Originally Posted by MKMK

Thanks Jay,

My signal strength is fine (in the 80s): The kind of problems you get from a weak signal are big blocks showing up on your screen. That's not what I've been seeing.

The compression artifacts I've been observing are the result of the compression of the signal before it is broadcast. They are smaller grainy blocks and checker board patterns that often show up around high contrast areas, like edge between someones shirt and a suit or skin

To answer your question, "Have you only noticed this over the past week?"

I definitely saw some compression on on DirectTV before - all digital TV has some compression artifacts - BUT in the past week I noticed a significant increase in the amount of artifacts.

Originally Posted by Aaron62

I have DirecTV and I have definitely noticed some artifact problems with local stations ever since the transition. I think they may be working some of the bugs out. When I get home tonight, I'll take another look at the rest of the stations.

Originally Posted by MKMK

Yes Aaron, now that you mention it local stations are showing a lot of compression, which, which stands out because local stations used to tend to be not so bad compression.

You will notice that the pay TV channels like HBO look better, they give more bandwidth to those channels apparently. Maybe thats what is going on now, they are downgrading the quality of free-channels to give more bandwidth the HBO-Showtime etc.