Pretty tought to say that in a forum about SHAW's crappy VIDEO and AUDIO quality. :eek:
Diento, I was agreeing with your point about how my wife's happiness is an important factor...sheesh. Check out the sentence from your post that I quoted. It wasn't a Shaw vs. Bell thing. It was a "true dat" thing about the sentiment. We don't have Bell, so that word needed to be swapped out... OK?

Each of us posting in this thread have issues with Shaw's video or audio or we wouldn't be here.

I just don't think it's very helpful for you to keep saying yours is better, or you don't have that particular problem. In fact, it probably gets on the person's nerves, like it does mine. It doesn't fix it for anyone else, it gets repetitive, and you come off sounding like someone trying to defend Shaw and keep the bad PR to a minimum. I called it "feedback" because it sounds like more like "damage control".

I'm just tired of you trying to minimize the issues that people are reporting here. But if that's your thing... go ahead, keep it up.

oilblue / technut, lets end it.

I think you have both made your positions very clear so my recommendation would be to stop posting on this thread to avoid any possibility of either of you saying something that would result in an infraction.

This is not intended to fuel anyone's fire, but it strikes me as bemusing.

I was at a party yesterday, and a fellow that I was talking to about HD, and other related topics, told me that he left Bell ExpressVu about 6 months ago because of weather-related reception problems (about which he was really emphatic). The weird part was that he has been using Shaw ever since, and has nothing to complain about; he claims that he does not have sound or picture issues. As my experience, like many of yours, has been frustratingly different, this was surprising. He lives in White Rock.

I view this as an aberration, but it does show that there may be some people who read this forum and wonder what we're all griping (justifiably) about.

Nanook will tell you a similar story, I'm sure.

There are actually people out there in Shawland that don't live with the problems the majority of us here at DHC do. People without problems aren't going looking for answers as to why their service is exactly what they expect it to be.

Oh, to be one of those lucky people....... I can only dream.

Nothing personal, but I would suggest some people have a higher tolerance for bad picture. If I hadn't started with Bell and moved to Shaw, I might assume Shaw's sub-par picture quality was the norm.

I think it's part tolerance, part obliviousness.

Some people wouldn't know a sub-par picture for the life of them. These are the people who thought the SD stretched pictures they were watching without an HD box were actually HD. These are the people who let salesmen sell them 300 dollar Mon$ter power bars and $100 Mon$ter HDMI cables. They just don't pay attention becuase it's outside their knowledge and comfort zone.

It's not a critcism of them, it's just different people care about different things, kind of liek how I now next to nothing about computers and my friends will be like "you don't know that???"

I have to agree as I know a guy who has a 60" 1080P tv that he boasts about and, when I got to see it, he doesn't even have it hooked up to an HD box. He had it on an SD 'stretched' signal and it looked awful but I didn't have the heart to tell him. I don't think he even has an up-converting DVD player. Some people just don't know what they are missing so I guess the think what they have is 'normal'. However, there are some who actually don't have problems and do have good PQ although personnally, I have not seen this for myself, yet.

These are good points. I am what is referred to as an 'audiophile'. It seems a bit pretentious, but it actually describes a kind of malady. One debilitating symptom is something called 'audiophilia nervosa', which is a pathological need to upgrade. Those of you who share the affliction know exactly what I am talking about.

Anyway, there are many, many people with whom I talk about my stereo who consider me a fringe being. They think tube equipment and turntables are a remnant of a low-tech past. And the terms imaging, soundstage, musicality and natural-tone have no meaning whatsoever to them.

Another experience -

Was over at a co-workers house setting up his new 40" LCD. He also had Bell over installing his new HD system and satellite dish. We sparked up just in time to see the American Idol finale. My significant other had our Shaw PVR set to record the same show, on the same network at the same time.

Watching on his Bell system? Not one moment of macroblocking, not even when the AI-logo sweeps past the screen at commercial.

On my Shaw system? The whole show was macroblocked, even when the contestants were just standing on stage waiting for the results.

This is NOT HD. Not even close.

My question is how much macroblocking is a result of the motorola PVR crunching the signal as it is recording?

The picture of PBS HD (non encrypted in Calgary) appears much clearer to me than the picture through the shaw box.

That being said, I would never give up my pvr... even if it makes the picture a little blocky.

Magnet, it is my understanding that the Shaw PVRs do a direct recording of the digital signal. The only time they get involved in any compression is with analog channels. There should be no additional macroblocking on HD channels due to the PVR.

So perhaps the difference you are seeing is actually just picture clarity related to how your PVR is connected to your TV, eg. up/down converting 720p/1080i on the Shaw box or digital to component conversion, vs. your TV displaying it directly from the original digital signal.

New message on my STB today.
To improve HD quality, on May 29 Fox HD East (ch 208 in most areas) changes from Detroit to Rochester. Please set your recordings and locks for this new channel.Good to see someone at Shaw is thinking about HD quality. Anybody know more about how Detroit is a better signal than Rochester?

In any case, that may improve the source, but what are they doing to fix the degradation over their cable system?

Has anyone seen the DirectTV commercial where all the cable execs are sitting around a table talking about how they'e going to compress their signal to stretch profit margins and how people don't know what HD is anyway because they're stupid workaholics?

Man that makes me laugh.

I miss my Directv :( :(

New message on my STB today.
To improve HD quality, on May 29 Fox HD East (ch 208 in most areas) changes from Detroit to Rochester. Please set your recordings and locks for this new channel.
Good to see someone at Shaw is thinking about HD quality. Anybody know more about how Detroit is a better signal than Rochester?
I doubt Detroit is better. If it was, they wouldn't be changing *from* Detroit *to* Rochester... :p ;)

My guess is the change is related to the audio drop out problem. The East feed of Bones and House were consistently ruined by drop outs. Perhaps a switch to a different source will reduce or even eliminate the problem with Fox East. Just a guess though.

I can confirm what Oilblue is saying. The Rochester feed is supposed to be more reliable with less technical challenges from the source.

I doubt Detroit is better. If it was, they wouldn't be changing *from* Detroit *to* Rochester... :p ;)Doh! I got it backwards. Shaw wouldn't do anything to degrade their signals (like HD compression), right? ;)

Thanks for the responses OB and SG. I notice that Fox had a lot of macroblocking... maybe even that will improve if Detroit was constraining their HD bandwidth by multicasting some SD and Rochester isn't.

Again - have to report that the macroblocking during the Stanley Cup finals has been dismally awful. And now I'm getting more frequent audio drops (lasting about 3 seconds, every 20 minutes or so).

Way to go Shaw.

That's strange as I watched the hockey game last night and only noticed about 4 drops in almost 5 hours of play and 2 of those were during commercials.