I'm getting ready to set up the TV provider for my new house, and I was dead set on cable (time warner) but in the back of my head I keep thinking of how you are always promoting Direct TV as a better solution.

I had sworn off satellite because of the crappy service I got from Dish, but maybe I ought to rethink this. I was hoping you could give me your best reasoning for going w/ Direct TV over cable.

My main concerns are outages, cost, HD content (amount & quality), DVR (since I'll be giving up my beloved Tivo to go HD)

Only outages I've ever had were rain fade and obstructions. Rain fade only because the dish wasn't pegged on the birds right.

HD is compressed, HD-Lite. Chaps my hide, but the new hardware will be MPEG4 which should help lessen the quality issues, but it will still be compressed (for comparison though, some cable co.s are compressing their HD as well).

You'll get the new DVRs, I haven't used the new ones, but they don't have any "to go" feature.

Btw, I've been a DirecTV subscriber for 12+ years now.

But I don't know who does and doesn't outside of the Western Washington area.

I'm just waiting for FIOSTv.

Outages: If installed properly, it's relatively rare. Depending on the cable infrastructure in your area, cable outages may be common or completely non-existant. Dish outages are generally only caused by rain-fade, which should only happen in really heavy rains if at all. Cable outages are usually much longer in duration. If you have a major storm knock out cable in your area, it could be days before it's fixed. Then again, with a really bad storm, your dish could get blown away.

So, long story short... IF the cable in your area is reliable, it'ls likely more reliable than Dish... but not by much. The tradeoff is that dish comes back when it stops raining, and cable may not.

Cost: How many televisions? One big benefit of cable is you get "free" analog cable for most of your TVs and just put digital cable boxes on a couple/few. With a dish, you have a receiver for each one, and pay for each receiver. The costs usually work out pretty close to even if you're under 4 TVs. If more than that, cable can have an advantage. This all depends on the programming that interests you, and you should compare packages that meet your tastes.

HD Content: DirecTV is currently severely lacking in this department. However, they are throwing insane sums of money into new capacity, and will be a leader in HD within a year.

DVR: The HR20 is a mixed bag. Some people love it, some people say it's the worst DVR on earth. Personally, I can't stand the Motorola and Scientific Atlanta boxes that the cable companies use. I moved from the Tivo DirecTV DVRs to the new DirecTV units (HR20 and R15) and overall I've been pretty happy with them. They still have a few bugs to work out, but I'll take those bugs over a Motorola or Scientific Atlanta crap anyday. If you have the option for a Comcast Tivo, it'd be a closer call between the two.

I've been really happy with DirecTV over the years. Lots of people I know have been really happy with Time Warner over the years. There are certain advantages to cable. In the end, you've gotta choose ;)

Oh... and one other thing. If you've only got one piece of coax going to each TV, and no easy way to run more, it's going to make DirecTV's DVR suck. To get dual tuner support, you need two runs from the dish (or multiswitch) to the DVR.

First, let's talk compression. This is MPEG2 or MPEG4... EVERYTHING on satellite (Dish Network or DirecTV, both) is compressed. All of it. Every channel.

Analog cable is not compressed.... anything on digital cable is. Again, all of it. This includes HD channels.

So, cable or satellite, HDTV channels will ALWAYS be compressed. The only way to get uncompressed is by picking them up off an antenna. DirecTV's HD receivers all have receivers that can do this given an antenna.

DirecTV previously was 100% MPEG2 compression. Their newest satellites are all MPEG4. Overall, this represents a bandwidth savings without a loss of picture quality... so they can get more channels in the same space without sacrcificing quality. Aside from that, MPEG2 vs MPEG4 means very little to a new customer. (It sucks for old customers, because none of their equipment can decode MPEG4)

Now... "HD-Lite"... This is a much protested practice of DirecTV where they take 1080i content and reduce the horizontal resolution. The original content is 1920x1080, and they make it 1280x1080. I'm not clear if they do this on all or just some channels. There's a lot of speculation that it will end as they migrate the HD content to the MPEG4 satellites. And yes, some cable companies do similar things.

That said... I can't tell much difference, if any at all. 720p (1280x720) channels are left at full resolution... and I just don't see much difference between the uncompressed non-HD-lite 1080i feed I pick up with an antenna compared ot the compress HD-lite feeds from DirecTV. If anything, what I see is a result of compression, which will be there with cable or DirecTV.

Thanks for the thorough reply. You make some pretty valid points, but it sounds like it's a fairly level playing field with pros and cons to each.

My main reservation about going with cable is the crappy Moto or SA DVR. Going from Tivo to that is going to be a tough adjustment. My only hope is that Comcast rolls out their Tivo DVR soon AND offers it in my area. I seriously doubt they will offer it in my area anytime soon though. Hell, they are still going to keep Time Warner letterhead on the cable bills until Spring!

Given your info, I'll probably go with cable and just hold out for the Tivo DVR.

But HD-Lite is another method of "compressing" those HD channels to get them down from a transponder which is only capable of 21mbps total. Sure MPEG4 will help, but there's only so far you can crunch numbers on images (and audio) before the quality becomes dilluted. They're munging the streams in addition to dropping horizontal resolution.

The 720p channels I don't think are dropping horizontal information, but they are getting compressed to high hell. ESPN suffers like nobody's business (watch SportsCenter when they do the opening montage or when they show the red lights swinging aroud the studio before they go to break).

One or the other wouldn't be as horrible, but both are murder.


EDIT: Btw, I say compression when something is taken beyond it's initial encoding into a compressed format (an MPEG2 stream which peaks at 19.2 is further compressed to only peak at maybe 17.4). Personally I wish we could get raw streams, but I don't think anybody can handle that yet. ;)

I absolutely despise the Motorola/SA gear. Even their non-DVR receivers suck.

at least I can with my E* dual-tuner hd-dvr (vip-622)

The only thing you can do with one wire is a stacker and destackers

They're extremely expensive. Extremely.

I have one line coming into my house, which is split 3 ways at the receiver - 2 satellite inputs, and the RF output going to the 2nd tv. At the dish, I have the 2 lines coming off the LNBs, which are combined into the single line going into the house. there's also the "splitter" for the feed from the DVR going to the 2nd TV.

not sure what they're doing, but the way DirecTV has implemented their newest satellites, they're using pretty much the entire available spectrum on a piece of coax. You can't multiplex anything onto it with a passive (frequency based) mux... only with a stacker/destacker, and those are extremely pricey.