Watching tonights football on the 436XDE

blossom

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Anyone watching the footie on their XDE tonight.? What a cracking picture on C5 for the Bolton game. Turn to ITV4 on M&M and the picture for the borough game is nowhere near as good.

Why is this. Is it just another crappy low bit rate channel?

Just be interested to know.

Cheers

Paul
 
I still haven't watched any footy on my XDE. My sky is still connected to my CRT. Did you notice any judder I keep reading about?
 
Don't notice any at all now. Think I saw some once when watching Jonothan Ross. Check the background colours behind him.

But as for everything else it's just great.
 
I specifically meant with sport. I've watched tons of DVD'S and never seen any.
 
watching the boro game on ntl and tried freeview both awesome pictures on my relisys plasy :smashin: come on boro
 
Not noticed any with sport and I love my football, golf and cricket.

Also the picture on the tour championship on SKY tonight is very good indeed.
 
What about image retention from logo's? I've had a little bit from console games after just Five minutes of playing! It disappeared quickly though.
 
mickymcd said:
watching the boro game on ntl and tried freeview both awesome pictures on my relisys plasy :smashin: come on boro

Actually the picture is better on the boro game on freeview as opposed to the same channel on Sky. Seems sharper for some reason.
 
I had a better pic on the Bolton game than on the boro game too, think its the bitrate here.
 
As a side issue I am trying to use the Pio's learning remote to operate the other equipment. Done all except my sky STB which is a Panasonic and there is no code in the manual for a panny STB.

Does anyone know a code that will work for me?
 
Panzer22 said:
I still haven't watched any footy on my XDE. My sky is still connected to my CRT. Did you notice any judder I keep reading about?

When you say judder - what exactly do you mean? I have a 50PHD8, and it when watching football or something like a scroll bar that moves fast across the screen, it seems to wobble/judder? To the eye it looks like the text enters large then gets small and exits large (sorry for my non techy description :) )

Is this the same with all Plasmas??
 
The picture for both games was appalling on my 436XDE through freeview, though agree the Boro game was the worst. Lots of blockiness, bad blurring round players etc. The pitch looked more like green liquid than a solid surface. Most channels produce poor picture quality to be honest on my screen. My ariel has not been upgraded though since the house was built twenty years ago. Is this likely to be a culprit?
 
I turned my xde on for the first time yesterday and was a bit disapointed tbh, but this morning i sat in front of it and changed some settings and adjusted the screen etc etc and was much happier with the results.
I've still got £1.99 scart leads at the moment though, so i'm hoping when i buy some better quality ones today the picture both on sky and dvd will improve.
Haven't tried the x-box as yet and haven't had to worry about any screen burn/retention, as i avoid the channels with logo's and top and bottom borders.
This is really hard though, as most of the channels these days have a logo.
 
fat dog said:
The picture for both games was appalling on my 436XDE through freeview, though agree the Boro game was the worst. Lots of blockiness, bad blurring round players etc. The pitch looked more like green liquid than a solid surface. Most channels produce poor picture quality to be honest on my screen. My ariel has not been upgraded though since the house was built twenty years ago. Is this likely to be a culprit?

Think that could be the problem. Sport has always been a bone of contention with PQ in my book but I have to say that I am very happy with it on this screen. The Bolton game last night was very good - almost HD like.
 
StefanoC said:
107 is the code for Sky IIRC.

Thanks mate I'll try it later.
 
As well as changing the scart you may also like to consider upgrading the cables that connect the media box to the panel. I swapped mine last week for the Pioneer Upgrade cables that Wireworld do. The difference to both the colour rendition and levels of detail was actually quite remarkable. The colours are now far more 'natural'.
 
stevedster said:
I had a better pic on the Bolton game than on the boro game too, think its the bitrate here.

I too had a better picture on the Bolton game via Sky FreeSat. Could you please explain in every day terms what bitrate is all about ? Thanks, Geoff.
 
blossom said:
Anyone watching the footie on their XDE tonight.? What a cracking picture on C5 for the Bolton game. Turn to ITV4 on M&M and the picture for the borough game is nowhere near as good.

Why is this. Is it just another crappy low bit rate channel?

Just be interested to know.

Cheers

Paul

Lots of the newer FreeView channels like ITV4 output on a DVB resolution of 544x576 - your plasma is attempting to upscale 544x576 to 1024x768!

What do you expect to happen? - that's right a crappy picture! In fact it's probably worse than on an SD plasma which only has to scale to 852x480.

I find it amusing that people spend all this extra money on HD plasmas and then expect to see the benefits on everyday channels like FreeView.

BTW I believe C5 transmit at 704x576 - hence a slightly better picture.

Gussie :)
 
mickg007 - do you have Panasonic JUST mode on as your aspect ratio??? This is a non-linear stretch for 4:3 material, so the middle of the screen is perfectly oriented, but the extreme ends are stretched to fill the 16:9 panel. Something moving at a fixed rate from left to right will be stretchy and blurred at the fat left and right, but will move normally in the middle of the image.

Panzer - you'll find with the Pio image retention is really bad early on, but far less so after a few weeks of running in. Just need to be careful early doors (i.e. don't watch Sky Sports news all day on a brand new Pio screen!). The judder is something I must admit you will more likely notice if you are specifically looking for it!!! Sometimes you just gotta take the "if it ain't broke" attitude and enjoy your plasma otherwise all you will do is spend your life looking for new artefacts!!

fatdog - I think an aerial upgrade will do your picture the world of good! You're not gonna get razor sharp with freeview, but a bad reception will give you the more blocky, inconsistent picture. Although bear in mind this good also be down to the area you live in and it's signal strength rather than just your particular aerial.

Ziggy - give it time to run in. When we install, as soon as the plasma is up we get it on and running loads of full screen material. CArtoon channels, travel channel, something that doesn't have black bars, fixed on-screen information bars, and isn't predominantly one colour/shade. We leave it running under a dust cover for the rest of the job to run it in as best you can for when it's handed over to the client. Even after the first hour differences are highly noticeable, then each further hour gains a little more. Picture noise settles and black detail improves. And then of course setup, turn off all noise reduction options, use normal or cinema mode (not dynamic!!), very carefully adjust sharpness down a click or two.

Gussie - a marginal change in resolution wouldn't give this result. I would guess bitrates. If there's less picture information transmitted per pixel, then detail and accuracy is going to suffer. A higher resolution panel can easily show a sharper image than a standard resolution panel if the scaling is up to it.
 
Hi Mickg007

Regarding the scroll bar, what you are describing sounds like Non-Linear Stretching (NLS). This is a function used to fill a full 16:9 screen with a 4:3 image while minimising the widening effect on the image especially at center of the screen. So the center of the screen looks normal, but the two ends look stretched. It is not a function of all plasmas and it is probably something that needs to be activated. Check your settings.

Regarding football, ITV are useless and have no idea regarding the broadcast quality of football. SKY is the benchmark, but Channel 5 are not that far behind (Quality of Spanish football on SKY is rubbish, but that is due to the Spanish broadcasters). Using the Crystalio scaler, ITV's football is palatable but SKY and C5 are dvd-like quality (I am very fussy about my football !!!!!).

Doc

mickg007 said:
When you say judder - what exactly do you mean? I have a 50PHD8, and it when watching football or something like a scroll bar that moves fast across the screen, it seems to wobble/judder? To the eye it looks like the text enters large then gets small and exits large (sorry for my non techy description :) )

Is this the same with all Plasmas??
 
Liam/TheDoc

I had it set to 'JUST' - but the scrolling bar was on skysports news, which is not true widescreen so I thought it should be set to 'JUST'. The panasonic Auto strectches the pic up and down way too much - have not figured out this setting yet

Are you saying I should just live with it ?
 
fat dog said:
The picture for both games was appalling on my 436XDE through freeview, though agree the Boro game was the worst. Lots of blockiness, bad blurring round players etc. The pitch looked more like green liquid than a solid surface. Most channels produce poor picture quality to be honest on my screen. My ariel has not been upgraded though since the house was built twenty years ago. Is this likely to be a culprit?

To be honest guys, bear in mind that the culprit may well be the digital medium. I am a designer by trade and spend some of my time trying to improve the image quality of jpegs sent to me for lay-out. Digital tv is essentially jpegs that move. When you present it with something nice and simple, say a blue sky that fills a third of the screen, it can handle the busy stuff in the rest of the picture. But in a football match, the system gets pushed to breaking point. You have textured grass right up to the edge of 23 people in bright colours moving at speed all over the place, plus a very busy crowd all round the edge. Trying to compress that and stream it is like trying to drive a fiesta at 12,000 rpm. You need very high bandwidth to make it look good. Out of curiousity, have you tried flipping over to analogue?
 

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