Now that I can record SciFi in HD, I got my first episode of Battlestar Galactica. Boy, was that disappointing. Now I see why they show almost nothing in true HD on that channel, it's because it compressed to death, to the point that outputting 1920x1080, or around 6GB for 1H of video, is a total joke.

First, to get that out of the way, there is nothing wrong with my mythtv setup: it gets raw mpeg2 and saves raw mpeg2, nothing is lost in the process. Also, the jepgs below are compressed at 85% or better to make sure they would not worsen the picture quality (trust me, it's hard considering how bad it is to start with).

Comcast's picture quality for HD on Scifi is so bad that you can see major picture quality faults without even pausing the picture. So Xav, stick to Satellite, cable HD quality is indeed totally pathetic.

Hell, this is not new but here are a few samples to see what I mean:

So, this frame looks bad, but it's a 5th of the size it's actually broadcast in


Now, this is a portion of the full size frame that is actually displayed. Yes, it's that bad




and another portion of a full size frame, lovely...

Yes, it is really that bad. Good job comcast, I'm happy I pay for this shit and that I have no incentive to download much better quality copies of the show off the internet.