Will new Dish HD recievers work w/ MPG4?

[robertjp]

These new HD recievers 942 and 921, etc are all well and good but will they work with MPG4 when dish switches over ? or will it be a waste of money? I wanna buy one but not if it will be obsolete with MPG4. Thanks much. Bob P.

 

[mdonnelly]

1. Charlie said a couple of months ago that all HD receivers will need to be replaced in order to access new HD programming in MPEG-4. MPEG-2 will still be around for the existing HD channels for some transition period.

2. Not necessarily a waste of money, but E* hasn't announced an upgrade path yet.

 

[mailman390]

I can't see dishing out $700 for a new 942 if it can't be upgraded or traded. If E* did some kind of swap program then fine.

 

[hdtvtechno]

By end of this year, or start of 06.....

 

[Cyclone]

I don't think that the MPEG-4 decoder chips became available in bulk quanities until the end of last year. So they really haven't been put into any of the STBs yet.

Besides, Dish has been saying that this will be a slow transition. The best guesses so far have been that first it will be just the New HDTV channels which will be Mpeg-4. Then the existing HD channels will follow after some period of time. There's only about 8 of them, so thats relatively not a big deal. The the SD channels will begin to convert.

By that time, the MP4 chips will be a few years in development and will be so cheap that it will make sense for Dish to be able to offer to swap out the millions of SD STBs that they have. l

 

[jerryez]

So, how many people have Dish HD receivers right now?

 

[Foxbat]

So, how many people have Dish HD receivers right now?

I don't know if Echostar has published that information. We have two in our house. Even if they published the number of accounts with HDPack, I'm sure there are accounts where people had it, and dropped it, so that may not answer your question.

As relatively satisfied as I've been owning my receivers over the years, Dish's Lease Plans would have cost me less money over the 8+ years I've owned them. Figure on $499 for my 2000, $799 for my DSR100, $649+$99 for my 6000 + 8VSB, and $149 for my 811. That's $2,195, which doesn't include the RG6U cable, connectors, tools, ground blocks, grounding rods, 30' of 00-guage copper cable to bond the ground rod to my service ground, etc. I've had Dish programming for approximately 106 months, which works out to $20.71/mo. just for the receivers.

If I can replace my STBs with leased units, that will be the way I will go.

 

[mudder1310]

I would think Dish would offer different HD packages once MPEG-4 comes around so you could keep what you had before and only upgrade to a new receiver if you wanted to add the new programming.