Not long ago I was trying to explain a problem I noticed while watching Seinfeld on one of the digital sub-channels that broadcasts in 480i. It was like the picture constantly was in and out of focus. Last night I started watching a movie that I recorded from Saturday night on the same channel that I had problems before. Only for some reason, the problem was unbearable. The “focus” problem caused the picture to seem to jump or skip. For the heck of it, I went to the Sage menu and changed the decoder from Cyberlink (PDVD7) to Arcsoft, since my trial’s still active. Went back to watching the movie and what a surprise, it looked fine. It was the decoder the whole time. One problem remains though. I decided to see how HDTV looked now so I turned it over the Sunday night football game. The game looked horrible using the Arcsoft decoder. Everything looked like a big blur while they were moving. Then I switched to the Intervideo decoder. Again, the 480i recording looked good, but HD still looked bad. Then I remembered the Intervideo decoder was not the one I thought. I had installed a demo of WinDVD 9, but remembered I uninstalled it. When I first chose it, I thought that was the decoder I was using but remembered it would now be called Corel or WinDVD 9. I can understand the Intervideo decoder not playing HD, but why is the Arcsoft so bad? Once I put it back on the Cyberlink decoder, HD was perfect again. So I can either have HD with bad SD playback or I can have good SD playback with bad HD.
One other thing that is confusing. SD content that is recorded from S-Video from my satellite box does not have this “focus” problem from the Cyberlink decoder. What is the difference? Isn’t SD the same regardless of where it comes from? 480i is 480i, right?
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