I bought a new 52" hdtv for my dad. I'm using a directv hd box. All hd chanels that use 1080i work fine. All channels that use 720p (espnhd and abchd) don't come in. they are compressed into three screens, all jumbled up, not in color, etc. the manual says nothing about it. any answers?
It's most likely that the box is set to natively output whatever resolution it receives. Many CRT TVs are not directly 720p compatible, so you'll want to force the DirecTV box to output 1080i only. That will make the receiver convert 720p signals to 1080i before it is sent to the TV.
If you can provide the model number of the box, I may be able to find exactly how to do this on your box.