There are lots of ways for them to cheat and they probably will because Astro / Media Prima have done nothing but shrink the budgets available to produciton houses every year.

But if they want to produce HD they need to do the following:


For Video - >

Malay dramas are slowly switching to HD shooting already. But of course these new cameras have higher rental fees. $$$

They are editing with an intermediate file that's between SD and HD resolution.

And then outputting to SD for delivery.

To upgrade, the production houses will need more expensive editing computers and spend a lot more time rendering than they do now. This costs more money$$$ than usual.

They will also need to output to HDCam tape, this transfer process costs more money than the current process.$$$


For Audio - >

Some malay dramas don't even take their audio to an audio-post production house to finish their audio.

To get 5.1 surround, they will either fake it. Or they will take their audio to an audio-post production house, which has to take more time in mixing / editing. This costs more money$$$ than usual.

Then the audio needs to be encoded to Dolby E. Not even the multi-million dollar facility at FINAS can do this. Currently the only way to encode audio to Dolby E is to take it down to MediaCorp in Singapore. This of course costs more money$$$



So if Media Prima / Astro go Full HD, not only will they have to upgrade their own facilities, they will have to increase the budgets that they give production houses.

Yes, but only if you have the audio settings in the B.yond box set to output Stereo to the HDMI.

If you set the B.yond box to outpu Dolby Digital on the HDMI output, it turns off the analog (red/white) outputs.

Ha ha ... bullshit

So much talk, and absolutely no action.

We'll miss you in the forum.


Hahahahahahahaha

All movies shot in film have 2k HD resolution.

Most tv programmes from the US are in fact shot on film.

It's just that all the master tapes up until recently have only been available in SD formats.

HBO has to upscale some movies, simply because they only own an SD master.

It's very sad that HBO HD doesn't have all HD source material.
Unfortunately up to this point the film studios are just starting to release HD masters of their films for television distribution.


As I've said before, they should really mark in the program guide which movies have HD masters and which ones don't.

Anything that has been re-mastered for Blu-Ray is already in a state that can easily be transferred to HDCam Tape to deliver to HBO HD.

It's just a question of HBO HD demanding to get an HDCam copy.


Godfather has already been remastered for Blu-Ray.

HBO should already have an HD version.


If they were more truthful about what is HD and not HD then customers would apply a lot more pressure on them.

Don't blame Astro, they have absolutely no contol over what HBO fills the channel with.

I just wish the content was in HD, just watched a couple of CSI shows on IPTV VOD. They only have the first 2 episodes of season 10 available at the moment. It's in 16:9 but it's definitely not HD.

The picture / audio quality of Astro B.yond is MUCH better.

If you've already checked the cable / connection.

Then just a wild guess, but maybe it could be an overheating problem.

My computer screen will black out for a second periodically when the computer graphics card gets too hot.

The converter chips in the Astro box are basically graphic cards / processors and will do weird things if they get too hot.

Try ventilating the area around the box or maybe even removing the cover.

This post has been edited by Arlington: Apr 7 2010, 02:48 PM

Yes, I think Astro should upgrade to quantum processors in the next model so they don't produce any heat.

But I think quantum computing may be a few years away.

In the mean time maybe they should simply improve the heat dissappation in the new versions.

Yes they have 2 check boxes to fill in.

1. Got Picture? __ Yes __ No
2. Got Sound? __ Yes __ No

A lot of the documentaries shown on these channels are compiled from many different sources of video ranging from Full HD all the way down to cell phone video.

Just watching the History / NGC channel graphics / title slides etc between programmes you can tell right away that it's HD just like the other channels.