Sky+HD vs Virgin Media TiVo
Is it Sky+HD or Virgin Media TiVo that has the best picture quality? We find out with our exclusive tests
HOW WE TEST… TV IMAGE QUALITY
We tested Sky+HD and Virgin Media TiVo for image quality on both live broadcast and catch-up services. We choose Top Gear as our test programme, as it’s a very popular show that has a lot of action and is broadcast in HD, so it should test the TV services and boxes to their limits. For testing we used a Sky+ HD box (black and silver type) and Virgin Media TiVo 1TB.
We recorded Top Gear’s Africa special simultaneously using all the boxes. We went through the show and choose a handful of scenes that we felt would show off the boxes to their best and test them in tough conditions.
Then we captured these sections of the programme from each using our HDMI capture equipment – outputting at the highest possible resolution from each box – as a digitally lossless 24-bit RGB video stream. We then watched the clips back, noted the differences and picked out individual frames to illustrate them.
Where we thought two services were producing identical video, we then used a tool to compare the frames on a pixel-by-pixel basis to ensure that they were exactly the same. It should be noted that your TV will have a large impact on image quality, but a good initial source is still essential.
FAST-MOVING ACTION COMPARISON
Our first scene used the fast driving scene over the dusty roads. We wanted to see how well each box dealt with detail in fast-moving scenes.
The original Full HD capture
Virgin Media’s TiVo has the sharpest-looking picture, with smooth, strong lines, such as on the bumper. There’s more detail in the mud on the lower bumper, but this only resolves as a slightly more textured appearance when watching the programme under normal conditions
Sky’s picture has a slightly more refined appearance with less pixellation on stand-out lines, such as the one across the top of the bumper. However, some detail is lost in the mud on the bumper to achieve this. There are a few artefacts if you look closely, with repeated patterns in the mud
Virgin Media uses the iPlayer internet stream. It can look pretty reasonable, but it falls apart in complex moving scenes such as this. It’s soft all over, with huge blotches of colour where the compression can’t keep up
Sky’s catch-up stream of Top Gear is a pixel-perfect identical match for its broadcast version