About coyote2

I also found it quite frustrating that almost no one I ended up speaking to at Comcast knew that this downgrade had occurred.   And I spoke to many during the process of getting out of my contract* because of this downgrade; none knew, neither the front line Customer Service reps, or the Comcast Corporate rep I talked to after filing an FCC complaint. They all suggested I simply had to set my DVR to output 1080p.  None of them admitted to understanding that my issue was with the downgraded delivery to my residence of 720p instead of 1080i, and the major loss of resolution due to the resulting two lossy scaling operations: from 1080i (as they recieve from content producers) to 720p (which they switched to delivering to my residence), and then from that 720p to 1080p (by my DVR or HDTV, at my option).   Thankfully, though the Corporate rep didn't understand, they did let me out of my contract (and fixed my monthly rate = the contract rate for a year to give me time to switch to a competitor).   *1-year contract which, 'coincidentally' Comcast had never before asked me to enter into until not not long before the downgrade. ... View more

@Morac2 wrote: The biggest issue isn’t that Comcast is converting 1080i to 720p as 720p can look good.  It’s that Comcast is bit-starving channels so there’s not enough channel bandwidth for a good looking picture.  This is most noticeable when there are a lot of small moving objects in the picture at which the picture turns into a blocky mess.    When HBO Go looks a lot better than HBO on Comcast, there’s an issue.  I don't disagree that the "bit-starving" (I believe aka lossy compression) is also a problem.  (Is that what drives me crazy when the camera moves over a scene with a lot of detail [and all one sees is blur]?)   I think that the pair of scaling operations bothers me more since it's impact is constant and I want more than for it to "look good", I want all possible resolution.   Perhaps most customers don't care, but it still puzzles me that Comcast doesn't do more to retain customers now that customers have quite a range of alternatives. ... View more

Yes, the lack of notice was shameful. I don't think that converting 1080i to 1080p involves scaling; it seems to me it would simply duplicate every other frame.   Theoretically settop boxes could be made to do the same thing and not cost any bandwidth. ... View more

Another obfuscative reply by Rustyben quoteunquote expert (!).   Comcast absolutely had the option to switch from "i" to "p" (their announced plan) by delivering 1080i content as 1080p.(1)   That would have saved subscribers from the major picture quality degredation which results from TWO scaling operations.   First downscaling from 1080 lines to 720 (to deliver to customers), then upscaling back from 720 to 1080 (or even 2160, shudder, by the customer's settop box or HDTV).   (1) By instead of alternating as "i" does, delivering every line every frame as "p" does.   The bet they made that most subscribers wouldn't even notice might sadly be correct.  But they lost me.  Their customer service didn't even understand what I explained above, and wouldn't let me out of my contract when I explained that they did this to us.  They did though in response to my FCC Complaint about it. ... View more