS Value and other problems

[boragthung]

I have had a few problems with my V+ box over the last 18 month - 2 years, since I think that nationwide server/power breakdown that happened. I had an engineer out today and after replacing something inside the feedbox on the wall (can't remember what he called it) which was old and could cause signal leakage his tests said the signal levels were fine and DTV medic passed as well.

I had held off calling in faults for so long because of the amount of recordings I still need to watch and so was worried about a box swap losing them all.

The instigator to getting round to complaining was on Friday I noticed something that wasn't there before - the external cable box door was hanging off and when I investigated I could see a splitter attached externally and a cable feeding off this to my next door neighbour, with the thinner phone wire twisted on and also going next door.

I queried this with my neighbour when they were in later and apparently they had the installation over 3 weeks ago and they were told at the time that the engineers would return within the week to do the job properly as they didn't have the right equipment with them at that time. My neighbour had forgotten about it and they had not returned. I was pretty furious about this situation and the outright cheek of it, connecting off my line. It looked like some kind of amateurish pirate tap or something, not what I would expect from a 'professional install' !!

The Faults Engineer who visited me today has made a note to get this sorted out. What is extra annoying is the one line coming into me is split internally to feed the V+ and modem. With this botch job currently existing my one line is now feeding 4 items instead. I was told when I had my V+ swapped originally from my old standard box that in order for me to have an extra box they would have to pull in another feed from the street as there wouldn't be enough power to further split it. So how they can do this is beyond me.

Now for some questions if anyone knows the answers to or are getting the same:

In the technical settings menu where all the power levels,etc are listed there is the QOS value. In the past on my box it used to say something like bia.com or something like that. Nowadays this is just a jumble of letters, numbers, commas, etc - at the moment it looks like it should say ntlworld but jumbled up with wrong letters. What should this be and does it have any bearing on box performance (The engineer didn't know - but the box tests were all positive)?

Others issues I have had in the last couple of years include poor picture quality on some channels looking to me like poor encoding/decoding of the mpeg stream. This displays as the picture blocking into lower res and seems to 'pulse' between smaller higher resolution blocks and larger res blocks as if your eyes are blurring as you look at the picture. Originally this was happening on the SciFi HD channel and was absolutey horrendous. This channel seemed to get sorted some time last year I think. Now the same picture problem has been happening instead to 5* and 5 USA. After todays visit these 5 channels are still rubbish.

My recent web research seems to be suggesting that this is a Channel 5 lack of bandwith problem causing a low quality feed with lots of mpeg artifacts. The picture is almost too hard to watch it is that bad sometimes. This re-enforces my original idea of an encoding problem when I was getting it with SciFi. Living and ITV2 are channels that have suffered this type of problem for me as well in the past.

Does everyone else have this picture problem with 5 stuff? I can only assume this is the case and it is a problem not being caused by the V+ box itself. How can Five get away with such poor quality and for so long?

Another of the issues I get is a massive picture break up that seems to happen only around 21.30. (I am hoping this issue could have been fixed after todays visit). I don't fully know how to reproduce it but it doesn't seem to happen every night.

I am usually recording something between 20.00 and 22.00 most nights and quite often using two tuners simultaneously. The programmes I do record are pretty much always on the hour (8-9, 9-10) rather than half hour so the problem is not being caused by a new recording starting at 21.30. Sometimes I can be watching Live TV at this time, sometimes a previous recording, sometimes a current recording. I might even have the box in standby if I am otherwise occupied and watch the recorded programmes next day. When I get this issue it happens on live TV and recordings. I could be watching the previous nights 9-10 recording and see the break up half way through.

Another (or the same) issue I have is sometimes when watching a recording that seems to have gone alright I can get half way through and then I get a message 'thanks for watching this' and cannot see the rest. I think this issue is caused by the drop out that happens around 21.30 and maybe being so bad it corrupts the file beyond that point. Anyone else get this or have an idea what causes it?

[DaMac]

Can't answer all your questions mate, but i do know on my Samsung V+ if i am recording 2 HD channels and watching another, i tend to lose sound on the one i'm watching, or one of the recordings will be naffed, i think regardless of the fact you are supposed to be able to do this i think that you (we) are seriously hitting our band width at this point added to the fact that you are "sharing" your connection with your neighbour it's obvious you are going to get problems. As for dodgy installs VM are known for it, when i moved into this address, the installers came when i was at work, ripped the mini dish cables out of the wall and left them dangling in the alley way and installed the feed in there so they didn't have to drill a seperate hole. i was fuming when i got home, next door neighbours VM feed from the streets is on his flags, they told him they would be back to lay it under his flags "next week", he tells me that was 4 years ago!! I told him i really wouldn't have stood for that, he says he rang and rang when it first happened but no one ever came back.

[spiderplant]

The QOS is now a random string of characters, so you can ignore that.

There was a lack of bandwidth on the Channel 5 SD channels after they launched 5+1 on satellite, but it was supposedly fixed a month ago. Can anyone else check how they look now?

The breakup at 21:30 is likely to be caused by some local interference, such as someone's heating going on or off. Hopefully the work the tech did has fixed that.

[boragthung]

Thanks for your replies. As for the 5* and 5 USA channels - I checked for a while yesterday and they are still rubbish.I rarely watch these channels as there is only the odd programme I am interested in.

I remember when I was series recording a program on USA a while back I got so sick of the bad quality I thought I would try recording it from Satellite to an external hard disc instead. I was surprised to find the same picture disruption (although not quite as bad as cable) so at that point I did some web research and this is where I came across the opinion that there was maybe bandwith problems et al. Disgusting state of affairs really and I don't know how they get away with it.

I'm wandering if this also happens on freeview - that's if they are on there as I never actually use my TV tuner either.

I haven't really got the highest opinion of this so called superior TV digital picture technology. It can only be good with a properly high bit rate and encoding. All that happens in reality is that the smaller footprint of channels (compared to analogue) is abused to cram in too many channnels of poor quality with, well, mostly brain dead telly on them with the same prgrammes repeated endlessly on multple channels. I'd rather there were only a few channels with great picture and sound. I hark from the era of 3 channels. I must say the analogue terrestial picture used to be fantastic in the past.

As for the 21.30 break up it will take a few days or weeks to see if this has been rectified with the new isolator and new internal splitter the Engineer replaced. The only interference I suspected it could be would be changing levels in the National Grid. But all my AV equipment is attached to (an expensive) Belkin Pure AV strip which has line filters and everything so that should not really be an issue I wouldn't have thought.