Directv darks are green? Anyone else?

[IncredibleHat]

Im new to directv, and I have been noticing that the darks are all greenish in tint. But nothing else is.

This isnt a TV calibration issue, as I have tried all the settings, on three different tvs, and even the input cards in my HTPC to fix it. The only way I get the darks to stop being green, is by turning everything else into purple tinges and bleeded colors (thus turning the HUE all the way up to remove green) lol.

Obviously thats not right.

When I get the whole rest of the color bands, the whites, lights, bright colors all looking like they are realistic... the shadows, dark jackets, dark brown hairs of people etc all have a green tinge.

SO, I wanted to see, any other directv customers seeing this too? I mean, we all have the same source, so if many others are getting this, then its definatly a dtv thing.

I no one else has this... then what in blazes would cause all three of my receivers, and thre tvs and the htpc to all exhibit this problem???

[naln]

Nope- I don't have that problem.

Are you using the composite/ Svideo or tuner inputs? Simplest solution is to switch to a different cable- a set that you know works and see if problem persists.

What capture cards are you using?

[IncredibleHat]

This occurs with composite. And svideo. Various cables.

Occurs on three different TVs, one being an HD Monitor (not much a tv, just takes input, see my sig for photo).

Only the HTPC has tuner cards, and they are crappy PVR150s, and they make the problem worse by 'banding' the darks and making a very ugly mish mash of colors in darkened areas or on faces in the shadows. Horrible... absolutly horrible.

[naln]

looks like its your sat box?

Did this start all of a sudden? have you tried to check the RF/Coax output on the sat box as well? - just wondering if your native signal has lost it tuning somehow.....from the dish.... thats my guess if the same thing crops up on coax output as well....

Good luck....how are the channel changing issues with the connector now?

[IncredibleHat]

I have two D11-100s, and one R13whatever DVR unit. They all do it, so its not just the one receiver.

So, my guesses would be, the dish, the cable from the dish, the power splitter they used from the dish to the four units (the dvr is two units in one), or ... the actual signal being broadcast.

There are too many end factors that all result the same for any of those to be the cause (tv, cable from receiver to tvs, htpc, encoders, etc).

As for channel changing... it hasnt locked up yet since I got it working monday. But then, tonight it prolly will during its scheduled recordings since this would be about the timeframe for it to go belly up.

[naln]

Did you try the older dll....

I have it working since Saturday on that one without crashing....i had intelligent recording enabled....not a single bad tuning/ missed tuning.

I have turned off the intelligent recording today morning and I'll see how it handles the scheduled recordings after that.

Patersontech is of the opinion that the USB port on the D11s go to 'sleep' every now and then.....so we need to simulate an unplug and replug, which is a part of their configuration utility if the box does not respond.

I don't know if Sage DirectTV dll takes advantage of this though....

Anyways- will keep you posted on how things go with the channel changing over the next couple of days.


As for your other problem:- I am strongly beginning to suspect your signal - ie dish alignment or tuning. There is no other reason for all of the sat boxes to go kaput at the same time. I would suggest that you give the DTV guys a call before you spend too much time on fixing it.....it may have an autotune dish option of some kind- buried somewhere in the menu.....but best not to mess with it until you get in touch with DTV techs...

Good luck!

[Knuckleheadtim]

I've had DirecTV for about 9 months now and I'm very dissatisfied with the picture quality. All dark scenes are terribly posterized (banded) and appear as though I'm viewing them in Windows set at 16 colors. This occurs on different TVs whether I go through Sage or not. Bright scenes are superb with no color problems or posterizing. some channels are better than others. I'm guessing that the compression they use skimps on quality for the darker scenes to conserve on bandwidth. I'm seriously considering going back to cable for this reason alone and not out of love for the local cable company.

[IncredibleHat]

Well, one thing is for certain, using any number of S-Video cable results in the green and poor quality by about 4x. So, I am going to use the ole-reliable component until I actually pinpoint the problem.

Edit: Oh, and yeah, Ive noticed that banding as well. It isn't as noticable on like the old cabinet cruncher 29" CRT SD TV upstairs, but it is more noticable on the 32" HDTV in the other room, and also the 42" Monitor I use with Sage. The banding gets even worse with the capture cards encoding.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Knuckleheadtim

I'm guessing that the compression they use skimps on quality for the darker scenes to conserve on bandwidth. I'm seriously considering going back to cable for this reason alone and not out of love for the local cable company.

Dark scenes, especailly dark gradients are notoriously hard for encoders to do well. They tend to give the encoder the false impression that it can use less bits, and often end up with banding and posterization.

You can see this on DVDs as well, even on good ones (don't go looking if you don't see it, ignorance is bliss).

I guess the question is "how green is it". If it's almost-black-green, there's probably nothing wrong with your setup.

One thing that you really should do, and will probably help things, is to make sure your TVs are properly calibrated for the source. Having the brightness set to high highlighs problems like this (plus macroblocking and other nasties) that would otherwise go unnoticed, or at least be less bothersome.

[unkyjoe]

I would tend to agree with Stanger on this.

I noticied a real crap picture on my TV but not on a projector when using Sage with DirecTV and svideo.

I pulled out the remote for the big screen and low and behold one of the kids had jacked the contrast way up there and not told me.

I always use a calibration disk to setup my TV's once I did this will the big screen all of my picture issues went away.

I record at about 3mb rate, as I find this gives me a good quality picture with the Nvida dual tv card.

Hope this helps.

[IncredibleHat]

TVs are calibrated just fine trust me.

Edit... I hit return by accident... let me continue...

Using just one tv as an example, I plugged the D11 into its AV port (the yellow plug, composite). The darks were greenish... most easily seen when a show had letterboxing on it, or of a dark drama whatchamawhatever. Now, if I disconnected the satellite feed... the screen would go blank with a little dtv message in the corner "acquiring satellite feed". The black screen was greenish in tint. Not just a 'wee bit' I'm talking obvious green. To further make the matter worse, it was not solid... it had two bands running up it slowly with a bit of hissy fuzz. This could just be the unit freaking out because it had no sat feed, so I am ignoring the bands and fuzz, you should too.

Now, when I unplug the D11 from the AV port, then plug the cable in from like an old VCR, the screen is blue (what the vcr does when it has no signal). I stick in a commercial tape that has a black leader, and run it. The black it displays is solid PURE nice warm n fuzzy BLACK. Not dark hunter green like the D11.

Note, I did absolutly no change of source input on the tv, nor any changes to calibration. The test tv in question has seperate calibrations per source. However since I was using the 'exact same input port' for the D11 and VCR, this negates that.

Ok, so now we move to the HTPC.

I switch to DVI (the htpc), and the desktop shows up. I had previously calibrated the TV's DVI port to a color chart on the desktop, and its setup perfectly. I put up a black screen image and the black is solid clean awesome black. I load up sage, and all its colors are great. I watch a show off the input card hooked to the D11, and the darks being displayed are nasty greenish. Same sort of nasty as when the D11 was plugged in directly to the TV itself WITHOUT THE HTPC IN THE MIX (make sure you understand that, its not the htpc at fault here, nor sage).

Common factor? The D11 box. Not the feed, not the cable, not the htpc, not the tv, not the calibration on the tv, not the tuner cards, not any of that.

Worst thing is, the two D11s I have, both do this. LOL...

Another thing to note, when I use the S-video output on the D11, the green is WORSE. It is also more grainy.

Edit again: TWO D11s do this! Not just the one. If it was one, I would have called in a replacement immediately. But no, its BOTH of them?????

Edit even more: I am not discounting all of your input. Its all good, and helpful for others who may simply have a miscalibration issue. But even after putting my tv way OUT of calibration to combat "greens" it did not fix it. Well, it got rid of green blacks, but it also made the rest of the image look worse. Either Purples, fucias, bleeding reds, and even faded out colors (black and white seems to exhibit no greens lol).

[stanger89]

Just because other sources look fine doesn't mean it's not a calibration issue. If all sources output exactly the same, there'd be no need to calibrate. Manufacturers could just make TVs work right out of the box.

Such is not the case with analog video, output varies from source to source, and different sources require different calibrations.

Sounds like the D11's have a bit of a color temperature issue at low levels. That's not completely unheard of, but the fact that it's "bad" still indicates a calibration issue, that the brightness is probably too high, artificially exacerbating the issue.

Oh, and the scrolling fuz sounds like a ground loop.

[Ted@TNT]

I previously had this issue as well, but resolved it with calibration as stanger suggests.

[IncredibleHat]

But here is my problem. If I calibrate the TV to compensate for the problems of the D11 input... And doing this to the HTPC DVI source, sage looks like hot ass in a sewer dump. Not to mention the desktop too and all my DVDs which play perfectly fine.

No amount of calibration has fixed just the raw input with no htpc in the mix either.

As an interesting note... I grabbed the R15-300 and tried it, and IT looks FINE ?! (so I was wrong about the previous post saying the R15 did it, oops, musta got confused with all I had tried)

Its only the two D11 units I have that exhibit this problem. They have this green tint to them. Which makes the capture cards most likely go wonky on the input. More so on svideo as the svideo out of the D11s are so MUCH more greenish. I mean, blondes look like they just came out a heavily chlorinated pool lol.

I tried 8 different composite cables, some gold plated.
I tried four sets of svideo cables too.
I tried plugging the D11s into another wall socket instead of the powerstrip.
I tried plugging the D11s into seperate quad shielded cables from the satsplitter.
I tried removing ALL other cables from the sat system (the other rooms).
I tried 'washing' the image out by dropping contrast to zero and up the brightness to bring darks out of the deadpan.
I tried moving all non essential equipment out of the room (speakers, lamps, etc).
I put electro deinterferance shielding around the D11s.

I didnt have any of these troubles with our old analog cable from the wall... just grains and streaks and waves and fuzz and ... lol.

Hrm, thanks for all the ideas. I keep trying them, but am not getting near a solution.

EDIT:
I attached a shot of Heros from last week showing a bit of how nasty dark scenes look.

[naln]

Try a new DTV box- I dont know if you can get a friends box to work for your troubleshooting at least?
Obviously the D11-100s seem to be your problem....since the other box is working fine

Good luck....

[IncredibleHat]

I just find it odd that 'both' D11s look exactly the same. I mean, what are the chances? So it just seems like its something on my end somewhere.

Got no friends that have the D11 nearby (like within 500 miles). I live in the boonies... lol.

[naln]

I agree- all I want to suggest is that a 'known' working sat box should be a step in the troubleshooting .... since you have obviously already spent quite some time on this... I think you should rule out the DTV boxes before this problem consumes more of your time....

also, how long since you had this working properly? ...can you backtrack to when you first saw this problem crop up- maybe we'll notice something....?

Good luck man....I totally understand this frustration.....currently my sage server is stuttering with video playback and I have no clue why?.....just about had it with PVRs for now......

[unkyjoe]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Sounds like the D11's have a bit of a color temperature issue at low levels. That's not completely unheard of, but the fact that it's "bad" still indicates a calibration issue, that the brightness is probably too high, artificially exacerbating the issue.

Oh, and the scrolling fuz sounds like a ground loop.

I would have to agree with Stanger on this one, I tried a little experiment outputing my D11-500 straight to a projector and I think he is on to something, it looks like the color temperature is way off.

I have contacted DirecTV support to see what is up as these units just went through a firmware upgrade not long ago.

My D10-300 is not exibiting the same problems.

JUST FYI

[SHS]

IncredibleHat I have very same thing and I'm Dish network see this page
http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=49750
I never could fig out fig out what was cuaseing it and give up.
I odd thing was it on all boxs in house both 811 and 311

[IncredibleHat]

naln: well, the problem persisted like, day 1 since I got the receivers (which was the begginning of the year, just a month old).

What I find the strangest, is the R15-300 unit looks just fine. But thats a dual-tuner unit with built in DVR, so its most likely got 'better' hardware in it. My only guess is the D11s have gotten a firmware update that screwed with the internal calibration or something.

I may ~try~ contacting directv support. God I so hate dealing with 'corporate support systems'. They waste about 2 weeks of telling you its all your fault before even listening to what the problem is.

I may be able to 'fix' this on the HTPC by adjusting the nvidia color calibration settings of video playback, and pray it doesnt screw with DVD playback (which DVDs look pretty spot on in my book).

Thanks for the info again... I'll keep looking into it.