Cable HDTV Not Ready For Primetime? 415
A reader writes: "Shelly Palmer head of the New York Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Advanced Media committee and the man that gave us the singing cats in the meow mix ads has posted a very entertaining article on his blog about finally getting a Scientific Atlanta SA8000HD High Definition, DVR-enabled cable boxes from Time Warner Cable in Manhattan, his adventures getting it to work, and its less than stellar performance."
HDTV? (Score:4, Interesting)
I live in Denmark myself.
Re:HDTV? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:HDTV? (Score:2, Informative)
I think there's more of a drive for it in the US because their standard TV broadcast is slightly lower resolution than the PAL standard in Europe.
Re:HDTV? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:HDTV? (Score:4, Informative)
(From a regulatory standpoint, it's important to ensure widespread takeup of DTV, as the old analogue channels can be sold off for other uses, once large majorities have switched. The paper speculates on how the HDTV aspect of digital television might be a better "selling point" than SDTV multicasting, which often is of poor quality.)
In addition (Score:2)
In the US, ATSC IS the digital TV standard for OTA broadcast, it just happens that here, HD support was included in that standard.
Re:HDTV? (Score:3, Informative)
HDTV has significantly more resolution than either PAL or NTSC. It's simply a matter of technology marching forward, and new standards improving upon old ones. It has nothing to do with N. Americans being jealous of European video standards.
Re:HDTV? (Score:3, Interesting)
625 - 525 lines or nearly 20% more lines. What would you consider a significant difference?
"PAL has a lower framerate, too, so nyah!"
According to your comparison, not enough to matter...but 20% faster in the US, but this does mean that PAL has a higher bandwidth.
Incidentally, we can actually drive most equipment from the past decade at higher refresh rates. 100Hz is not that uncommon from the past five ye
Re:HDTV? (Score:5, Funny)
My guess at the reason was that PAL resolution is just about good enough for most people, whereas NTSC is just the other side of the acceptability threshold. That, and the fact that American TVs are bigger than most British houses
Re:HDTV? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:HDTV? (Score:3, Insightful)
Compression is the downside of digital, whether it be digital standard def or high def.
When you leave it to the broadcasters/cable-companies to decide how heavily to compress their signals, they will ratchet it up as far as they feel the market can bear.
That's why digital cable and satellite cable generally looks WORSE than analo
Re:HDTV? (Score:5, Informative)
It is more than just your opinion - it is pretty much a fact. PAL is ~50Hz but has about 100 more scan lines, where as NTSC is ~60Hz.
What hurts PAL sometimes is that NTSC video is often poorly converted to PAL using pretty sloppy methods. But if you use a 100% PAL signal chain (direct from camera or direct from film telecine), it will generally have a better picture than NTSC, all things being equal.
One thing that bugs some people is that 24fps film gets speeded up to 25fps so it displays well on PAL, but it also causes a 4% frequency shift in the audio to synch the audio to the video.
Re:HDTV? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:HDTV? (Score:3, Informative)
It's a good thing, too, or else the networks wouldn't have time to cram in another CortiSlim ad.
Re:HDTV? (Score:3, Informative)
TPS in France is going HD next year, Sky Digital in the UK are going HD 2006-07, Premiere in Germany are also announcing plans and I think Canal+ (inc Scandinavia) have something in the pipeline.
A cons [hdtvforum.org]
Not ready for primetime... (Score:3, Interesting)
CB*&^A(#@$
Re:Not ready for primetime... (Score:3, Interesting)
All of Europe and Asia is a pretty decent market share.
The best tech doesn't always win (eg- VHS vs Beta,
Beta only offered 1 hour tapes when it was first released. VHS offered 2 hour tapes. Picture quality isn't everything.
Re:Not ready for primetime... (Score:3, Informative)
And BTW: In the professional world, a descendant of BetaMax is still used -- BetaCam. I'd say Beta won in the pro world.
Re:Not ready for primetime... (Score:3, Informative)
Not this again. Beta lost because it could only record one hour's worth of programming whereas VHS could record two. Not being able to record a complete movie off TV unattended is a crippling limitation. The video quality for home users was pretty much indistinguishable.
MS vs Linux...
Twenty years from now, people will be saying "What's a 'Microsoft'?" It is inevitable that Linux will become the standard desktop the world over; it will just take time
Re:Not ready for primetime... (Score:4, Funny)
Twenty years from now the world will be metric/Linux while the U.S. is English Units/Microsoft
Re:Not ready for primetime... (Score:3, Insightful)
The pushing of higher rez digital TV content over the cable line isn't *that* hard/different, nor is the decoding/decrypting of it. I gotta think the PVR/set top box quality is the issue here NOT the transmission of the HDTV or HDTV content itself...
*shrug*
e.
Re:Not ready for primetime... (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheap at half the price (Score:5, Interesting)
The pain of early adoption at its purest.
Re:Cheap at half the price (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cheap at half the price (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. My other thought upon reading that was "God, I wish I could afford to blow that much on leisure electronics".
All that stuff together costs more than the total worth of my car and all the computer/video game/TV/DVD stuff I own atm.
Re:Cheap at half the price (Score:5, Informative)
You can spend less than $1500 and get 80"-100" with surround sound.
$900 Infocus X2 projector (800x600)
$100 progressive scan player
$150 5.1 surround sound home theater in abox
$50 cables and stuff
$300 Dalite Hipower 80" screen/portable tripod (use a white wall while you're saving up)
But I'd say getting a PJ like the Panasonic AE700 at around $2500 is the best value.
Oh and go get an xbox which will do alot of games in hidef like Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3, underground, etc. Just look on the back of the box or search on the web.
And you can connect you PC to these and surf the web etc. And they're light as hell. 20lbs. Compare that with a $100lb+ tv. bleh.
THERE IS NO BETTER WAY TO WATCH MOVIES FOR SUCH LITTLE MONEY. Suffice it to say, i don't go to the movie theaters anymore.
List of highly recommended pj's:
http://www.projectorcentral.com/recommende
a useful site.
http:..www.avsforum.com
Re:Cheap at half the price (Score:3, Insightful)
800x600 is not HD anyway.
Re:Cheap at half the price (Score:3, Informative)
My HTPC video card is configured right now to do 1360x768.
Front Projection/home theater stuff has become my new hobby now that upgrading PC's is so cheap and easy.
Re:Cheap at half the price (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and how about those bulbs? Have you had to buy a replacement yet?
Re:Cheap at half the price (Score:3, Interesting)
Movies can usually wait until after dark, and most major TV events are after dark, too, at least on the east coast.
Lamps can be a killer, I'll admit. The old JVCs were 1000h for $750. The new panny claims 5000h on a $300 lamp. That's not pocket change, but if you only watch at night, it'll last quite a while [/rimshot]
FWIW, fixtures hold lamps, lamps produce light, and bulbs are planted in the ground so you
Re:Cheap at half the price (Score:5, Insightful)
Safe to say he might not know a whole lot about video as well. I've had to help many rich people setup their stuff: they just walk into a store, hand the clerk their checkbook, and assume they're getting the best. A Bose system wouldn't ever be found in a home of someone who knows what they're doing. It's for CEOs/CFOs or people who want to be like them.
I wonder if it's as simple as having the cable company remove a filter on his line, or maybe he's multi-plexed in his area. A call to the cable company wouldn't hurt, me thinks.
Re:Cheap at half the price (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cheap at half the price (Score:3, Informative)
The "probl
Re:Cheap at half the price (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Not enough channels (1 HBO, 3 Network)
2) Sometimes the picture is SO good you can see what cheap materials are used on the set. Spiderman was a good example, somehow the green goblin's costume looks like rubber under heavy paint in HD, instead of the steel or whatever it's supposed to look like.
3) The HBO HD channel contents are the same as the SD version of that channel. Not all movies played there apparently have good enough quality film stock to be worth encoding and playing in HD.
4) Network TV programming for the past 2 years has sucked in ANY resolution.
5) I wish there was a VoD HD channel.
Other than that, I wish I had bought a TV with a DVI input, but that's the price of early adoption. Optical audio is a bad idea unless you're dealing with high power amps, otherwise digital coax is the same data on copper, and the same quality. I'm happy with it and I control the volume via the sound system. I wish comcast didn't charge me a premium for HD. I wish such a thing existed as an HD DVD, but I suspect when that is invented the MPAA will fuck it up, and I will have to use other means anyway. Finally I wish my playstation 2 could output HD =) I refuse to buy an X-Box until someone can prove to me on facts that buying an X-Box and pirating X-Box games will cause MS to lose money.
People who pay $6000 for a TV are asking for disappointment. But if you are in the market for a TV anyway, and (depending of course on the size etc. you're looking for) can get one for a couple hundred more? I say go for it, how often do you buy TVs? The one I replaced I inherited from my parents which they bought 20 years ago.
Re:Cheap at half the price (Score:3, Informative)
So if you're itching to use that setup for HD games you can do it already. A few Gamecube titles support 480p also, but I don't own one so I can't really speak for it.
Nothing to do with HDTV (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nothing to do with HDTV (Score:2, Informative)
from Comcast (Boston area) for over a year. I
don't have any of the problems he described. The
picture is beautiful, and my cable remote controls
the audio level. And I don't pay anything like
$135/mo.
Now, if I could only record HDTV shows....
Re:Nothing to do with HDTV (Score:2)
Hellooooo, satellite.
Dino-Tech (Score:4, Interesting)
Computers and the net will take over as the receivers of the future.
HomeTheaterPC anyone?!
Re:Dino-Tech (Score:5, Interesting)
Can't be more wrong.. (Score:3, Informative)
HDTV can ride over the internet as soon as the internet has the bandwidth to do so. Until then it rides on satellite and cable systems.
HDTV is here to stay - its a standard in resolutions. I can use my HDTV projector as a video, tv or computer projector as long as i tell my radeon what the native resolution is.
16:9 is used on every DVD d
Re:Dino-Tech (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree. I don't know of anyone in my age group (25-35) that watches "TV" anymore. Just about everybody has one, for watching DVD's or playing games, but I don't think that I know a single person my age with cable or even an antenna. TV is rapdily becoming something for the poor and uneducated. Good riddens!
Re:Dino-Tech (Score:5, Funny)
You watch a lot of TV, don't you?
Actually, not true.. (Score:3, Insightful)
People are not going to start watching television on desktop computers or start sticking PCs in the living rooms. The lean forward/lean back experiences are well defined and they aren't going to change.
TV may adopt methods and technology that are in use by computers today, but the idea that Television is dead is like declaring books dead because we have computers...
An ATSC HD bitstre
you can't read too much into problems in the early (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:you can't read too much into problems in the ea (Score:3, Insightful)
-Charles
Re:you can't read too much into problems in the ea (Score:5, Informative)
I'm assuming they have the digital output setup like a line out. You can't change the volume of the line out on most equipment either. He should be changing the volume on his speakers.
Re:you can't read too much into problems in the ea (Score:4, Informative)
Digital "volume". (Score:4, Informative)
Of course you can't. Digital audio doesn't HAVE a volume adjustment. It's just the audio signal, not a signal with an analog amplifier behind it.
NO digital audio source has a volume control. That's not what it is. If you have a device, like a DVD player, that has a digital audio output, then you program your remote to control your amplifier's audio volume. In his case, he could have done some kind of learning mode trick on his cable box remote to let it change the volume on his stereo system, because that's what he'd be plugging the digital audio into anyway, one would hope.
I agree that disabling those outputs is stupid, and I agree that HDTV over Cable is shit for quality in most places. But let's face facts: consumers are quite often too ignorant to install a proper home theater setup themselves. If he didn't even know that digital audio doesn't *have* a volume on it, then can we really expect him to understand how to correct picture and signal issues?
You can only make things so simple. At some point, you have to expect the user to learn WTF they are doing. I admit that home theater is ripe for simplification, but digital audio ain't ever going to have a volume control and that is that.
Unfortunately, you can read lots (Score:2, Interesting)
Hollywood has no interest in giving us HDTV. They don't understand why we're not satisfied with what we're allowed to look at today.
No joke. Read it.
I've got one of these (not HDTV though) (Score:3, Interesting)
it would be nice to have a little more storage space, and it seems to randomly reset about once a month (it just turns off, strangest thing).
i should note that i've never used a tivo or anything like it before though, so for all i know it could be a total steaming pile of shit.
Re:I've got one of these (not HDTV though) (Score:3, Interesting)
This could be a hardware watchdog reset. It probably means that your thing just crashed spectacularly or ended up in an infinite loop, and then it resets everything to fix that. Maybe if there are firmware upgrades you can avoid that in the future.
Another Time Warner (presumably SDTV) snafu (Score:3, Interesting)
(found via TV harmony blog [tvharmony.com])
Have to give credit to TiVo for remaining (ever so slightly) ahead of the generic cable company DVRs (for now...)
e.
The World is 4:3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahh, I here but what about HD 16:9 signals - well we have watched DVD that can range are even wider than 16:9 on 4:3 TVs for years and I can accept the black bars at the top and bottom.
Do I hear more rumbling about screen size and weight as the wight of a 4:3 is quite high - Well I have two Tivo machines and a replay (for comparisons) driving a projector as I don't have digital TV at my local yet. In the past with digital, I could hook up directly from my digital turner to my audio tuner to handle the audio video distribution.
Let me tell you that anyone that sees the Projector is astounded and its only an cheap HP with 1500 Lumens @ 800x600. Yeah it needs to have the curtains closed but at night it like a movie screen. The cost was only like ~700 bucks and the weight savings is a factor of like 500 pounds. The projector can't show true HD quality but it is more than enough for DVD 480p; thus, save your money if you go this route and wait until more Lumens (brightness) and resolution (something that can show 1080p) comes along at a cheaper price.
Re:The World is 4:3 (Score:2)
All reasonably priced projectors I've seen make more noise with their fans than computer does, and my computer drives me nuts. Furthermore, it requires a complete rethink of the living room layout as the projector has to go the other side of the room. Personally I'd be happy with a 16:9 TV that co
Re:The World is 4:3 (Score:2)
The world is 16:9 (Score:2)
HDTV is 16:9 and there is tons of content in 16:9 - not too mention it is the standard format for dvd.
Leno is 16:9, CSI is 16:9, Not to mention all the HD special channels and premium channels. Heck PBS in 16:9 is great.
Widescreen is the standard for Hi-def. You don't go to a movie theater to watch a 4:3 cut of your movie - i'd rather see a limited black bar then miss half t
Re:The World is 4:3 (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a Sony 32" HD WEGA set with a 4x3 aspect ratio, and even here, I'm screwed. If the set detects an HD / widescreen signal, it will automatically letterbox the top and bottom of the screen, in order to get a 16x9 aspect ratio.
But! If the HD broadcast is in 4x3 and has side letterboxes, then the picture is effectively 50% of my total screen real estate. I wind up with an incredibly clear 16" picture in the middle of my 32" tv, surrounded by black boxes on all sides. And of course, there's no way to override this "feature."
Despite all the naysayers, this is not an incremental jump. The electronics superstores and the HD subscription services are largely to blame for creating this perception. The stores will run a DVD or other non-HD content through the HD sets, and try to sell the picture quality. Another place where they fail is that they will often not set up side-by-side comparisons of the same material being presented in both HD and SD. The true difference is astounding.
Meanwhile, DirecTV and the cable companies overcompress the ever-living shit out the video signals, adding nasty artifacts and degrading image quality to the point of it being barely acceptable. One would think that since DirecTV & digital cable are 480p MPEG-2 signals, you would receive DVD-quality video and audio, but in fact the picture quality is strikingly inferior most of the time (check out Family Guy or Futurama broadcasts vs. the DVD sets to really see the difference). It's funny, but right now for HD free, over-the-air broadcasts offer the best picture quality of any of your options, should you be lucky enough to live near a transmitter.
Re:The World is 4:3 (Score:3, Funny)
If the HD broadcast is in 4x3 and has side letterboxes, then the picture is effectively 50% of my total screen real estate. I wind up with an incredibly clear 16" picture in the middle of my 32" tv, surrounded by black boxes on all sides. And of course, there's no way to override this "feature."
I really hate this. And it's worse when you get commercials that are in a faux 16:9 format, like most IBM commercials. Then you get this:
Not ready for Hi-Def DVRs (Score:5, Insightful)
After reading the article this guy seems like someone who thinks they know a lot about digital electronics, but doesn't.
"No volume control on the digital audio output?" - No, volume is controlled through your receiver. Who, with a nice setup, expects that they'd be controlling the audio output with their cable remote? He has a bose lifestyle system. Run your digital audio through there smacktard.
Re:Not ready for Hi-Def DVRs (Score:5, Funny)
He has a bose lifestyle system
'Nuff said.
Re:Not ready for Hi-Def DVRs (Score:3, Insightful)
Any normal person who has used a cable box in the last 15 years.
He could use the Bose remote to control the volume, yes. However, when you're flipping channels, you use the cable box remote. The volume control on that remote cannot control the Bose. It will usually control the volume output of the cable box (this is also usually an option and can be set to a fixed volume output.. it can also control the tv
Re:Not ready for Hi-Def DVRs (Score:3, Interesting)
As for royally fucking up HD, you need only look at the multitude formats in th
Yeah, why all the stops and starts? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't have the HD version, but I do have a Scientific American digitial cable box using Time Warner service. I also get the picture freeze, then start up again in a second or two, problem. Digital noise I understand, but I'm wondering what is causing the stops and starts. Can anyone enlighten me?
It does lead to the bizarre result that my two TVs can go out of sync while watching the same program. It's amusing to put them both on and then hear something in the living room and know that a few seconds later you can hear it on the bedroom TV too. Pushing the "live" button seems to fix that, so I think this out-of-sync condition is a result of this stop-and-start issue. Instead of jumping back to the live feed when it stops, it just picks up from where it left off. The more stops you get, the more out-of-sync you wind up being. So what's causing this?
Re:Yeah, why all the stops and starts? (Score:5, Informative)
When I worked at Time Warner in summer of 2001 (Albany, NY), we had a few calls for people who wanted to get the new HDTV digital converters. Since we only had about 4 of those installations the whole summer, each one was a half-day event for one or even two of the most skilled technicians we had. They would make sure everything ran perfectly before they'd leave.
I was in a position in the company to hear a lot of what the actual problems were, and the most common complaint was just a weak signal to the converter. Even coaxial cable loses signal strength over distance, and as anyone who's tried hooking 6 TV's up to an unamplified signal can attest, the quality sucks when you split it too much with bad equipment or have a 500' coil of cable behind your TV. So with the highly-compressed HDTV signals when you lose a small amount of data, it makes a big impact on the picture.
Each of the HDTV installations that summer (except one) required the techs to install a new drop (the wire between the pole and the house). They all required new splitters, new wire to the HDTV converteres, and sometimes an amplifier right at the input to the house. There were always bad feelings toward "the Radio Shack s**t" that people install themselves, and as a result every tech always carried replacements with them, and many times this fixed the problems with regular TV and RoadRunner (internet service).
So back to HDTV: I'm convinced that the graininess and the pausing of this guy's picture can be traced back to a weak signal. He lives in Manhatten so the wires in his building are probably old and failing, and even if they aren't there are many other potential problems that could be causing his poor picture quality. Because he obviously doesn't know about signal degredation, he may have simply hooked up too many TV's to the same signal. Also, Sony WEGAs are very good TVs. They take a regular picture and make the most out of it, so quite frankly I'm not surprised at all with his results. Like I said at first: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
My advice to him is to call Time Warner and have them send a technician out to test the signal and inspect the set-up. That, and to not jump to conclusions about the infrastructure not being prepared. He may be right about the entire area being unready for the HDTV invasion, but no amount of work on Time Warner's part will ever be able to fix the problems inside the end user's apartment if they split the signal 32 different ways.
HD is ready for Prime Time . . . This HD-DVR isnt (Score:5, Interesting)
Previous to getting this particular box I had a standard HD set top box, which never had a hiccup. And for what it is worth, watching a sporting event on a big screen in HD is spectacular.
I guess the point is that his conclusion that HD is not ready for primetime is really not a valid one, rather, I can attest that this particular HD-DVR is clearly not ready for prime time.
Re:HD is ready for Prime Time . . . This HD-DVR is (Score:3, Informative)
No compelling reason to switch (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No compelling reason to switch (Score:3)
The consumer doesn't *have* to know what 480i/p, 720p or 1080i are, the TV does.
Re:No compelling reason to switch (Score:4, Interesting)
Ideally, you'd be correct, but practically, the manufacturers are still getting a handle on this stuff. I have a Philips 60" HD-capable (no tuner) projection TV. It has 2 inputs that appear to be HD capable, both have component inputs, one also supports DVI.
The component-only input only actually supports 480i, with the component cables simply giving you a cleaner video input. Feed it 480p, 720p, or 1080i, and all you'll see is garbage. The other input supports 1080i and 480p, but not 480i and 720p. When I first received my HD Dish Network receiver, it was defaulted to 720p, which once again caused my TV to display garbage. I had to set up a temporary composite video feed to my TV so I could dig through the menus and tell the receiver to output 1080i instead.
As a technophile, this wasn't a huge problem. But to the average consumer, this would be out and out maddening. And just try to explain to them why the TV won't let them properly connect their HDTV receiver and their progressive scan DVD player at the same time. All of this rubbish is temporary - the manufacturers will eventually work it out. But for now, consumers *do* need at least an understanding of the different resolution options, and possibly some outside help to get their HD rig running.
Re:No compelling reason to switch (Score:4, Informative)
Have you ever actually seen HDTV? It's not an incremental upgrade - it's as close to a paradigm shift as you can get without a scratch-n-sniff panel on the TV so you can smell the rotting corpses on CSI.
Why would Joe Sixpack need composite, optical digital, DVI and Svideo outputs?
Because when Joe Sixpack sees his first NFL game in high definition, he'll need a 12pack's worth of beer-goggles to make watching football in SD tolerable.
Seriously, once you've seen a live sporting event in 16:9 HDTV, or a broadcast HD movie with 5.1 surround, there's just no going back. The NFL is HDTV's killer app in the US. It's already happening. Compare last year's Sunday Ticket HD lineup to this year's; look at the satellites DirecTV is launching just so they'll be able to add HD locals in every market.
try explaining to your average Walmart shopper the difference between 480p, 720i, and 1080p
Nah. The average Walmart shopper would have no trouble plugging in a new HDTV and STB. Just a couple of cables, and they're even color coded.
BTW, it's 720p and 1080i.
Joe Sixpack bait (Score:4, Funny)
Sidenote: they also seem quite smitten with HD baseball, which I can't for the life of me understand, my favorite meduim for basball is radio.
On the beer goggle front: Sometimes when we're all watching something like Sunday football in HD, I'll switch over to the regular SD channel of the same game for effect. This causes everyone to groan, boo, and yell "Turn the game back on!".
Re:No compelling reason to switch (Score:3, Funny)
That reminds me of last night, when I went to the local WalMart and looked for a laser pointer. None of the 3 of the employees that I talked to even knew what it was. I used the word "laser pointer" and they repeated those same words back to me... but they had never heard of them. I'll just have to take a drive to Circuit City or Radio Shack or something.
I Have HD. My Response (Score:5, Informative)
Does this mean that the HD format is flawed or not ready for widespread consumer usage? No. It means that you should be aware of the problems you could run into, like any informed consumer. You should ask a salesperson at a reputable store (not Best Buy or Circuit City) about your options: OTA vs Sat vs Cable, the pros and cons of each, and how to determine which equipment you'll need.
Re:I Have HD. My Response (Score:2)
I realize it's not their fault, but it still torques me. Much as I want to watch Sunday Night Football in HD, I'm not gonna pay anoth $6.95/mo for ESPNHD and four in-demand HD channels.
Even worse, though, I'm planning to move to Madison in the relatively near future...and man, have I not been impressed with Char
Mark F from boing boing (Score:2)
*shrug*
e.
Cable HDTV sux.... not HDTV on the whole (Score:5, Interesting)
Hate to say it... but this is one place where over-the-air has kicked butt. You may not be able to get as many channels but even in podunkville where I live I can get 11 HDTV sources and they all look beautiful. My pcHDTV card renders them flawlessly on my monitor (which is set up for HDTV resolution).
Over-the-air is getting fairly standard and stable now. HD dish channels are actually starting to work out nicely now as well... but cable is gonna die if they keep moving at the current snail crawl they have going for their HD/SD rollouts.
And for those wondering about HDTV and their future.... don't go to someones house with HDTV unless you want to buy it yourself. I about killed 2 peoples credit ratings by letting them watch the Olympic ceremonies at my place.
(Current Setup 3.2Ghz/512Mb/320Gb AMD box running MythTV with a pcHDTV card displaying on a 21" CRT)
Let go already (Score:2)
The Issue is bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Issue is bandwidth (Score:3, Interesting)
Uncompressed SD is 270MBit/s. Uncompressed 1080i HD is around 1.5GBit/s.
MPEG-2 compressed SD is barely watchable at around 2MBit/s, OK at 4MBit/s and good at 8MBit/s (DVD).
MPEG-2 compressed HD is barely watchable at 8MBit/s, OK at around 12-13MBit/s and good at around 18MBit/s (coincidentally the bitrate ATSC requires OTA broadcasters to use in the USA).
So, yes HD takes up more bits, but it's not nearly as bad as you make out.
Box need more Work. (Score:3, Informative)
Not a universal problem (Score:3, Informative)
Occasionally, a HD channel will show something (usually sports highlights or news interviews) which was originally not HD and will be much poorer quality. Also, live HD MLS soccer feeds are prone to the transmission glitches of a live situation, but what would be an almost unnoticable problem in low-res is a big ugly artifact in HD.
My parents have one (Score:3, Insightful)
The only real issue with it they have left is recording the Dolby Digital track on an HD feed will result in choppy audio. This is supposed to be fixed in the upcoming firmware. In the meanwhile, they record the 2-channel audio with their DVR events. Boo-hoo.
Having dealt with both Cox and T-W at various times, I can pinpoint exactly where the problem is, and it aint the technology. Hint: The problem has the initials T and W.
This guy is a mornon (Score:3, Interesting)
Jesus... stop crying like a baby....
First off... the 4:3 issue. The STB displays it with gray bars on the sides because that is how it SHOULD display it. The monitor should be set to stretch the image to the fill the screen if you want to get rid of the bars.
The 1080i image likely looks blurry because you need you monitor calibrated for convergence... geometry... and color. This is a common problem with displays as they arrive from the store. And sadly almost no one goes to the trouble of having them properly set up.
And 480p likely looks bad because it is just 480i sources that the STB is upconverting to 480p. If your normal cable channels look like crap... then you are just upconverting crap... Do you expect it to look stunning? Now... if you use a good progressive scan DVD player and have it setup correctly... and it still looks like crap, then I would say it has to do with your display not being calibrated... which seems obvious from some of his other comments.
Wait for the 8300HD box and not TW fault... (Score:2)
"Let's cut to the chase. Time Warner has disabled the DVI output, the RF output and the S-Video output on the box."
TW hasn't disabled the ports, Scientific Atlanta has. The firmware to enable those ports doesn't exist yet or TW NY hasn't gotten it from SA yet.
"How is this experience worth the $10,000+ I spent to achieve it?"
He spent 10k? Why the hell does he want his cable box to control what resolution he displays in? Put it in one on the box and let the
HDTV, not yet (Score:4, Interesting)
Simple works-for-me HD DVR shopping list (Score:2)
DirecTV HD-Tivo ($900) [solidsignal.com]
Panasonic 42" 7UY Plasma ($2200) [visualapex.com]
Onkyo HTS-760 6.1 Receiver/Speakers ($350) [amazon.com]
I have this setup and I am very happy with the result. The key, IMHO, is to find a display that does a good job of cleaning up regular 'ol 4:3 NTSC signals so you the 80% of your channels that are not HD still look good enough, if not stunningly great like HD content does. Every nice display can do HD content justice, but not every nice display can do SD content justice.
Re:Simple works-for-me HD DVR shopping list (Score:3, Informative)
Um, if you're going to create an HD shopping list, wouldn't it make sense to have a display that can display full-HD resolution?
At the same site you linked to, there's one for about a grand more:
Panasonic TH-42PHD6UY [visualapex.com]
Works great, just need more channels (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, I'm a bit annoyed with the limited channels. I get about 8 HDTV channels that come in at 760p. That's ESPN, Discovery (fucking awesome), Bravo, Encore, Showtime, HBO, and a couple of others just thrown together by Mediacom. The rest of everything comes in at the normal digital cable rate; I tell the cable box to send it in 540p.
The HDTV channels just blow the others away. Switching back and forth is really like night and day...you need to see it to appreciate it at all. But I'm paying about an extra $25 a month, just to get those 8 really clear channels. I'm starting to wonder whether it's really worth it.
Oh well...c'est la vie, I guess. But what I wouldn't give to have Comedy Central, and maybe Fox, in HD.
Indeed... (Score:2)
I will agree that this box is a major POS. The non-HD tuner on it is indeed horrible compared to the Motorola HD boxes TWC distributes. I was pleasantly surprised to
Worked for me (maybe I'm just lucky) (Score:2)
Interesting-but not from a techie perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
If you've got any background in A/V design, you'll probably notice the following in his post:
Various appeals to brand name and amount of money spent. This reveals that he doesn't know what he's talking about. BOSE (outside their marketing department) is not respected among Pro A/V circles. This guy clearly expects he can spend his way to a great A/V setup, a decidely anti-geek and anti-A/V professional stance.
Complaints about the 'blurriness' of SD material A good TV will reveal flaws in source material. Large screen TVs, HDTVs, and poor scaling are the likely culprits here-as any A/V professional would know.
This blog post is still useful-you wouldn't believe how many people who have more money than sense buy and HDTV and hook up all the sources through the RF input (channel 3). Mr. Palmer's disappointment with HDTV mirrors the uninformed early adopter experience happening across the USA!
Just like color TV from say 1958 to 1973... (Score:3, Insightful)
It was a mess. Nothing on them was watchable but cartoons, where it didn't really matter whether if a red shirt became orange when the character walked to the left side of the screen or magenta when he walked to the right. On ordinary programs people could sort of get the flesh tones in an acceptable range by jumping up every five minutes to fiddle with the controls, but everything would go to hell whenever there was a commercial break or a different program.
Basically everybody denied that this happened--in theory it didn't happen if your set was properly set up by a technician and never moved and all the broadcasters did what they were supposed to do. In practice, people just enjoyed the fact that the picture was in color, even if all the people on the screen looked as if they were about to die of cyanosis.
It took a good decade-and-a-half before broadcasting practice and self-adjusting television sets co-evolved to the point where an ordinary joe could just shell out $400, have the set delivered and set up, connect it to an ordinary-quality antenna or cable TV outlet, and expect to be able to sit down and watch television all evening, switching channels freely, without having to leap up to fiddle with the knobs.
It will probably take a decade-and-a-half for HDTV to "be perfected," as they used to say.
Of course, maybe people won't care. I have a friend who bought a more expensive digital camera than she wanted last year because someone else convinced her that she had to have five megapixels. It came out of the box with a 16 megabyte card and the resolution set to "standard quality" which happened to be 1600x1200. Having paid a premium for five megapixels, she has happily shot pictures all year at two megapixels and is perfectly pleased with the results.
So perhaps people will be perfectly happy with low-definition HDTV, just as they were happy with off-color television.
Content is King (Score:3, Informative)
And the pricing is a little crazy too. It's $13 a month to rent the HD Digital set top box with DVR (Motorola). When you rent the HD box, you get NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, and Bravo in HD. For an extra $10 / month you can add HD-NET, HD-Movies, ESPN-HD, and Discovery HD Theater. That's $2.50 a channel. HBO-HD will run you another $10 (you get the standard set of digital HBO's as well), and SHO-HD is $13. Essentially, if you wanted to subscribe to every feature available in my area, and rent only one box, your total cable and internet bill would run in excess of $180 / month. Mine currently sits at $117 (digital box, digital subscription, HBO, Starz, internet). If all you were interested in getting were the 11 HD stations, you would be paying:
- $40 Digital Subscription
- $13 HD Receiver rental
- $10 HBO
- $13 Showtime
- $10 HD-NET, HD-Movies, ESPN-HD, Discovery HD Theater
- TOTAL: $86 / month + tax!
That's nearly $8 per channel! Even more discouraging is that there is very little network programming that is broadcast in HD. What you end up with are standard resolution programs that have been upconverted to HD resolution. This looks terrible, as you end up with all sorts of distortion, tracing, jaggies, and artifacts. America's Funniest Home Videos is notoriously bad, as they are upconverting the already poor video from home cameras.If you are thinking about upgrading your service to include HD, be sure to check what content is available in your area, and set your price limit ahead of time. Otherwise you might find yourself disappointed with what you get. Also, you may want to look into the HD content that is available over the air. Over the air decoders have come way down in price, and I know that in our area there is more HD content available by broadcast than by cable.
US DTV/HDTV directory (Score:4, Informative)
Scientific Atlanta and HD (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to get an HD box from Time Warner. Make sure to get their Pace 550p. Don't even think about accepting the SA boxes. And don't even bother with the HD DVR. The Pace 550p has zoom, stretch, and normal output supported by the converter. On top of that, you can choose an output being 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i (which you can alter on a menu that doesn't require your tv, which is invaluable) as well as passthrough. Also, you can specify if you want 4:3 or 16:9 with those resolutions. Really, the only HD converter you should bother with from time warner.
Also, unless you know about cable you should have your cable company install the bloody box. It should assure you that the FDC (data going to the box) and the RDC (data being sent from the box to the cable co) are at proper levels, FDC being significantly more important to the average viewer. Actually, more than likely the installer is a lazy kid that gets paid $9/hr. So I suppose you just need to get lucky in order to recieve the level of service you expect.
Why bother with HD? (Score:3, Insightful)
It strikes me that something is wrong when you have to legislate a technological upgrade. Even with that HDTV market penetration is lagging far behind expectations.
Yes, I know that we're all going to have to upgrade. I just wish it didn't reek of the corps finally getting a law pass requiring me to buy buy buy.
Re:Not a problem with HD (Score:2)
Re:Well in Canada... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Video connectors: RGB, YPrPb, s-video, ... (Score:4, Informative)
The original, over-the-air, frequency-modulated signal.
2) Composite video: Same exact thing, just a different connector. No better quality AFAIK. Why was this created?
This is an unmodulated, single video connection. It saves the cost of a modulator/demodulator, which is needed to put the signal on a "channel" over standard co-ax. Also, the audio signal is carried separately.
3) S-video: Supposed to fix the problems of "composite" video signals, but it doesn't look any better. Still a crappy analog interlaced YRB signal.
Separates luminance and chrominance onto separate wires, eliminating the mux/demux of these two analog signals into the single "composite" signal. (Which is composite only due to the upgrade from B&W to Color, which was a very neat backwards compatibility trick.)
4) Y-Pr-Pb component output: Silly. RGB is better, and was already supported by monitors, computers, and projectors. What is the point of this?
Splits the chrominance into two separate signals. Not entirely sure why. (Educated guess? The chrominance was split into Red (r) and Blue (b) components. But that's just a guess.)
5) Y-Cr-Cb component output: Digital version of Y-Pr-Pb. DVI is better. Usually mislabeled as Y-Pr-Pb anyway.
I'll have to take your word for it. (I think they're just using the standard chrominance (C) label instead of the 'P' label.. for partial? Again, just a guess.)
6) VGA - Been around for >20 years, and is superior to all of the above.
VGA is 640x480, no more, no less. The physical VGA link has been co-opted for higher resolutions. The physical link is pure analog, and it's better only because we've demanded better quality out of the transmitter (video card) and receiver (monitor), such as higher resolutions (1280x1024) and refresh frequency (85Hz).
7) DVI - Digital replacement for VGA. The best.
As long as you have an all-digital path. But, then, any digital transmission mechanism would suffice. FireWire (IEEE 1394) makes a good digitial transmission link. With digital, it's all about the signal bitrate and the medium's maximum bitrate. FireWire has plently of room for HD signals.
Even more frustrating is that TVs are RGB, so why did the industry continue to adopt YRB signal standards when it is both inconvenient to send, and to receive?
Because of backwards compatibility! The original B&W TV only used a luminance (Y) signal. This was great, but when TV's went color they wanted a backwards-compatibile system. So they used some nice signal magic and piggybacked a chrominance (C) signal over the Y. This meant a color receiver got colors, and a B&W receiver still received B&W reasonably. It's been a backwards compatibility game since the beginning.