With the HD HomeRun Prime, has anybody noticed pretty horrible picture quality with Comcast / Xfinity as your provider? I have seen this for a while, but on last night’s mid-season premier of The Walking Dead, it was particularly horrible. Dark areas showing large compression artifcating.
I’m trying to rule out it being either my cable card / HR Prime or a general issue with Comcrap. I know Comcast compresses their channels, but this was next to unwatchable.
Are you using a 4K TV and ATV? You may need to enable SDR mode in the app to make sure colors are not distorted.
Apple TV 4K outputting 1080p HDR (need to upgrade my receiver before I stay on 4k output) connected to Vizio M55‑E0. But see the same (although not as pronounced) on regular 4th Gen Apple TV on a older 32" Sony in 1080p.
I did change to SDR, and noticed the compression artifacts were not as glaring. I also tried setting the “match dynamic range” and it did not seem have an effect when I set the output back to HDR. Shouldn’t Channels be asking for SDR from the ATV4k when that option is on?
There’s a setting in the Channels app that controls when it asks the system to switch to SDR. You can either do it on app launch, or on video player launch.
I think that did the trick! Thanks for the assist!
This is why I keep telling all my friends about Channels. Keep up the good work.
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That show is particularly horrible picture quality whatever the source, Cable, on demand, through the AMC app, or through Netflix.
Not sure if that’s the intent.
The Walking Dead use a particular type of film/camera that results in pretty grainy/noisy footage. This is apparently intentional. Unfortunately, film grain doesn’t compress as well as smooth, noise-free footage, so a lot of the limited bandwidth goes to the grain and not to the detail of the show, making it look worse than it should.
I find the Amazon Prime Video version to be of a high-enough bitrate that the show looks as it’s meant to.
The problem was particularly bad in The Walking Dead, but it also was bad in Mr. Robot and any other “dark n moody” show.
But! per @tmm1’s suggestion, enabling the switch to SDR in Settings worked perfectly. The image quality is more or less (slightly on the less) the same as watching from AMC’s app. Which, is about what I expect from Comcast’s highly compressed “HD”. (How are they now offering 4k when they can’t even do justice to HD is beyond me)
I agree with you, Comcast’s picture quality is terrible. We invest all this money is 4K TVs and 4K AppleTV’s and all we can get is ~3Mbps H.264 streams. At least OTA looks decent.