Virgin Media Community

[joebloggs]

I had a bunch of episodes of Eastenders recorded and when deleting one episode I recorded it went to the next episode delete option and deleted an episode I was about to watch.

However going from a recording to BBC iPlayer I noticed a small upgrade in picture quality.

 Just a heads up - I don’t have any pixelation or service issues

 Having both Sky and Virgin it does seem that the channels are significantly lower in quality than Sky, are they taking DVB-T feeds off channels like Really and Drama?  Only channel that looks better is Talking Pictures TV 

[japitts]

My understanding - someone with knowledge of the TX architecture like @nodrogd or possibly @ozsat (hope they don't mind the ping) may be able to correct me if necessary - is that VM take off-air satellite feeds for all SD channels, and fibre feeds for HD channels.

Those feeds should at least be a match for Sky's PQ

[joebloggs]

Yeah you can tell that a lot of channels (including HD) are about 2-5 seconds behind the satellite versions - but I do think they are being re-encoded by Virgin — the MPEG2 to MPEG4 change over a year or two ago really killed the picture quality for a lot of channels — like Movies24 used to look fantastic - now it looks terrible — Really channel and Drama are considerably lower on Virgin than satellite! 

[nodrogd]

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@japitts wrote:

My understanding - someone with knowledge of the TX architecture like @nodrogd or possibly @ozsat (hope they don't mind the ping) may be able to correct me if necessary - is that VM take off-air satellite feeds for all SD channels, and fibre feeds for HD channels.

Those feeds should at least be a match for Sky's PQ

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You are correct. HD channels are fibre fed to VM (the main PSB  channels are fed uncompressed). The SD channels are for the most part sourced via satellite using the Astra DVB-S/S2 feeds used by Sky & Freesat through VMs dish farm at Langley. The facility is also available to source channels off air from the Crystal Palace TV transmitter at that location, but this has not been used since the days when “Men & Motors TV” was a terrestrial only channel. VMs operation is almost 100% MPEG4 encoded, so there has to be reprocessing of some of the satellite feeds, but there is no reason to reduce the PQ in this process. 

[Roger_Gooner]

BBC iPlayer HD is streamed at 720p, and certainly every video I've downloaded is at that resolution, whereas all HD is broadcast at 1080i. As to which is better, the answer isn't simple as a lot depends on the quality of the deinterlacer from 1080i to 1080p for an HD TV, scaling from 720p to 1080p (for an HD TV), or scaling 720p/1080i to 2160p (for a 4K TV). You've also got to think of other factors such as the pixel density of the screen which is dependant on screen size.

[joebloggs]

I have Sky Q and 360 on the same TV at present while I switch over and it’s definitely ALOT worse on Virgin Channels - heck you can’t even read the terms and conditions on some channels and you can’t even see the text in channel dogs! 

There was definitely a picture quality reduction when channels switched to MPEG4 as before they switched the majority of the channels either looked the same or better than Sky

[joebloggs]

Such a shame Virgin doesn’t transmit HD channels as 1080p as Freeview does dynamically 

[ozsat]

What is the channel number and name you EastEnder link is set to - can you post an image from your SAVED folder?

I do find the 360 doesn't seem as good for video quality as the V6 - but don't find a massive difference.

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@joebloggs wrote:

I had a bunch of episodes of Eastenders recorded and when deleting one episode I recorded it went to the next episode delete option and deleted an episode I was about to watch.

However going from a recording to BBC iPlayer I noticed a small upgrade in picture quality.

 Just a heads up - I don’t have any pixelation or service issues

 Having both Sky and Virgin it does seem that the channels are significantly lower in quality than Sky, are they taking DVB-T feeds off channels like Really and Drama?  Only channel that looks better is Talking Pictures TV 

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[joebloggs]

 Definitely recording on BBC One HD — we pay so much for Virgin - we shouldn’t get less picture quality than Freeview - which broadcasts at 1080p on the main channels with certain shows (BBC and some others on Freeview dynamically depending on the show broadcast between 1080i and 1080p)

 

[Roger_Gooner]

The PQ of my VM broadcasts is absolutely fine, so if it's poor on your TV you probably have a configuration or a signal problem.

Also, I don't have a problem with VM broadcasting all HD as 1080i (as does Sky I believe) as advanced interlacing produces good results. As for 1080p broadcasts: there's a lot of 1080p25 Freeview broadcasts but nothing in 1080p50, so a conversion still has to be done by the STB or TV.