Anyone have any experience improving the affect of these? I have a Sony Wega 32FV17 and after cleaning up the picture through the service menu (most everything looks much better) the macroblocking from Directv's low compression rates has become much more noticeable.

Does anyone have any service menu settings or retail product recommendations that could help this problem? It's annoying to have a very nice (albeit only a tube) TV and then suffer from poor source.

Hopefully someone will at least know what I'm talking about

-Nick

There's really nothing you can do to improve the image coming from DirecTV as they set the quality levels at the source.

DirecTV does use different levels of compression depending on the program material -- I understand sports broadcasts get the best quality compression -- so some shows are worse than others.

You may want to consider tweaking your TV's adjustments back a bit so that the compression artifacts are less noticeable.

Yeah, unfortunately I can't really remember what I set (a lot). As a general rule most of the "popular" channels are okay. And NBA league pass is okay. Sunday ticket football seemed to vary (although I've heard the # of HD broadcasts are only going to go up). It's just annoyin to have such a sharp picture and then have the artifacts be so present. I guess moving forward, DVD's, video games, and HD should be less of an issue.

I was just curious if anyone knew any good tweaks.

-Nick