DirecTV troubleshooting

[Castlerock]

I recently moved and got DirecTV for NFL Sunday Ticket. I often like to rewind, pause and slow-motion the game. At my old house (with cable) the paused action looked like HD. Now, with DirecTV, the video quality is terrible. I cannot see where the ball is on the screen and cannot read uniform numbers. This is with the exact same TV. I am not a video expert, by to my uneducated eye, it looks like video compression.

I thought that DTV had as good or better picture quality than cable. Is there some setting which I can fix? I have a 1080 plasma tv.

[cartman]

I can think of two possibilities. One is the Video setting of the receiver. It might be set to 480i. If you hit Menu-Settings-Diplay-Video Resolution, make sure that 1080p is selected. If that setting is set and the picture is still bad, that sounds like maybe the satellite dish isn't pointed correctly.

[stevew]

Yeah it's gotta be outputting at 480i. Check the button on the front.

[Castlerock]

It says it's outputting at 1080i (I can't get it to output at 1080p) but I don't notice any difference between 480 and 1080.

[DanGarion]

You aren't going to be able to get it to output 1080p. 1080p is only on select PPV movies. 1080i is the only output.

You might need to grab your TV remote and confirm it is actually displaying 1080i as well.

[Castlerock]

You aren't going to be able to get it to output 1080p. 1080p is only on select PPV movies. 1080i is the only output.

You might need to grab your TV remote and confirm it is actually displaying 1080i as well.
That explains the 'missing' 1080p. Thanks.
I looked through the Samsung TV menu options and I'm not sure how to confirm it is actually displaying 1080i.

[APC]

As long as someone started a thread on DirecTV troubleshooting, I'll jump in w/ my own question:

This year w/ NFL Sunday Ticket, every time I switch games, a pop-up appears in the lower left portion of the screen telling me to hit the red button for enhanced features or some other button for some other things I don't care about.

This happens every single time I switch between games and I have to hit the exit button to get it to go away.

Is there any way to disable stuff like that?

[BillJasper]

I looked through the Samsung TV menu options and I'm not sure how to confirm it is actually displaying 1080i.

Usually, it is the 'info' button on the remote. I have an RCA and VIZIO and on both it is the 'info' button on the remote. It'll show on the screen.

[CraigSca]

Just as an FYI, when we lived up north, I went from DirecTV to FIOS as my provider. When I did so, I noticed that the resolution on my Samsung TV looked TERRIBLE. So much so that the technicians installing my FIOS (who insisted the picture is always better with FIOS as opposed to other systems) came out multiple times to fix the thing but were never able to. We ended up living with it because we had no other viable Internet solution at that time.

Anyway, the point is - sometimes there are incompatibility issues between certain TV vendors and TV providers. Were I not to see it myself, I would have never believed it. May want to just Google search your TV with DirecTV to see if anyone else is complaining.

From a pure troubleshooting standpoint, is the DVR hard drive actually in the device you're attempting to rewind with? Just wanting to see if maybe the program is stored on a different device than what it is playing on.

[CU Tiger]

Which directv box?
Traditional or Genie?
And were you also recording something else at the same time?

[Castlerock]

It's a Genie. I don't think anything else was recording at the same time but I don't know. It's not a one-time-thing.

I did confirm via the 'info' button on the TV remote that it is 1080i.

Below is a photo I took of a section of the screen while paused. It is a fairly accurate representation of what I am talking about. The poor image seems to be the worst when the image is moving. The two players are running and the image is blocky and looks like it has been compressed. Notice the stationary guy on the sideline is much sharper.

<a href="http://imgur.com/kG8tbnS"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/kG8tbnSl.jpg" title="Hosted by imgur.com"/></a>

[BillJasper]

Looks like the image is being overly compressed.

[BillJasper]

Have you ran other equipment through the same input to make sure it isn't an issue with the TV?

[jbergey22]

I hate talking to them people as much as the next person but have you tried that? HA! Its possible it is an equipment problem. I had a problem with their genie dropping my internet connection all of the time so I had a hard time watching VOD. Of course they had no solution so I had to eventually figure it out on my own but every once in awhile they may be able to help on something:)

Did you do a system reset on your genie? Or try unplugging your TV and plugging it back in?

[cartman]

How are you connecting the Genie to the TV? Is it HDMI, or Component? As mentioned above, try running another source through the input, as well as try a different set of cables between the Genie and TV.

It might also be a picture mode setting on your TV. Samsung usually has four: Dynamic, Standard, Movie and Custom. You might try the first three, and if it still doesn't look right, there are tons of options under Custom.

[CU Tiger]

Genie. Check.
How many "sub" receivers do you have feeding off it?
Are you using a SWM 16 or SWM 8?
How long is the cable run from the dish to the SWM?

You didnt add any splitters into the system did you?

Genie has 5 tuners, that is traveling through a limited bandwidth that is restricted by cable cross space (this is assuming 95+ sig strength...if not the dish needs re pointed) If multi other mini's are used the Genie compensates internally by "storing" at a reduced frame rate...not a reduced definition"

The result is frame by frame looks like pausing an old school VCR as * I think* it can downrate as lows a 2 frames per second.

[CU Tiger]

Let me take a step back and make sure I understand the problem before I chase a squirrel up a tree when we are coon hunting.

During normal viewing the picture quality is fine, correct?
The fidelity issue only comes up when watching replay and slowing it down or pausing it?

If so its not a "problem" so much as a design decision but we can minimize it by answering the above questions.

[CU Tiger]

Such an unfulfilling resolution...

[Castlerock]

I will respond... out of town for a couple of days.
This board is great. So much different knowledge and folks willing to lend their expertise.

[SteveMax58]

Below is a photo I took of a section of the screen while paused. It is a fairly accurate representation of what I am talking about. The poor image seems to be the worst when the image is moving. The two players are running and the image is blocky and looks like it has been compressed. Notice the stationary guy on the sideline is much sharper.

Assuming your RF signal is good to great.....

The bolded part is one of the key efficiencies in compression. Its motion blur, a tool for a video encoder to use, with the thinking that as you watch it in realtime, you don't notice the blur (much) because your eyes can't track that fast anyway. Some people (with very good eyesight) may have an overall loss of detail feeling, but you wont feel like you missed anything generally if the encoding system is given "enough" total bitrate to work with (which is a key difficulty in managing several hundreds of programs/channels when you have finite bandwidth to the home). While it might be desirable, the quality when pausing/slow-motion isn't likely a key factor in how the DirecTV engineers handle these (unfortunately I know).

You'll probably notice better video quality when there are less games playing (either a bye week for some teams, or even at the 4pm EST games) as the NFL ticket is statistically multiplexed (statmuxed). That means they allocate a fixed total bitrate to all the games, and allow their encoding system to dynamically make bitrate allotment to each program (or channel) as the encoding system sees fit. This tends to work best with mixed content types (like news, sports, movies, etc.) but given the NFL ticket is a once a week thing, likely the aggregate is easier to manage as a fixed allocation (for business rules), in addition to shortening tuning time (making it quicker to flip back/forth between them) and making it easier to record multiple games on the DVR (i.e. using less tuners than if you scatter them about all the satellite transponders...which is how they are able to do the 4 local broadcaster DVR'ing at once as FYI).

If you were watching that game on your local affiliate, it would likely look better (even on DirecTV). Its hard to say all video looks better on Cable vs DirecTV vs Telco as each service is managed differently even within a given provider. I happen to work in cable (have worked with Telco and know a lot of people in the industry generally) and like to think "my" quality is better than the competition but thats not really fair to say universally across the board (nor can I singlehandedly control EVERY factor that might appear as a video quality issue such as bad RF).

Sometimes TV settings will exacerbate compression artifacts. You may want to run thru your TV settings and customize it to the DirecTV video. Personally, I have only seen a handful of TVs that actually have any ability to improve the video quality over what the video provider is sending you...and many more that will simply screw it up more. After all, the missing information (which is what compression is doing in this case) relies on the decoding device (which is the Genie in this case) to "figure out" the missing pieces by inference. If the TV has the horsepower (processor) to do deep video analysis in realtime then great, but I would personally disable any & all settings that appear intended to "correct" the video such as "MPEG noise filter", "Noise filter", "Enhanced Picture mode", "Auto Picture Correction", "Deblocking Filter", and the list goes on & on. You can turn 1 at a time on if you really want to see the effect it has, but I will caution you that most compression artifacts that are upstream of DirecTV are uncorrectable so only try this with the NFL ticket or something else thats likely DTV's doing, and not likely to be the content provider.