Is your HD broadcast a few seconds behind the non-HD?
 

Maybe this is just my provider but watching the Giants game last night people in the other room were already cheering after the field goal sailed through yet on the TV I was watching he hadn't even kicked it yet.

Are yours synced up?

yes. also, I was in northern VA watching the game on Comcast HD and my father was in Georgia watching the HD feed and it was several minutes ahead down there.

My local OTA HD is ahead of the SD on U-verse.

Nah, it's like that on every channel, everywhere, as far as I know. The explanation I heard is that there's a lag due to the time it takes to encode the material.

It's a few seconds behind on Directv. I was watching the Giants-Packers game on TV last night while posting in the Sports Forum here. I saw "game over" posts before the ball went through the uprights. And things like this happened a lot during other sporting events.

My HD is always 1 second behind the SD broadcasts.

My HD is always behind as well.

Doesn't it have to do with satellites? It would take less time for the broadcast to go from "wherever broadcast-antennae-home" than "wherever broadcast-satellite-cable company-home", or whatever the proper sequence is.

Like when you watch the news and they talk to someone on the other side of the world, and there's that annoying lag. It's all very technical :D2:

I work for a local FOX affiliate and our analog and HD signals are synced when they leave the building. The transmitter equipment is a lot different however and the lag is generated there. Besides broadcasting, the other entities all use a different way of receiving our signal. Comcast uses a fiber feed directly from our building, while DirecTV and Dish take our signal off-air. So not only do you have the lag from the digital transmitter, but now you're adding more lag sending the signal to multiple satellites. We have tried getting Direct to use fiber, but they don't want to pay for it. Their receive site is also in a bad location so occasionally they get a crappy signal and make their customers deal with it. Pretty lame.

I can't wait until Febuary of next year when analog goes away. It will make my job in master control a lot easier, with far less to keep track of.

Lag here as well. Insight, btw.

Both Dish and OTA HD broadcasts are behind the SD ones for the major networks for me.

Using a DVR/Tivo will create "lag" as well.

Regular Comcast in San Fransisco is generally about a minute ahead of my parents HD transfer from Direct-TV in LA...

Oh yeah ... I'm on satellite (Directv) and HD and DVR ... no wonder I'm like 20 seconds behind. :lol:

I work for an NBC affiliate, and there usually is a difference between the SD and HD signals. Though it could be a bunch of different factors. I'm not an engineer, so I couldn't explain everything. I know at one time, our master control switcher was SD, and any network HD feed was being fed to another system. So there was a delay already. But now are master control is nothing but HD. That makes our SD signal very weird, because we actually just either center-cut the HD signal or letterbox it (depending on the programming). So, now, our signals (in theory) should be synched going out, but our digital transmitter is in another location (several miles away). So our SD signal (being next to our station building) is going out before our HD signal.

Now with cable and satellite, I think that's already been explained. Every provider gets the signal differently, and they handle it differently. I couldn't tell you what goes on at that end, not counting the delay of getting there. And the DVR causing a delay makes a good point, too. Even in regular SD, my DVR was always a few seconds behind the TV without DVR.

Its about 5 seconds here with TWC... Thats with an HD-DVR as well, not sure if that makes a big difference or not.

The lag has been worse lately. At first it was just NBC HD but now every HD channel I look at reminds me of 70's Kung Fu theater.

What makes it worse is my wife remembers everything so the first question she asks...'is this nbc?' :(

The lag we're talking about is just that the HD channels are a couple of seconds behind the standard definition equivalents -- the video and audio are still in sync. Are you sure it's not an issue with your home theater?

Hmm...maybe :)

I have audio lag on most of my HD channels...sometimes. It happens about twice a week. Sometimes changing the channel and coming back everything syncs up...but other times there's nothing I can do with it. Do you think it's my HD DVR box?

all mine lag..except TNT HD....it is almost 30 seconds AHEAD of SD TNT

Yeah, having sat is the first problem, then having the DVR adds to the lag.

It used to be behind, but now it's ahead. Weird.

Agreed

Not HD related, but my cable is about two seconds behind a good friend's. Watching football over the phone together a couple years ago, I was amazed at how prescient he was, predicting several plays in a row.

He wasn't aware of what he was doing, he was just commenting on what he was seeing, but I thought he was a modern Nostradamus for a minute or so.

We figured it out before he had a chance to mess with me. Not realizing that and abusing me with the foresight is one of his biggest regrets in life.

I am curious as to why NBC seems to have the worst looking HD picture out of all the networks.

This is a recurring sync problem with HD broadcasts on NBC I've noticed. It was almost painful to watch Chuck last night because the lag was so noticeable. I've not had that problem on ANY other OTA HD network broadcasts.

Perhaps obidawsn can enlight us to what NBC is doing that no one else seems to have trouble accomplishing.

And as far as OTA compaired to DirecTV, DirecTV always lags the OTA signal both SD and HD.