Re:It's Not The Loss In Quality... (Score 1)

yep, on mot dvrs it's 6-9mbps vbr (or 4-5.5mbps vbr depending on your firmware version) whereas the broadcast digital sd channels are typically lot lower than 6mbps. this is done to give the best analog picture quality. older mot stbs were around the same bitrate ~8mbps cbr but about 60% the picture quality (cheap, early tech encoders). since each stb has to do the a->d encoding realtime, they aren't able to have more than 1 pass at the compression & even then aren't that robust at the first pass (otherwise more expensive hw). the cable company can afford to have massively expensive & robust encoders since they only need 1 per channel rather than having 1 chip in every stb.