Sky Sports HD recording in SD. Why???

[admin_exported]

This is a REALLY frustrating problem, apologies if it's been covered before; I noticed a couple of weeks ago when I was recording a couple of Heineken Cup rugby games on HD that when I played the games back they were in SD.

Upon further investigation I narrowed the problem down to it only happening when there was more than one game being broadcast on the same channel. After repeated phone calls to the Sky helpline (every person I got was Indian and struggling to understand the problem) they booked an engineer to come out to my house, in spite of me insisting that it probably wasn't something an engineer could sort; I only wanted to talk to someone in the technical dept. No can do!!

So fortunately the engineer called here while there was a match on so I was able to show him exactly what the problem was. He was on the phone to the tech dept for over half an hour, the guy there said they hadn't heard of such a problem and that the engineer should just replace my box. Obv I was adamant that I wasn't happy with that and he totally agreed. He got so frustrated with the tech dept he ended up ringing his wife and getting her to record the game I was watching. Lo and behold his box turns out to have the same "problem". Are we the only two people in the UK with this problem? Really?

In summary, when I have the HD channel ON THE SCREEN and press record it records it. But when I play it back it's in SD!! The info bar doesn't show HD either, so is this just what happens when 2 games are shown at the same time on the same time? I'm REALLY

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annoyed with this as I spend money to see rugby in HD and then it turns out I can't! If it's a problem with the signal being split then why can't Sky show the games over more than one channel? This is unbelievably frustrating grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!

 

[Anonymous]

I have noticed a similar sor tof problem before with Champions League football. When Sky have the 'match choice' available on Sky Sports HD4 for example. You can wacth the 'live broadcast game on the channel in HD, when you go into the 'match choice' menu and select one of the other games being televised then the picture qualtiy switches to SD despite being on the HD channel. Now originally I thought this may be just because some of the other games were not being broadcast in HD to begin with so not really a problem. However, if you are in the match choice menu, and you select the game that is also being broadcast 'as live' on the Sky Sports HD4 channel, then it also gives you a SD picture quality despite being broadcast in HD! So watching the same game, on the same channel, can give you two different picture qualities depending on whether you are just watching the channel as normal, or in the match choice menu.

This, I could hazard a guess, is what is linked to your problem recording a SD picture. It will be recording it as though it is from the 'match choice' menu and thus a SD picture instead of just recording the original broadcast HD signal. Previously I haven't tried to record a game from a 'simulcast' channel so I have not seen that particular problem, but it makes sense in terms of what i've experienced with the Champ's League broadcasting. It shouldn't, and it is very frustrating, but that seems to be the way for some reason.

Sorry this doesn't help your situation, but I thought i'd just mention my experience in relation to this as this is clearly a problem for Sky which they either are not fully aware of or have not addressed yet.

 

[Anonymous]

That's exactly the problem Bob, so it's clearly a problem with the signal and not our boxes. Good to know that others have experienced this as my new 1TB box is otherwise flawless

The annoying thing is, Sky's tech dept claim not to be aware of any such problem!! One of their guys rang me a few days later and I went through the problem with him. He said he'd ring me back. That was a week ago!!

And the engineer said they have eqpt in front of them so they could've done exactly what we were doing there and then, but they woudn't!! Gits!!!!!

 

[The_Lhc]

If you're actually going into the "Match Choice" bit and trying to record from there it's very unlikely that you'll get HD, regardless of whether you started to watch on an HD channel. If Sky are offering 6 or 7 different matches at once then it's going to be almost impossible for them to show each one in HD, they simply won't have the bandwidth to do that (each stream is effectively an extra channel).

If you just select the HD channel and then press record it should record the HD feed but there may be a bug in the Sky box firmware that causes it to select the multi-stream feed instead, that'll require Sky to issue a firmware update to fix and also require them to actually be aware of the issue of course.

Either way there isn't anything you can actively do about it, hopefully the engineer will have logged the issue, which is probably the quickest way for Sky to understand the problem.

 

[Sorreltiger]

Hi Dave - I get the same thing when there's a choice via the red button. There doesn't seem to be a fix. For example, I set my box to record Tigers v Perpignan while we were at the match and the recording was only in SD. Unfortunately, the ref only had the SD feed rather than the HD one, but that's another story...........