Which game?

The Detroit game looked like it was 720p.

The Anaheim game looked 1080i but there was some wicked ghosting going on. It was awful.

I'm switichng between the two hockey games, CBC HD and TSN HD.

Is it me or TSN HD is not HD at all? CBC HD looks so much better then TSN's HD broadcast.
Tonight the CBC game (Pit v. Ott) looks like widescreen SD on CBCHD, while the game on TSNHD (Was v. Phi) looks pretty good.

The games in Pittsburgh are in SD, but the games in Ottawa will be in HD. It has to do with the availability of HD trucks, or so they say...

The Montreal-Boston game on 209 (CBC) had horrible macroblocking for me.

Whenever a player would score, and skate by their team's bench, you couldn't see any detail, just a blur of coloured blocks.

Great to know Shawdy is making $100 million a month giving their customers steaming crap on a plate.

The Mtl/Bos game was great for me. Exceptional sound and PQ.

I have found the CBC SD feeds to be noticeably worse than the TSN SD feeds. I'm watching on Shaw. Sorry if you guys don't talk SD anymore, I couldn't find a more apropriate forum. I know some CBC guys read this forum from time to time.

All of the HD I have seen this playoffs has looked great. San Jose / Calgary last Thursday on Shaw looked wonderful, except for the result.

I watch HD sports at my health club, but have SD at home on good CRT sets. I'm not comparing HD to SD.

Next time there is Hockey on TSN and CBC at the same time, have a look at the difference between the two SD feeds.

On my bedroom's CRT I had wicked macroblocking on the Mtl-Boston game. Oddly enough on my plasma the upconverted SD looked fine.

I've noticed that TSN's HD feeds from Versus have looked really bad for ghosting, macroblocking and such...especially the Anaheim-Dallas games.

I was watching the Cal-SJ game last night (CBCHD, 209) and noticed the picture quality was pretty grainy versus what I've seen in other games. The same was for the MTL-BOS game. Have others noticed this? Are they simply upconverting an SD signal for these games on HD? Hardly HD quality.

The games on TSN seem to be OK, but the Versus games they're showing seem rather ghosty (as others have remarked). They're otherwise pretty clear.

The other thing that gets me is I often see that the video and audio are a bit out of sync. I notice it during the intermissions when you actually see the person talking. Is this a common thing?

All of the SJ @ CAL and MTL @ BOS games were upconverted widescreen and looked absolutely....terrible!

To me those games looked almost better than the HD ones, because of the lack of macroblocking.

Here's how great TSNHD hockey has looked on $haw. I diconnected from my splitter to se if somehow that would help too...these are the sans splitter pictures.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v405/jfplay/colorado-minny001.jpg

This one doesn't show up so well, btu the puck has just left the shooter's stick...the camera hasn't moved yet to follow the shot and everything starts to look like I'm three sheets to the wind.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v405/jfplay/colorado-minny003.jpg

Pom Poms= Macroblocking!

But this one is my favourite....

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v405/jfplay/colorado-minny005.jpg

This was simply the camera man tweaking his focus on Lemaire's face....not even a rapid rack focus, a slow tweak and I got blocky goodness!

Over here on Bell the CBC feed is uncompressed, and i'm getting the same thing with the boston game, but this only happens when the game is in Boston. When the game is Montreal on CBC it looks impecible on Bell

Did anyone else in Winnipeg (or elsewhere) notice that, as of last night (April 17), on several HD channels (202, 209, 211, 212, 216, 221 for me) intermittent blocking/breakup was visible along the far right edge of the image; primarily in the top third region (almost like an underscan issue but at times a finger of blocking/breakup would shoot leftwards a few inches, then correct itself - again located primarily in the upper right region of the image). I was also getting, for the first time, a quick fluttering/flickering of the entire image (three or four quick flickers over a half second) shortly after tuning into one of the channels mentioned. Typically, it would only happen the once, approx. 2 seconds after the channel info bar disappeared, and not repeat while I remained tuned to the channel (except 202 where on occasion it flickered in two short bursts about 5 seconds apart before stabilizing.)

On a separate topic, I was noticing the white "flashes" on TSN's HD feed of the hockey game last night similar to what has been observed by myself and others on channel 209. As I've only seen it occur during hockey games, I'm wondering if it is the result of a specific wavelength of light being reflected off the ice, etc. which the HD camera lenses cannot handle when received from a particular angle, much like looking suddenly into the sun.

My system: Pace STB-->Vp50pro scaler-->Pioneer 5010FD

[PS: For Shaw CSRs and TSRs reading this - the audio dropouts on the HD service are present using the Pace unit as well. It's not a Motorola STB specific issue]

I didn't notice any of these issues.

Is it just me or does HD in Vancouver look like crap. I just got it this week and am pretty dissapointed by the quality.

Everything looks grainy.

Today's detroit game is just a game of boxes pretty much. Even the New York/Jersey game isn't all that great.


Anyone else getting this?

Some programs are not broadcast in good quality HD to start with. But there is also a generic problem with all of Shaw's HD channels... they are overcompressed. Shaw squeezes 3 HD channels into the bandwidth of 2. It is sometimes nicknamed "HD Lite" by those who know what they really should be getting.

This overcompressing results in frequent macroblocking.

Here's a couple of pictures I took of macroblocking on Shaw HD:
fullscreen.png (http://technut.canada.googlepages.com/fullscreen.png) (1.5MB)
partialscreen.png (http://technut.canada.googlepages.com/partialscreen.png) (1.5MB)

In my experience it is most obvious during fast action (lots of movement) or immediately after a scene transition. Scenes with strobe lights also have loads of problems.

See this thread (http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=84230) for more information and consider filing a complaint with the CRTC.

Not excusing current issues, but keep in mind that MPEG2 at HDTV resolutions will have difficulty keeping up with fast action and scene transitions, even at full HDTV bandwidth. Strobe lights are probably impossible. Especially for live events (the encode of a taped event can be tweaked somewhat to ensure maximum picture quality). Another problem area would be a screen full of confetti. There's simply too much changing on screen for MPEG2 to handle within the bandwidth constraints of the HDTV standard...so even full bandwidth will have macroblocking.

Squeezing 3 channels per QAM256 exacerbates the problem as it lowers the bandwidth limit even further.

Again, not excusing current issues. I've seen more marcroblocking than I used to...and I'm not happy about that fact. Just saying that we shouldn't expect strobe effects to look very good at all.

Understood, but without the original signal to compare against, it is rather difficult to say exactly how much better it would look without Shaw's additional compression.

We can stop blaming Shaw for our crappy HD when Shaw stops tampering with the original signal.

Note on the "white flash" thing during hockey games. Was doing some work in the basement today and had the Detroit/Nashville game on CBC, the SD channel since I was watching it on the 14" tube TV with a Shaw DCT 2500. White flashes were there.

CBC had that detroit/nashville game in widescreen SD, while NBC had it in HD. I don't get why CBC doesn't strike some agreement with the US channels to use their footage, and just stick their score bar and commentators over it.

It almost makes you dread it when a hockey game is on CBC, because in the playoffs, more often than not is in SD, while TSN for the most part is in HD (or uses an HD feed from the US).

TSN is in HD but did anyone notice that the dallas/anaheim game was pretty grainy today?

Same goes for the Raptors game. Just want to ask to make sure that it isn't my tv.