MPEG-4 and DirecTV

Very rarely do I make an important decision concerning the purchase of
home A/V equipment without first referring to The Perfect Vision for
guidance.
Recently I did make a decision, which I now regret. I moved to a new
home and when I called my satellite provider they informed me that I
should leave my old dish behind and that a new one would be installed
free. I was also told that with this new dish my current SD receivers
and HD receiver were obsolete and that they would upgrade them for free.
The 'upgrade' HD receiver had such a poor quality video image
compared to my old one that I was afraid that my RPTV had been damaged during the move. The NBA playoffs were in progress when I made the move and I had been following them closely before I moved. As soon as I hooked the new system up and tuned in the HD broadcast of the playoffs I realized something was grossly wrong. The colors were faded and washed out and fast motion would exhibit severe macro blocking. A quick check using the DVD player confirmed that the RPTV was fine, the problem had to be in the satellite receiver. The 'upgrade' receiver also included a giant leap backward in it's GUI interface. Horrible! Functions that required 1 or 2 buttons with the old system would take up to 12 button selection to accomplish with the 'upgraded' equipment. (No exaggeration.)
After being told 3 times by the support folks at DirecTV that my old
receivers were not compatible with the new 5 LNB dish, I found someone
in tech support who told me that this is not the case. I have since
returned to using my old HD receiver and am again enjoying decent HD
content, with the exception of the recently added TNT HD channel, which
can't seem to get the aspect ratio correct.
I have been a subscriber to your publication for over 4 years and
so am aware of the transition from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 encoding. My guess
is that the newest HD receivers from DirecTV are using MPEG-4 and they
haven't figured out how to take full advantage of the format yet. As far
as I can tell, TPV has not yet rated MPEG-4 receivers or made any direct
comparisons to MPEG-2 receivers. A review of the picture quality of
MPEG-2 vs. MPEG-4 in the pages of TPV might have saved me a headache. In the absence of such a review, could you give me your opinion of the two formats and whether or not you've experienced any differences in picture quality between them? Does DirecTV have any plans to offer an upgraded version of their HD receiver? Are any other companies manufacturing MPEG-4 compatible HD receivers?
As long as I am on the subject of satellite HD, do you think there
is anything that can be done to discourage content providers from
constantly displaying their logos during programming. It's becoming more
than a little annoying to be reminded that these providers think we are
too stupid to remember what channel we are tuned to.Worse, some channels actually interrupt programming with animations advertising upcoming programs. There are some channels which I refuse to watch because of these annoying interruptions. There is nothing worse than to be involved in a dramatic movie scene and have an animated banner suddenly pop up covering the bottom third of the screen.
Your recent adoption of bar graphs to provide equipment ratings is
right on target. Keep up the good work and I'll keep up my subscription!