Also, compression will probably starts only when new HD channels are added.

I had dinner this weekend with a guy who works for a company making the compression equipment. I told him how I had read, in this thread, that Rogers was ready to start compressing their hi-def starting anytime now.

He was surprised. He said he knew Rogers was moving in that direction and went on to say that it was his understanding his company was on the short list of vendors for the hardware but that Rogers had not yet decided who to go with.

It's possible he is not in the loop (he doesn't work in the cable tv products area) but perhaps this idea was floated as a trial balloon to see what the reaction of the Customers would be.

ltj

Well, 5 days on and they are still not compressing anything.

I have actually seen a lot of Discovery HD content in the last few days consuming a full 8.25 GB for a 1 hour show. That is VERY close to the full 19mbps mark.

I didn't think they were compressing anything as Saturday I compared the OTA version of the Masters with the Rogers versions and I couldn't see a difference - it looked fabulous in both instances. Rogers even had one advantage over OTA as it seemed that the Buffalo CBS affiliate does not do DD 5.1 but both the CBS-East and CBS-West feeds seemed to be in DD5.1 which is weird since CBS-East is supposed to be Buffalo.

Naw, I was just reporting in so people would know.

Where I am one of the few active Firewire users on the forums, I have a pretty sharp pulse on what Rogers is sending down the pipe.

Compression may have yet to start but it appears that technical issues are piling up, is there a possibility or correlation between the 2? Tough times for the cable giants if they can not get Sw/Video.

I know it has been stated that compression hasn't begun yet, but I have to say I have noticed a lot of noise in the signals lately especially on CFTO HD (CTV) and it may not be on HD shows necessarily, but SD shows seem to be noiser in darks in the scenes (blues/blacks within the scene).... for example during the news telecasts. Ken Shaw looked horrible last night compared to last week.

I've also noticed this is HD shows as well in dark parts of the scene but not as bad since there is more material to begin with and the resolution is higher. I began seeing this last week when I noticed shows like ER looked worse than previously.

I think we are seeing subtle compression artifacts but not to the extent that you see major "squareage" (macroblocking) or dropping of frames/pixelation but it may get worse over time such that it looks as bad as Comcast (gawd hope not)

I think they have done this without notifying anybody to see if they see differences and then they enforce it across the entire system. They may not be doing it in all neighborhoods but plant by plant.

I wonder if maybe instead of putting 3 HD stations in a QAM they are muxing in a few more SD stations along with the 2 HD stations on each QAM. The effect wouldn't be as large.

Only way to know for sure is to go digging around on the STB (http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?p=729349#post729349) and note the QAM frequencies being used on each channel.

Deleted a couple of posts. This thread is about Rogers compressing HD signals, please stay on topic.

Just deleted more posts. Last warning, posts not on the topic of Rogers Compressing HD signals will result in the poster being issued an infraction.

Saw the same AP article on the nytimes site.

I liked that TW claims to have some technicians they call "golden eyes" making an effort at tuning the compression for best results, and that as a result they have fewer customer complaints than Comcast.

Rogers could learn from this, both by putting a similar effort into tuning the 3 channel per QAM HD compression, but also by being open about. Rogers, please tell us what you are doing to ensure good picture quality! Tell us you care!

You know, many companies now have blogs written by their engineers, discussing new features and the trade-offs they have to make to when they make decisions.

Rogers should do the same thing, and launch a digital cable technology blog, written by the Rogers engineers. I'm sure all of us obsessives would read it.

In the past, and I suspect nothing has changed, its been against Rogers policy for staff to post on this site so don't expect any outreach from the company.

I do not know if this is related, but I was watching Two And A Half Men on CBS-HD tonight, and boy oh boy was the picture quality crap. While I'm not familiar with all the terms used in this thread, there seemed to be a lot of pixelation. Any movement on the screen resulted in some "trailing effect".

Yeah last night's CBSHD primetime feed seemed very crappy. I had set "Big Bang Theory", "How I met your mother" and "House (on Global)" to record on the PVR. THe PQ for House was super but both the CBS shows were really crappy and painful to watch. I first thought it was my PVR not recording properly while I was watching another channel. But I guess it was the shows themselves.

Letterman was fine later at night.

But it appears to have resolved itself since then.

When I called Rogers Tech line, they weren't aware of any system-wide problems but did have a measurable drop on that channel at my boxes.

Sounds like a head-end problem.

it might not even be a head end problem neither. I use BEV and OTA as well , I watched the show over OTA (Buffalo WIVB) but recorded it on BEV PVR (Boston WBZ). Both had the same trailing effect mentioned. Keep in mind that even ATSC OTA at full 19.4 Mbps it is still a "compressed version" of the full bandwith 1080i signal around 1 Gbps. I should also add that I have AutoMotion Plus on high all the time therefore the 120 Hz processing is also adding some artifacts. Even blu-ray movies like Batman at full 1080p 24 Hz via HDMI therefore with around 35 Mbps show that kind of trailing in a couple of ocasions but I beleive in that case the TV processing like Auto Motion Plus (Samsung obviously) could be at fault there. some times is hard to discern wether an artifact is actually a compresion artifact related to constraint bandwith or if you prefer low bitrate or if it is just the TV or STB procesing at fault.

just my 1 cent , I wish I had at least 2 cents lol lol lol

I have actually seen a lot of Discovery HD content in the last few days consuming a full 8.25 GB for a 1 hour show. That is VERY close to the full 19mbps mark.
Adaptive compression doesn't always show up as smaller file sizes. It doesn't with the software that I use. However, further processing (to remove nulls) does show up as smaller files. YMMV.

further processing (to remove nulls) does show up as smaller files.

A bit OT but I have wondered how to strip those nulls... What can one use to do this?

Adaptive compression doesn't always show up as smaller file sizes.

I was a bit suspicious that this could be the case. Either way, I have not seen any bit rate drop or perceptable drop in quality of any of the content that I have been recording. And as to what and how much HD that is, well, we wathc about 90% HD and we record most of the HD shows that are on so that is a lot.

What can one use to do this?
I use a program called HDTVtoMPEG2. It edits and does simple processing on TS files. (Don't use the MPEG feature, it has issues.)

Is it just me, or is NBC really bad?
It actually gets blurry every minute or so, and macroblocks looks stronger and bigger.