TiVo : sky sports 2 sound sync

[spiderplant]

Originally Posted by BrightonJohn

Good question - I would have to guess that we get the feed on TiVo from different SKY dishes locally - so down here they are based at Shoreham Harbour (I believe) and then distributed across our local cable network. BUT I could be totally wrong about all or any of this. Are there any reliable websites or journals that discuss how all of this stuff works?

cableforum.co.uk is as reliable as it gets

VM acquire almost all channels centrally in Langley, so they start out the same. The sync should stay the same as the signal progresses throughout the VM network, as it is encoded into the digital signal. But once it's into the decoder in the STB, and through the equipment in your home, there is the potential for a little delay to the audio and/or video at each stage. If the audio and video get delayed by similar amounts, they cancel each other out and end up in sync. On the other hand, if either the audio or video gets consistently delayed more at each stage, they can end up a long way out. The delays might vary depending on things as subtle as which video resolution you use.

Also some people are more sensitive to sync issues than others.

[BrightonJohn]

Originally Posted by spiderplant

cableforum.co.uk is as reliable as it gets

VM acquire almost all channels centrally in Langley, so they start out the same. The sync should stay the same as the signal progresses throughout the VM network, as it is encoded into the digital signal. But once it's into the decoder in the STB, and through the equipment in your home, there is the potential for a little delay to the audio and/or video at each stage. If the audio and video get delayed by similar amounts, they cancel each other out and end up in sync. On the other hand, if either the audio or video gets consistently delayed more at each stage, they can end up a long way out. The delays might vary depending on things as subtle as which video resolution you use.

Also some people are more sensitive to sync issues than others.

But then I would expect to see/hear the same problem with Dolby Digital Sound from, say Neighbours on Channel 5 HD or SinBad on Sky One HD but neither of these are anything as like as far off as the guys talking about cricket on Sky Sports 1 HD. Why should my kit treat Dolby Digital sound differently from different channels? I am assuming that my Onkyo is not lying when it shows Dolby Digital and all 6 (5.1) speaker icons are illuminated??

Checking Sky Sports 1 HD this morning and where it isn't broadcasting in 5.1 it is still out of sync while Sky Sports 2 HD is in sync. BBC1 HD, again not in 5.1 is also perfectly in sync. So, for the moment, I'm forced to conclude that Sky Sports 1 HD has some sort of problem generally, at least by the time I get it in Brighton, and one which is worse when in 5.1.

[spiderplant]

They may have different sync offsets at source. Or be using different video or audio encodings that take different lengths of time to decode.