Certain On Demand titles from HBO and Cinemax blurry and flickery
When accessing certain On Demand movies from HBO and Cinemax in Omaha, NE, the picture looks out of focus and has a bad flicker to it. This is on Contour 1, boxes Cisco 8642 and 4742. This is not the TV's problem, as it only happens on certain titles. With HBO, if I record the same title off of the live channel with the 8642 DVR, it is fine. So again, definately not the TV. With HBO, this has happened with only a few titles, most work fine. Cinemax On Demand is just plagued with it, though, as more than half of the titles I wanted to watch during their free On Demand preview had this problem and were therefore unwatchable. I don't think I've ever encountered the problem on Showtime OnDemand, Starz OnDemand, or any other OnDemand through Cox. Don't encounter it on live channels or DVR recordings from live channels. I tried each of those boxes on the same TV, same results. The box is hooked up to the TV through component. (I do not know if the same problem happens through HDMI, since I have no TVs with HDMI.) The box for this TV is set to output 480i standard (what the TV supports, non-widescreen TV 480i format).
Here are some specific examples and titles:
HBO OnDemand Titles with this problem
Invisible Man, Turistas, The Frighteners
With Invisible Man and Turistas, the titles display fine when aired on the live HBO channel or recorded to the Cox DVR from the live channel. (Frighteners was not tested on live channel.) There were a few other HBO OnDemand titles with this problem in the past, but I don't remember which ones. I do remember they did play fine on the live HBO channel, though.
Cinemax OnDemand titles with this problem:
The Watch, Walk of Shame, The Apparition, Shaun of the Dead, Code 46, Don't Let Go, Darkness, Curse of the Pink Panther, Son of the Pink Panther
Not able to test on the live channels since live channels are not included in the Cinemax OnDemand free preview. (OnDemand only included.)
Below are some still captures. They give a general indication of what I am talking about, although the problem in real life is worse than these images show since the bad flicker can't be seen on a still image. The one on the left is from a Cinemax OnDemand title that displays normal (Inheritance). The one on the right is from a title that is screwed up, The Apparition. Notice the Dolby text at the bottom is not even readable on the screwed up title (The Apparition), but is readable on the title that displays normally (Inheritance). (You'll need to click on the images to view them at a larger size.) Can this be looked into? Maybe there's a flag or something set incorrectly within the video itself?
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