National Geographic (828) & Showcase (838) HD now on Evu

  • Thread starter Thread starter x64Man
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Hahaha, good to see these channels up as many on this board were asking for them. They look really good on my set, and I do agree they are better than the Hi-Fi HD channels. I agree with you - "usual suspects" will be running rampid and filing complaints to the CRTC .... all in good fun! I have a good feeling there will be a couple more HD channels added before end of quarter...
 
I thought National Geographic was an MPEG4 channel. Does this mean a 6141 or 9242 will be required to view it?
 
No, it's MPEG2. There will be no MPEG4 for quite some time. However, Dish passed a bunch of channels off as MPEG4 when they were actually 2, requiring customers to upgrade. No, I'm not saying this will happen, but it's possible.
 
I connected an analog audio cable from the 9200 to my AVR and compared the audio to the optical connection. Because I was really looking for the dropouts, I heard them, but they were almost unnoticeable and in no way as irritating as with the optical cable. That's why most people don't notice them. But the glitches in the digital audio stream are there and some audio receivers underscore them more than others.
I called EV and complained. I urge others to call too and specify that they have "audio dropouts on ch. 838 (Showcase HD) over optical connection", so that customer service hopefully adds them together and we get noticed.
 
I noticed dropouts when i was watching trailer park boys the other day. Im going to try to switch the settings on my amp to PLII that might help

Im using the dual tuner PVR from bell
 
Correct Hugh. I was comparing BEV to Shaw in Western Canada.

Back to the thread though, very excited about the 2 new channels.
 
I don't know about Showcase HD but National Geographic HD is just a hi-def. broadcast of National Geographic SD. Same tired program mix of pop. science, nature and actuality type programs some of which are nothing more than recycles from Discovery and History Television. What is everyone getting so excited about?
 
Gents,


This is a problem stemming from the source station. The engineers there are working on fixing the issue but it seems to be taking much longer than we would all like. We're going to get an update shortly and see what needs to be done to get it fixed faster.




Drewsat :mad:
 
I watched some programs from both channels recorded 3 days ago and for the first time I heard no dropouts. It might have been fixed earlier, but because of this problem I had almost stopped watching Showcase HD.
Thank you, engineers, and please stop working on it anymore! :)
 
I gave up watching Showcase because of this. I'll have to give it a test again.


Just gave it a test and no drop-outs so far.
 
Thanks for the observations. I've fed it back it to our folks here who were dealing with CanWest.

If you hear any issues, can you post here please. I'll keep checking this thread for the next bit.


Drewsat
 
"House", recorded 11:00 pm June 3: I've watched 35 minutes of the episode, and have had over a dozen digital audio dropouts so far. But these have all been what I call "soft" dropouts (dropout does not recur upon repeated playback of the segment, so appears to be in playback, not recording).

Compared with "Damages", recorded 10:00 pm May 12: plagued with many, many dropouts, both "soft" and "hard" (audio packets actually missing from the AC3 stream, so dropouts repeat upon replaying). Some of the "hard" dropouts seemed to be preceded by a very brief buzz or oscillation, probably as the digital stream was interrupted.

So, it looks to me like the CanWest folks found the cause of the "hard" dropouts, and now Showcase digital audio is on a par with most of the other HD stations. Since there have been complaints about Dolby Digital dropouts on the ExpressVu HD channels in several threads in multiple forums, I believe that there is either a software or hardware problem in the receivers.


/ashtonp
 
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