I believe they r doing a system upgrade and their system is still down.

SD on a HDTV depends on the quality of the scalar. To tell u the truth, on a 34in CRT, if u really pay attention u can actually see the amount of compression on the SD channels. So on a bigger display it will be more apparent. Some good HDTVs have good scalars, the picture is actually pretty good.

In my own opinion, the Beyond box seems to put out better SD than the older Philips box that I had. cannot attribute it solely to HDMI so I'm unsure. I have not however. tried the component out to my display or my Reon equipped AVR to see if it is better on component, since its easier for me to use HDMI. Also, with the bitrates at 8mbs for the hd channels, I hardly consider that as anything deemed as critical viewing material. But u're right, SD processing is still mostly done in the display rather than the box. Remember that the box is intended as a sat box and not necessarily as a upscaler. As long as the box is doing the colour space conversion correctly its more than a bonus. This is one area that the current Pace box is good. It outputs in YCbCr 4:4:4 8bit compared to some boxes (even in the states) that output in RGB pc levels....So in my opinion, its a good box.

Don't confuse marketing with technical data. That's just how marketing goes.

Nice. I hope they can do it to all the movies on Fiesta HD.

I know this thread is normally reserved to point and "discuss" all the bad things about astro, but I wanted to reflect back on the last one year of Beyond HD broadcast.

Highlights:
Sports....sports... sports....and more sports!
For sports fans, its been a great year. Not perfect but great nonetheless. World Cup broadcast was fantastic. PQ was great, AQ was nice, with good LFE from the drums. EPL was fantastic. Astro Supersports HD seems to be have slightly better PQ than ESPN HD (not sure why) for the EPL games even. The broadcasts of Spanish league and Italian league seems to be of better quaility than the EPL that leads me to believe that the source feed might be the culprit. Commonwealth games was nice to have in HD, and I believe one badminton tournament. Asian games not being in HD was a shame though.

Movies:
StarMovie HD was a surprise and welcome addition, at least for me. The thing that I liked about Astro was the temporary channels that are festive based. The Hari Raya programming was great fun, the Deepavali as well. The current Fiesta HD programmes are really underrated. Example, Raavanan Blu ray was released only on the 24th Dec or so, yet Astro could source the HD master from somewhere (most likely SunTV) but its still a feat. 3 Idiots as well. Shinjuku Incident as well is a fairly recent release. The concerts are nice, hv not caught all of them so cannot talk about the quality as well.

Others:
The other channels are pretty good. FX HD although highly critized here, seems to show some decent serials and sitcoms.

Lowlights:
For PVR users, the series recording is still not complete.
I wish they would extend the sports HD channels at least for Friday/Saturday/Sunday to cover more Italian and Spanish League and more EPL.
Subtitles are still not available for the HD channels (I understand that this might be a technical limitation)
Of course, more channels would be welcomed.
HBO HD (I know this is not Astro) is definately stretching and upscaling a lot of its material. This one has me confused (I have not researced it yet). StarMovies seems to use at least maintain the correct aspect ratio and their stuff seems correct. I was under the impression that HBO owns part of StarMovies, but I could be wrong.
Astro's systems upgrades really take too long.
PVRs seem to have higher than normal HDD related failures, I lost one and some of my World Cup recorded matches...but thats life I guess.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Astro, this is my reflections. I doubt Astro would read this and not work on improvements. There are still ways to improve. Its been an eventful year for HD broadcasts in Malaysia IMHO. I look forward to a better year all around with more channels and more variety to the HD programming.

I believe that is framerate mismatch. Someone did not do a good job during the conversion.

Has there been any announcement if Astro will broadcast F1 2011 in HD as announced by BBC and Sky Deutschland? Or did I miss that discussion?

Actually they currently have 15 channels.

They have
Sports HD
All Sports Network HD
History HD Education HD
National Geographic Channel HD
Nat Geo Adventure HD
Nat Geo Wild HD
Discovery HD
Food Network Asia HD/Lifestyle HD
STAR World HD
FX HD
FOXCRIME HD
FOX HD
AXN HD
HBO HD
STAR Movies HD

Pretty similar lineup, additional breakout NatGeo channels, the elusive Discovery HD and a couple of Fox HD channels.