Very likely, but even HD cable looks like hot garbage most of the time these days. I'd try a netflix stream or a Blu-ray and see how they look. That would put the blame squarely on the cable box, and cableco - likely some combination of the two.
That's the truth. I haven't had cable for over 15 years, so I forget about that. I use OTA and streaming, which are both far less susceptible to those problems. When I go to my folks', I'm surprised how bad the image is. When I watch OTA, I'm surprised how good the image is.
It's one of the reasons why I won't go cable. If I switch from DirecTV, it will be streaming only.
I switched from DirecTV to OTA (with Amazon Firecast DVR) and streaming. Very happy.
I'm a sports nut which is why I'm still with DirecTV.
I spent about $250 on long range antennas about 15 years ago. I can't even calculate how much I've saved since then. Possibly more than I have spent total in that time on movies and A/V equipment.
Over The Air - refers to people who use an antenna for their TV signal instead of cable or satellite.
When DirecTV began offering local channels in HD, they were the first to begin using MPEG-4 compression (transcoding the broadcaster's MPEG-2) to be able to squeeze more channels on to their satellites, use less disk storage on their DVRs, and provide a more efficient compression codec. At the time, most cable providers were still re-compressing the broadcaster's MPEG-2 signal using the same MPEG-2 codec, yielding a picture that often showed compression artifacts. Many cable companies, unfortunately, still do that. Our local Spectrum engineer told me that until just a year ago, most of the so-called HD channels we were receiving in my little town over Spectrum were nothing more than 1080i upconverts from SD until they were able to afford the cost to replace equipment at our head end. Kind of pathetic, but at the time all they offered in town was TV service. Now that they replaced that equipment, they offer phone service (a steal at $10/month) and up to 960 Mbps internet service. Unfortunately, their TV service still sucks in that they are still using those crappy 500 Gb Motorola DVR boxes.
