pwhittle

Bought one of them new fangled wide screen TV (28" Sony, ex-demo, £97).
Pleased with the picture, colours much better than my old 25" (now dedicated to the PS2!). On some programs though, running through either of my digiboxes, there's an annoying amount of 'noise'. I'm sure there's a name for it, but it looks like each image is over-compressed, so you get a blocky image, like a photo taken from a phone. Some programs are fine, and I can't see a connection. OBs are worst (just as well I don't watch football).
I noticed this on the other telly, but not as much.

Is this common with digiboxes (I use a £30 one and a £100 one)? Is there anything you can do to reduce it? Or am I going to have to try Sky?

cheers

GC8

You should see how bad it is on my 40" LCD then! The issue is bandwidth; some channels have barely paid for any at all.....

davegtt

yup. the 37" plasma we have looks cracking with most programs we watch but one in say 5 channels its utter pants. usually something like UKliving etc which I dont mind as theyre **** channels anyhow. Misses doesnt watch all the repeats of Location Locations friggin annoying Location over and over which she probably would if the picture was great like other channels.

Oh and thats through NTL too.

EddScott

Don't know if its the same but on our Sony TV (not 100% sure its not the TV) when watching UKGold or UK drama or any UK channel the sound seems cut off at certain frequencies as if its clipped. Comes across a little crackly at times.

Another annoying issue with our Sony TV is that it automatically changes the aspect ratio. I've tried and tried to stop it doing it but it it'll jump from 16:9 Or whatever to 4:3 (you know what I mean anyway)

I've turned all the automatic actions off but it refuses to stop. It'll stay on Wide until the adverts and then keep switching all through the adverts.

davegtt

yup, thats the channel changing too. does your TV actually pop up with a message changing the ratio or does the picture just change with no message? when we turn the aspect ratio off ours and leave it on 16:9 it still does it on certain channels like UK gold and UK living etc but thats the channel not the TV thats doing it.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

The auto-aspect ratio is annoying - why can't all tv channels just transmits in one aspect ratio and be done with it

Ours works fine with 4:3, or 16:9, but doesn't like it keep switching, and doesn't like it when sky transmit a 2.35:1 film in 16:9 with black bars...it works better with the box set on 4:3, then the TV sorts it out perfectly and works finr with 2.35:1 DVDs

As for compression "blockyness" well if your signal strength is ok there is not much else you can do...welcome to the "digital era" where picture quality is "supposedly" better than terrestrial analogue

EddScott

It doesn't tell you, it just does it. Its seems alot more noticeable on the UK channels.

DO you get the odd sound from UK channels. If watching say re-runs of Top Gear on UK Documentary its like the higher frequency sounds are clipped and although its not distorted when people clap it sounds really crackly.

pwhittle

No sound probelms with mine, though when on 1 of the digiboxes, sometime the sound click off for a second, and the SMART and channel messgaes flick up. Only seems to be during ads.
One the expensive digibox, E4 has out of synch sound, we is so annoying you just can't watch it. I think I'll try an arial upgrade anyway.

dharbige

Does the TV have a 100Hz mode? This is supposed to improve the quality of the picture by interpolating between each of the normal frames. It works quite well from a good quality source, but as mentioned earlier in the thread, some of the Sky channels are not very good.
The 100Hz digitisation (digitization?) process could actually make the picture worse rather than better, and one of the expected effects would be a more pixelated picture.

If your new TV has a 100Hz mode, odds are it's enabled by default, so try switching it off.

GC8

The issue with Freeview is MPEG compression. Not all channels have similar bandwidth; think plumbing. BBC1 and ITV have a relatively big pipe; so their output isnt over (its relative...) compressed. Smaller channels can have less; some of the music channels seem to be transmitting from a GPRS telephone somewhere! In these circumstances, the bigger and beter your television set is then the more noticable it is. The over-compression manifests itself in two principal ways: artifacts, commonly seen around text and sharp edges, and; macro-blocks, most commonly seen in dark shots (where blocks of colour jump about) or high-motion shots.

I have no idea what sort of bandwidth is available but I recently compressed as 20+ minute 'Wallace & Gromit' film (320x240; 25fps) to under 75MBs for my PDA and it had fewer artifacts than ITV3!


Simon

Leslie

It is possible that your signals are being reduced between the aerial and the freeview box. It is worth fitting new cable from the aerial and making sure that the aerial connections and the plug at the other end are properly installed. Old coax can have bad losses on it and the freeview box is very sensitive to that.

Les

rik1471

Is your TV 100Hz?

pwhittle

checked and it isn't 100 Hz.
Found a noise reduction function, but it doesn't seem to do much.