Is digital cable pretty crap in general?

Was at a friend's house tonight, and spent some time watching various things as we hung out. He's got digital cable through Cox, and while I admit to not seeing a huge cross-section of stuff, we watched various shows on BBC America, as well as a couple of specials and then a movie on HBO On Demand.

The more I watch stuff at his place, the more I'm shocked by how crap the digital versions of the shows are. At times, the encoding compression is so bad that I'd swear we were watching a downloaded Divx file run through the TV (except, of course, I've seen Divx encodings that are of far better quality.)

Is this kind of quality standard for digital cable? Is it mostly a problem with on-demand stuff (due to them wanting to fit in more selections), or is it a problem all across the channels? Or is this just a problem with Cox, and other providers are better about it? Is Satellite better about having higher quality encodings? Do HD channels suffer the same problems?

I'm just wondering if this is what I've got to look forward to once I make the jump up to digital cable.

The compression is worse on Cablevision. EVERY SHOW has glitches and a very blocky look, on demand or otherwise.

My family, of course, doesn't even notice this. It bugs the hell out of me, though. Seriously, it's not like I'm looking for this shit, it's just really that bad.

Honestly, I wanted to stick with the traditional cable, but CV are assholes and are killing the non-digital signal area-by-area so that they can charge per box whereever they go.

It's not just you. It really, really sucks.

What sort of TV does he have? Pretty much any non-HD broadcast signal will look like total garbage on a large HDTV (especially LCD, I've noticed). Also, a plain bad SDTV can be unbearable.

I don't have digital cable myself but I've seen people with it. Seems about the same as regular cable, I guess, though the HD channels are cleaner (though rarely really HD).

"Crap" is not an adjective. Please remember this in the future. The word "crappy" exists for situations like this!

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Originally Posted by ChaoofNee

The compression is worse on Cablevision. EVERY SHOW has glitches and a very blocky look, on demand or otherwise.

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Best part is when the signal gets fucked up and black blocks go everywhere. Hooray technology!

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Originally Posted by MarkRyan

What sort of TV does he have? Pretty much any non-HD broadcast signal will look like total garbage on a large HDTV (especially LCD, I've noticed). Also, a plain bad SDTV can be unbearable.

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Pretty nice Sony SD TV, so it can't be blamed on the up-conversion from SD resolution to an HD resolution.

I've heard that some companies are switching over to using MPEG4 ("standard" or H.264), which should help with some of this stuff. I was just shocked at how terrible the quality is, and that people are paying even more money for such crap ( ~ SCREW YOU GRAVE!! ~ ) quality.

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Originally Posted by MarkRyan

though the HD channels are cleaner (though rarely really HD).

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That's pretty much my only gripe with "HDTV" through digital cable.

Satellite looks better IMO. But weather can fuck it up. One thing I've noticed about digital cable is that it takes like 10 seconds for the channel to appear after you've changed it. That's annoying.

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"Crap" is not an adjective.

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It is now. Dictionaries aren't up to date.

Someone should let them know.

As far as weather screwing up satellite services, I've always heard that but the satellite service we're using now has had less problems than when we had cable. But maybe that's because I live in Southern California where the only weather we have out here is "hot".

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Originally Posted by Jester

Satellite looks better IMO. But weather can fuck it up. One thing I've noticed about digital cable is that it takes like 10 seconds for the channel to appear after you've changed it. That's annoying.

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I've had it take that long on rare occasions. Usually there's just a second delay, which is still annoying after viewing TV on regular cable. I've found that some channels look better with digital cable, but most actually look better through regular ole' cable. It's so glaring that I prefer to record shows on the TV with basic cable than the one with digital.

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Originally Posted by Jester

Satellite looks better IMO. But weather can fuck it up. One thing I've noticed about digital cable is that it takes like 10 seconds for the channel to appear after you've changed it. That's annoying.

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lol what?

You guys all have horrible cable. My Time Warner digital is great. The reliability of their internet service is questionable, though.