More on the Effect of Digital TV 355
EyesWideOpen writes "Here is an interesting article at Wired which mentions that existing DVR devices (Tivo, ReplayTV) aren't equipped to handle the digital TV signal that broadcasters are scheduled to start delivering in 2006. Also mentioned is a proposal being considered by the FCC that would allow cable companies to 'turn off' the firewire port, which DVR's will use to connect to digital televisions, so that some broadcasts can't be recorded. The proposal is being considered no doubt in response to fears like that of MPAA head Jack Valenti who has said that without proper security measures, the industry won't allow its movies to be broadcast because they don't want viewers to record 'perfect copies' of movies."
Re:Forgive my ignorance... (Score:2, Informative)
These are not the same thing. Your refering to Digital Cable - a digital way to multiplex analog TV signals to gaurentee clearity while allowing the Cable company (Rogers, Cogeco) stuff more channels down the pipe (and compete w/ satellite). That set-top box converts that channel you select back to analog (which is why you cant use the tuner on the TV
Digialt TV means all channels are NOT digital versions of analog content. It is fully DIGITAL content, encoded in some format (MPEG-7?) and decoded by YOUR TV. This means you can record the digital stream on to a HD (technology permitting).
Have you seen the quality of Digital TV ?? (Score:5, Informative)
Here in the UK we can get Digital TV over the airwaves, by satellite or over Cable, and ALL of them have terrible picture quality (funnily enough the adverts are the only parts that they seem to pre-compress and spend some time and effort doing properly), because the broadcasters MPEG encode on the fly, and try to get a much higher compression ratio than their hardware will allow. This is most obvious with live TV (news and sport especially, and when the news footage was already compressed to come over the satellite, then expanded and re-compressed
Digital TV is nearly unwatchable at times - when the picture isn't breaking up and freezing then the MPEG artefacts and the blurred textures render stuff unwatchable. Go to a TV shop, and get them to show you BBC1 on analog and on digital on 2 adjacent TV's and you'll never want digital TV.
My wife runs a DVD mastering studio, and she just kills herself laughing at the picture quality over Sky etc.
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