Comcast compressing their HDTV streams and somebody noticed
You may find this funny, but no I don’t have comcast (charter here), nor do I have a tv that’s capable of hdtv output (yes, go ahead call me a luddite…) But… I’m starting to wonder if it’s even that big a deal. In a short time the cable carriers may make hd look as bad as some of the worst online video streams. It appears that someone has become wise to comcasts increased compression on hdtv streams to try and get 3 streams in the bandwidth of one. It also looks as though the quality degradation is noticeable and would be enough for me to consider that IF I were paying for hd content and getting THAT, I’d want a refund/cancellation/etc.
The main idea is that they’re trying to keep from having to kill off analog channels to increase the available bandwidth for more hd channels, so they compress it, HOPE nobody notices and keep moving. Unfortunately for comcast somebody has noticed and in spite of their claims that it doesn’t affect the picture quality, the side by side screen captures tell the story.
So, any other comcast users that have noticed this?
How about other cable providers?
Another writeup on the same is available here.
