Help with Sky+ HD

Right, our family aren't too good with technical things involving Hight Definition and stuff. We got HD just before Christmas last year and we can't seem to see any difference between ordinary TV and HDTV. I just wish we could splitscreen two tv programmes - one in normal and one in HD so we can get more of a clearer view. I mean, we do it with football, switch from 401 to 408 in quick succession, we do it with sky movies too. i'd like to watch Wrestlemania in HD tomorrow too.

So what's up? are our eyes completely messed up?
Is something not plugged in right?

For those who may want to know, we have a Sony Bravia.

Big thanks if you reply

Stupid question, but you ARE using a HDMI cable and it is on the HDMI channel?

its not a stupid question.
its stupid because i dont know how to reply.

when we got it, the guy who installed it said we'd have to buy our own HDMI cable as they don't provide them. so if you didn't have one already, or buy one, then this could be one of the problems?

when we first got our Bravia back in 2008, we got two HDMI cables with the 'deal'

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Originally Posted by ArronMUFC

when we first got our Bravia back in 2008, we got two HDMI cables with the 'deal'

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So is the Sky box plugged in using an HDMI cable?

Some people genuinely cannot see difference between them.

Many can't see much difference. It's probably very subtle and depends on the size of your TV.

HD is pretty much brighter colours :L

Many ill never see a difference, although the quality of the TV does depend HUGELY on the cables you use. Our TV has a £150 Fibre-Optic cable, bu if you say use a £20 you do see huge differences. You could go back to the shop and ask them to see a HD screen and a Non-HD TV. Check with them thye have the same cables aha.

Same with my Xbox 360 elite, it only came with scart lead, I have to buy a HDMI cable seperately, so you should get one.

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Originally Posted by Android

HD is pretty much brighter colours :L

Many ill never see a difference, although the quality of the TV does depend HUGELY on the cables you use. Our TV has a £150 Fibre-Optic cable, bu if you say use a £20 you do see huge differences. You could go back to the shop and ask them to see a HD screen and a Non-HD TV. Check with them thye have the same cables aha.

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A digital signal (such as that provided over HDMI etc) is just 1s and 0s, it is either there or it isn't, therefor bugger all difference between a £150 cable and a £20 cable ;)

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Originally Posted by Recursion

A digital signal is just 1s and 0s, it is either there or it isn't, therefore bugger all difference between a £150 cable and a £20 cable ;)

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Incorrect.

The quality of the cable makes a big difference.

As long as the cable is the 5m or under specification for HDMI and the cable is sheilded against interferance the picture will either be there or it wont.

You may have seen a difference when the signal was analouge, but no more.

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Originally Posted by Recursion

As long as the cable is the 5m or under specification for HDMI and the cable is sheilded against interferance the picture will either be there or it wont.

You may have seen a difference when the signal was analouge, but no more.

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Im talking about the cable that goes into the wall.

No, you are completely and utterly wrong. For a digital signal as long as the signal does actually get there then there is no affect on the quality of the actual signal regardless of what quality cable you use (Yes, even if you used a solid gold cable vs. a impure copper cable there will be no difference at all).

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Originally Posted by Android

Incorrect.

The quality of the cable makes a big difference.

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Originally Posted by Tomm

No, you are completely and utterly wrong. For a digital signal as long as the signal does actually get there then there is no affect on the quality of the actual signal regardless of what quality cable you use (Yes, even if you used a solid gold cable vs. a impure copper cable there will be no difference at all).

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Go to currys/comet/any other TV shop
Ask to see a £600 TV with the best cable and a £900 TV with the worst cable and see what one is better quality. It will be the cheap one.

They don't all just sell the same cable at different prices. Well they couldn't do - I am sure the police would get involved with 'tricking' the public.

http://www.avforums.com/forums/video...explained.html

Watch the video from a guy who actually certifies HDMI cables and watch how he starts to laugh when asked the question if different cables can affect quality (~3:20 into the video).

I'll link you to the exact place in the video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MMDGkQ-w5s#t=3m21s

"The different cables you may use use would not make any different in the way the picture quality would be."

Also http://www.avforums.com/forums/hdmi-...ust-facts.html

"Important note added by admin : Different HDMI cables do not affect the quality of the picture. FACT. Reviews stating that cables produce a 'more natural image' or 'better colours' are complete rubbish."

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Originally Posted by Android

Go to currys/comet/any other TV shop
Ask to see a £600 TV with the best cable and a £900 TV with the worst cable and see what one is better quality. It will be the cheap one.

They don't all just sell the same cable at different prices. Well they couldn't do - I am sure the police would get involved with 'tricking' the public.

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Originally Posted by Tomm

http://www.avforums.com/forums/video...explained.html

Watch the video from a guy who actually certifies HDMI cables and watch how he starts to laugh when asked the question if different cables can affect quality (~3:20 into the video).

I'll link you to the exact place in the video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MMDGkQ-w5s#t=3m21s

"The different cables you may use use would not make any different in the way the picture quality would be."

Also http://www.avforums.com/forums/hdmi-...ust-facts.html

"Important note added by admin : Different HDMI cables do not affect the quality of the picture. FACT. Reviews stating that cables produce a 'more natural image' or 'better colours' are complete rubbish."

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Nice on there Tomm, nice one ;)

Instead of being ignorant, why don't you read he bit when I said 'I am not talking about the HDMI cable.'

I repeat for you, 'I am not talking about the HDMI cable'

Please post a picture of all the cables coming out of the back of the sky + HD box, and all the cables going into your TV. This should give some help.

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Originally Posted by Android

Instead of being ignorant, why don't you read he bit when I said 'I am not talking about the HDMI cable.'

I repeat for you, 'I am not talking about the HDMI cable'

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To be fair though, the thread is about hooking up an HDMI to a Sky HD Box and an HD TV, which is probably why they are discussing the use of HDMI cables while you were talking about fibre optics, as far as I can tell at least :) What they say is true about HDMI cables though. I've not heard about fibre optics having much to do with televisions, so have no place to judge, but gold plated scarts for example seem to make a difference, but gold plated should never cost more than about £20 depending on length, any more and you're being ripped off (though if other factors like cable thickness, noise reduction and length etc may bump up prices).

The only thing I can think of is audio for this "fibre-optic" he's talking about??

If it was Virgin or something it would go from the wall to the provided box... but I can't see how spending £150 on a fibre cable would really make any difference to bouncing light down a long strip of glass/plastic because that is still digital AFAIK

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Originally Posted by GommeInc

To be fair though, the thread is about hooking up an HDMI to a Sky HD Box and an HD TV, which is probably why they are discussing the use of HDMI cables while you were talking about fibre optics, as far as I can tell at least :) What they say is true about HDMI cables though. I've not heard about fibre optics having much to do with televisions, so have no place to judge, but gold plated scarts for example seem to make a difference, but gold plated should never cost more than about £20 depending on length, any more and you're being ripped off (though if other factors like cable thickness, noise reduction and length etc may bump up prices).

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I went on about the other cables after he aid he cannot see the difference with Sky+HD :) I will try to remember to get a pic later.

So, what cable are you talking about since you quoted Recursion's post about HDMI cables and the general topic of this post is about HDMI cables? Also what cable were you expecting them to hook up to the TV in the electronics shop like you said that we should go do?

Even if you are not talking about HDMI cables, any digital transmission works in the same way. It is simple science to understand why a digital signal is not affected by the same problems as an analogue signal.

Lets take a really simple example. In a digital signal there are two states - on and off (high & low, 0 & 1, whatever you want to call them). An Analogue signal can have a theoretical infinite number of states. Expressed on a time/intensity graph you get:

http://cbdd.wsu.edu/kewlcontent/cour...g%20signal.gif
Analogue

http://cbdd.wsu.edu/kewlcontent/cour...l%20signal.gif
Digital.

In the analogue graph each point on the graph represents some sort of information represented by a certain voltage (Can be other things, but lets keep it simple). The digital graph is either on or off depending on the voltage.

Lets introduce some interference due to a poor quality/shielded cable.

http://ericsonfp.files.wordpress.com...logdigital.jpg

As you can see in the analogue signal we've completely lost the original wave shape and can no longer recover the same information that was originally sent - the image has lost quality. For the digital signal despite having significant noise it is clearly possible to reconstruct the original signal since we only need to decide if it is on or off which is possible at all points on the graph (Above dashed line = on, below dashed line = off). The perfect original digital signal is still able to be reconstructed and, therefore, has lost no quality despite being exposed to significant interference.

Now, if the interference is so great that on the digital graph it is no longer possible to differentiate between on or off then the signal is useless and nothing will be displayed as no (usable) data is available. So with digital signals you either get the original perfect binary data up to a certain amount of interference. After that threshold where it becomes impossible to tell between on/off then there is no data available at all, zilch.

However, with analogue signals unless you have absolutely no interference whats so ever then you are never going to be able to get the same data that was original transmitted as the number of different values that that point could of been is infinite (Rendering it impossible to reconstruct the original signal) therefore causing a loss in quality of the signal.

It also applies to both signals that if there is not enough strength to get the signal to where ever it needs to go there there is obviously going to be no signal received.

So, to summarize:

• Digital signals can either be differentiated between on and off resulting in a perfect, exactly the same as the original signal or, if interference is so great, unable to be differentiated resulting in no data/signal.
• Analogue signals, unless exposed to zero interference (Near impossible), are never the same as the original signal once transmitted and their perceived quality is determined by the level of interference.
  

So what does this mean for video?

Well, lets start with a digital signal transmitted down a cable. Since we can always reconstruct the original signal up to a certain level of noise (interference) then we either get the perfect exact video, only affected by the quality of the display or none at all. Regardless of what cable I use there are only two possible options as to what will happen: The original, perfect signal displaying on my TV or Nothing displaying on my TV. However, in transmissions like Freeview/Sky that are wireless and digital there are more conditions that can introduce noise to the signal. If there is a prolonged period of interference for whatever reason then you'll completely lose the picture for your TV channel. Although, it is more likely you'll get short spikes of significant amounts of noise resulting in a temporary inability to reconstruct the original signal resulting in a stuttering video or graphical anomalies appearing as the decoder for whatever codec the stream is encoded in attempts to decode video despite being staved of data to do it's job.

Moving on to analogue and once again starting with signals transmitted along a cable. Since each possible value for the analogue signal represents something different in what we see then as the signal becomes exposed to more and more noise as it is transmitted along the cable we start move away from seeing what was originally transmitted (aka lower quality). Also due to the fact there arw a infinite number of possibilies to the value of a point in an analogue signal we can't guess what that value could of been. Since I can get different cables with varing level of quality it is true that, typically, the more expensive and therefore high quality cables result in lower noise in the signal and therefore a more true to what was originally sent signal resulting in a higher quality image. If I attach a low quality analogue cable to a TV and then swap it for a high quality analogue cable there will be a difference.

End wall of text.

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Originally Posted by Android

Instead of being ignorant, why don't you read he bit when I said 'I am not talking about the HDMI cable.'

I repeat for you, 'I am not talking about the HDMI cable'

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The cable does make a tiny difference.

There is always some "bits" as in the digital bits lost in every cable. The devices at the end do error correction recreate the lost bits. Essentially the signal either works or doesn't as there's either enough data remaining to do error correction or there isn't. Better cables will lose less bits over longer distances so error correction is more likely to be successful, but if you're getting a "good enough" signal from a cheap cable it should give exactly the same end result as a "good enough" signal from an expensive cable.

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Originally Posted by preposterous

when we got it, the guy who installed it said we'd have to buy our own HDMI cable as they don't provide them. so if you didn't have one already, or buy one, then this could be one of the problems?

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Our Sky+ came with a HDMI cable (was only about a month ago).

I notice more of a difference in the audio rather than the picture but there is an improvement with the picture. Overall, if you are using a HDMI cable, the HD channels will look better, require higher volume on the TV and will have a slight delay compared to the non-HD channels.