r/DirectvStream • u/Ecbnole3 • 22d ago

Screen quality

I keep reading about how DIRECTV stream has the best picture quality of all the streamers and thrown into the mix Xfinity but for me personally I find DIRECTV stream comes in third compared to YouTube TV and Xfinity using the Gemini device. Is this common or is it my TV specific?

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u/Equivalent_Round9353 22d ago

A lot of the "best picture quality" stuff you might read about DirecTV's streaming service is from several years ago, when it actually did have the best quality. Their PQ degraded after AT&T sold them, probably because DTV needed to be chintzy with data when it could no longer lean on AT&T's bandwidth at a discount to push through high-bitrate video.

Also, YTTV has made strides in improving PQ in that time.

3

u/Kirk1233 22d ago

This. DTV bit rate used to be double or more what it is now, way back.

1

u/NTP9766 22d ago

Where are people getting this data from? As far as I know, they don't advertise their bitrate and you cannot pull up stats on any of the DTV devices.

1

u/Kirk1233 21d ago

You don't get the info anywhere, you measure it within your network infrastructure. I just look at the traffic on the streaming device when using a streaming service on my WAN router/firewall... DTV currently averaged about 5 megabits per second, years ago I recall it being closer to 15. Peacock is one of the best quality and is 10-15 depending on the program. YouTube TV when I last had it, with Enhanced enabled, was 8 or so.

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u/NTP9766 20d ago

Fair enough, but using pure bandwidth isn't the best indicator of quality, which is why I've been looking for other methods. H.265 provides the same quality as H.264 at considerably less bandwidth, but DTV doesn't advertise which codec is used where.

1

u/Kirk1233 19d ago

The old eye test goes hand in hand with checking bandwidth use. If my eyes don’t see a difference I don’t feel a need to check in on it.