Are You Being Cheated by Digital Cable? 291
Lauren Weinstein writes "Even though your cable company may claim that a channel is in a digital tier that you're paying for, they may be sending it to you in analog form, with associated negative effects. Surprise! Are You Being Cheated by Digital Cable? 'You're paying for digital, you should get digital. Outside of the lower video and audio quality that can be present on many analog feeds, third-party devices (like cableCARD TiVos) which could otherwise record a digital signal directly, will be forced to re-digitize an analog signal, with inevitable quality loss in the process. But how to know for sure if a channel is digital or analog as received?'"
Very interesting ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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So, uh, I'd be
Re:Very interesting ... (Score:4, Informative)
If you are using something like VLC or mplayer (or even Media Player Classic on Windows), it shouldn't be too hard to get it to look right. Most feeds should have the MPEG aspect ratio flag set and it should Just Work. Otherwise you should be able to force the aspect ratio (4:3 or 16:9) in your playback software.
Composite video has a maximum bandwidth (Score:5, Informative)
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Standard-definition production is generally done using digital SMPTE 274M (SDI) devices, which have 720 active pixels of luminance and 360 active pixels of color difference per line. This is why
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With the box on, press Power (turns it "off") then press Select within 4 seconds. This should take you to the User Settings menu.
If Power/Select takes you to the diagnostics, try Power/Menu. It's one or the other, I just cant recall which right now.
Re:Very interesting ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mod parent up!
However since digital is cheaper it will be preferred by the distributors regardless of quality.
It's not unlike those digital thermometers, most people assumes they're more exact since they have numerical readout - wrong wrong wrong......
HD is Better - Digital just gets you more channels (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:HD is Better - Digital just gets you more chann (Score:3, Interesting)
Not true.
If the transmitted program was recorded digitally, ie. recently, it does look better, and is mpeg2 standard (DVD) with bit rates up to 15 Mbs (thats the highest I've s
Re:HD is Better - Digital just gets you more chann (Score:4, Informative)
Not true.
Not True.
I think what the grandparent was saying is its not neccessarily better
. If the transmitted program was recorded digitally, ie. recently, it does look better, and is mpeg2 standard (DVD) with bit rates up to 15 Mbs (thats the highest I've seen so far).
I'm sure that would look better. What if it were transmitted at 256 kbps instead? Would the quality still surpass a virgin dub from a high quality master onto broadcasters professional tapes (1/2" Beta as I recall)? No way in hell. And broadcasters I'm pretty sure don't generally use DVD's to store their material. So the bitrates you see on you DVD player are irrelevant. Actually, in general the quality of the source material is irrelevant. Yes, good tranmission won't help bad source material, nobody is arguing that. Assume pristine best case source material.
Now think, does an CD (digital representation of an analog sound wave) or an MP3 (compressed digital represntation of an analog sound wave) sound better? At higher bandwiths the compression losses (MP3 is part of the MPEG2 standard, a "lossy" standard) become negligible, sure. But almost nobody argues it is better than the original source.
Now lets think bandwidth. An analog signal consumes some amount of bandwidth (I think 38 Mbps). By compressing it via MPEG2, the cable company can now fit 7 (very good quality) to 12 (Ok quality) channels. With all the bandwidth pressure though (more channels, faster internet, HDTV), cable companies are being tempted to add even more channels in each slice, I've heard of up to 24 less popular digital channels being squeezed into 1 "analog" channel.
So why is "digital" sold as cleaner? Interference. While a very clean signal is injected at the head end, By the time it runs through all the splitters, amplifiers, it can be very muddled. The benefit of digital assuming about 85% of the signal can be ressurected at the far end, and near ideal picture can be constructed. Problem is, at about 75% loss, no picture can be reconstructed. Analog pictures can yield usable content with much higher loss level (we used to what OU football games out of NYC (OTA) with maybe 40% of the signal surviving. A staticy mess, yes, but we knew what was happening on the field.
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Around here anyone buying a HD set finds that SD digital cable ends up looking horrid. we actually set up their cable box to use composite to the Set and switch to that from the compone
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xoxo
-Your Friendly Nieghborhood Moderator.
Re:Very interesting ... (Score:5, Funny)
We definitely don't want comments like that on Slashdot.
Re:Very interesting ... (Score:5, Funny)
Shocking? (Score:3, Funny)
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old news (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:old news (Score:4, Interesting)
Both cable and satellite providers effectively called their viewers "idiots" with these spots, yet they continued to run them. I found their race to be the lowest common denominator personally offensive. (Almost like a political campaign.)
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As a side note, I also have Time Warner for cable internet (plus analog TV). I've had equal amounts of down time with Time Warner (due to people tinkering with the line) as compared to satellite (during storms). Time Warner may be a hard line, but they don't me
Audio (Score:2, Informative)
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Got cable, but slowly transitioning... (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, I'd rather pay a la carte for shows we like than deal with the cable mess. A la carte would mean better handling of their massive bandwidth, and a better distribution of proceeds for shows. No need for Nielsen when advertisers will know exactly who is buying what.
I think we'd honestly pay $5 for a 30 minute show -- what does it cost in our time preference to sit down for 30 minutes? I'd pay less with ads. If we liked the show,we'd pay for an annual subscription -- giving shows the chance to continue even without massive ad-funding (see: Firefly).
With our 8-12Mbps Comcast Internet (not oversold in our neighborhood, yet), we download moves quickly enough to make it worth the wait. If we like the movie, we'll buy it, but I have no problem reimbursing even without a physical medium to save it.
I can't figure the TV distro system out, really. Sure, the powers-that-be are paying millions (or more) to keep the monopoly they have, but as the next generation ages, I'm sure the old system will hit the toilet, to be replaced by what? Hopefully more a la carte.
Re:Got cable, but slowly transitioning... (Score:4, Insightful)
A 30 minute show, without ads, is a 21 minute show.
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heh.
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So name this incredibly crappy show you watch, that is pushing 50% commercials.
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What you're saying, I hope, is that for now you're willing to be behind on your shows, and you'll instead buy or rent entire seasons on DVD, or just stick to rented films, until legal downloads / a la carte cable becomes available. I'd suggest iTunes at well under your $5 an episode target, but I assume this is too low-quality for you.
Or maybe you'll just steal it.
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It sounded like the parent poster watched non-broadcast channels, though.
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If they're already providing the show to me for free, it shouldn't matter if I'm getting it for free via some other source. Maybe they can pull some legal bullshit about it being a "deriva
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In fact, I was talking about torrents of pay cable shows, and that is precisely the argument.
Neither the parent nor I mentioned broadcast, and it's a safe assumption that if your cable bill is outrageous, you're not just watching local broadcast on it. And if you're already getting it for fr
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But stay tuned... Season Two launches in September, on air and online!"
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Yes, exactly. You pay for cable. The parent indicated he was "transitioning away" from cable, at which point I would hope he would stop torrenting non-broadcast shows.
I have no problem with your argument, as it's not related to mine.
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I'd rather wait and buy the season box set that's mine to keep indefinitely for less than half that much a few months later: $5 x 24 eps/season = $120 while box sets often retail for less than $50.
If you knew the insides and outs of bandwidth oversubscription, you would know there is no such thing as non-oversubscribed bandwidth. Congestion between your modem and the head-end is easily
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Currently there's Sanctuary [sanctuaryforall.com] which has 15 min webisodes (say 14 less intro, no ads, credits in pdf) which in bundles work out to about $3.30/21min content which is what you get in a 30 minute show. More like $4.50 if you want 30 mins of content, but then it's a 45-50 minute show.
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I can't figure the TV distro system out, really. Sure, the powers-that-be are paying millions (or more) to keep the monopoly they have, but as the next generation ages, I'm sure the old system will hit the toilet, to be replaced by what? Hopefully more a la carte.
Maybe it's because you have a poor grasp of math?
I think we'd honestly pay $5 for a 30 minute show -- what does it cost in our time preference to sit down for 30 minutes? I'd pay less with ads. If we liked the show,we'd pay for an annual subscription -- giving shows the chance to continue even without massive ad-funding (see: Firefly).
Your setup looks pretty high end--at least, it's HD and you have two CableCards. My assumption is that you watch quite a bit of TV.
Most seasons are 22 episodes long. 22*$5 = $110. Assume 12 shows (the average American watches something like 4 hours of TV a day so this isn't unreasonable--in fact, it's probably lowballing it), and we're at $1440 per season.
Around here, at least, the extended cable package (without premium channels like HBO) is around $60/
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On Comcast it's easy (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:On Comcast it's easy (Score:5, Informative)
Many of these boxes can only output the signal as analog (on a user-specified frequency, for arbitrary placement in the channel map), some of them are capable of outputting MPEG-2 data using ASI as the physical link. In order to cram multiple channels in one frequency, the MPEG-2 streams have to be changed (PID numbers must be changed to be non-duplicates, PAT and PMT packets need to be updated), then these MPEG-2 streams need to be muxed together and encoded into QAM.
Seeing as this is an expensive process (that cable companies might not have planned for, especially in the case of smaller operators), I believe that many of them are waiting for the migration to MPEG-4, to get the most bang for the buck.
-- Joe
Analog is better here. (Score:2)
As far as I am concerned SDTV is just a means for the cable company to free up bandwidth for other purposes, not to provide better service. I could see pushing the cable company to ditch an
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Re:Analog is better here. (Score:5, Informative)
Bandwidth is not really a problem for HDTV: from what I read, most current HDDVD and BluRay titles are encoded at less than 10Mbps total. Since a DOCSIS modem can pull over 40Mbps from a single 6MHz NTSC channel bandwidth, a digital cable box should be able to squeeze at least three very good quality HD channels in the same bandwidth as one analog channel. With about 900MHz worth of usable downstream bandwidth on coax, there is room for up to 450 high-quality HD channels. Of course, about half of that spectrum is used by analog channels, SD/ED digital channels and cable-modems so there should still be room for 150-200 HQ-HD channels.
As for the processing equipment, the heavy-lifting is at the source where initial encoding is done and at the head-end if there is transcoding to be done. The rest is standard fare digital broadcast over an HFC network just like it is for all other digital cable broadcasts. Since head-ends already have quite a bit of equipment dedicated to each channel they support on their networks, having an extra transcoding/scaling unit in loops that require it is (usually) a minor hurdle.
Re:Analog is better here. (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is not bandwidth, it is that the cable operators are locked into their antiquated equipment due to politics within the industry (for example, the CableLabs cabal/consortium), or due to the cost of the equipment (although I only do software at a company that makes this equipment, I have heard estimates of hundreds of dollars per channel in costs).
-- Joe
I'd just be happy to just get the channels . . . (Score:2)
Look at the noise (Score:5, Informative)
Look at the noise characteristics. Analog and digital respond to noise differently. Digital pixilates and stutters but otherwise displays a perfect picture. Analog ghosts and snows.
If you're not getting enough noise to tell the difference then smile and be happy because you have a better cable TV signal than most of the rest of us.
quality (Score:5, Interesting)
How to know... (Score:5, Informative)
Begin unscrewing the coax cable from your cable box. As you very, very slowly pull it away, if the signal starts to fade/shows static/etc., it's certainly analog. If, instead, it suddenly goes from perfect, to black, it's digital. Also, in the latter case, it will probably start to show artifacts, perfectly square 16x16 pixel macroblocks that stand out in sharp contrast to the rest of the picture.
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You can't necessarily tell just from that -- I have analog cable (in fact, all my TVs are about 20 years old and I plug the coax directly into them without a cable box), but I still sometimes see digital noise because it was apparently introduced somewhere upstream before it hit the cable company.
Comcrap is moveing all of the channles to digital. (Score:2)
first they started to move some there Local channels on basic to digital forcing to pay for a lot of other digital channels that people may not want just to get what they used to get and now this crap.
They want you pay per box or per cable card with little to no support for them.
Just wait for Ipv6 they will likely only give you 1ip and make you pay more too hook up more then 1 system on a per ip fee
Clear QAM (Score:2)
It serves well to get local channels in HD even if you don't have good OTA HD reception, and you get a number of other channels as well.
You'll miss out on some premium content, like Discovery HD and other things. You can find other ways to get at those shows if you need to, from iTunes to torrents.
Who actually pays more for digital cable? (Score:5, Insightful)
When the promotion expires, the price is only $1/mo more than plain analog cable. At that point, I'll give back the cable box -- it isn't even hooked up, but Comcast insisted I take one -- and save a buck a month by going back to analog.
See, when you sign up for digital cable, you're doing them a favor. They want you to have digital cable so that (1) you'll be tempted to buy On Demand movies, (2) you'll have to pay them to lease that godawful box, (3) you'll be tempted to pay for one of their DVRs because third-party ones don't fully work with the box(*), and (4) once everyone is a digital subscriber, they can switch off the analog feeds to free up bandwidth and sell you more services.
(* Yes, there are DVRs that accept CableCards, but they're prohibitively expensive, you have to pay for the cards, and we've all heard how much trouble it is to get a CableCard installed correctly.)
You're sure not helping yourself. Anyone who's ever used a cable box knows how much they blow. Changing channels is slow; and if you use a cable box with your own DVR, you can only record one channel at a time, your recordings will have cable-box banners all over them, and you'll have the ghettoest house on the block with that little infrared "blaster" dangling around.
And what do you get in exchange for that hassle... marginally better picture quality? Maybe not even that, because you're just trading analog noise for MPEG artifacts and blocking. Even if you do get a better picture overall, how long will that stay exciting? A week? After that, you won't notice the picture quality, but you'll be dealing with the drawbacks of digital cable forever.
Re:Who actually pays more for digital cable? (Score:4, Informative)
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Hah! You think they'll let you go back to analog? Sure, some people have analog because they're grandfathered in, but that doesn't mean the cable company is necessarily accepting new analog subscriptions. It is being phased out, you know.
I think I'd prefer analog (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, this is why I haven't bought into HDTV yet -- if I spend a couple grand on a TV and extra per month for HD channels only to see compression artifacts in high resolution, something's getting sent through the front window.
Hear, hear - S-VHS v DVD as well | More cheating (Score:2)
That said, I'm sure the content mastering teams are to blame there. There's more than enough bi
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I "enjoy" going to Best Buy and the like to look at the TVs and laugh. With those giant screens you can really see the artifacting!
Back in my Continuous Signals and Systems class, my professor said that a digital channel has less bandwidth than an analog channel. Granted, you can
pfft.... (Score:2)
Get a dish! (Score:2)
Just ask... (Score:2)
Antenna HD rocks (Score:4, Insightful)
My antenna gives me what is really a wireless video stream of 19 Mb/s in MPEG-2.
It's not like in the age of BitTorrent that you really need to be beholden to the cable companies, unless you have a real need for college football or MLB.
Don't forget what uncle Milt Friedman taught us: people vote with their feet. If you don't like what the cable company is doing to you, get a dish, an antenna or just download the shit out of everything you want.
Between my antenna and BT I'm pleased as punch paying practically nothing for the few TV programs I bother to watch. As long as the NFL stays on local TV, I could care less. And MY HD is just gorgeous.
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The Catch 22 of being a cable MSO (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: As mentioned before, I do work for a cable company.
Americans can get their traditional TV through a number of different providers, but it boils down to just a few methods of delivery: direct from the broadcasters over the air, from a satellite, via fiber owned by a telephone company, or via a hybrid fiber/coax network owned by a cable company. Of these options, cable providers are caught in the crossfire of regulatory demands and consumers who don't know enough about the technology itself to know what they really want. You never hear these complaints about satellite/FTTH (FiOS), only because the nature of their medium requires all digital transmission. But is 100% digital always "better" for the consumer? The answer is clearly no, not always.
As I'll explain later, much of the FCC's time is spent regulating the coax providers to help the "smaller players". Really, now...AT&T and Verizon are small players? When will the FCC step in to help the smaller players in the landline voice business, such as Vonage and VOIP? (Hint: they won't.)
Cable has been the incumbent for so long that they have become the Microsoft of TV. If there is any complaining to be done, lets complain about the cable company. But as I said, most consumers don't know what they are complaining about. Let's look at the ramifications if every cable company switched to 100% digital tomorrow...which seems to be to be what people want. Let's do a step by step breakdown:
The infrastructure in most cable systems does not need a rebuild for digital, just a little headend work and some maintenence in the field to fix issues that will visibly affect digital but not analog (CPD, microreflections, etc...). So, BAM! Cable is all digital. What happens the next day?
Firstly, ALL TV's without a digital tuner go dark. Great-aunt Maryrose and Gramma Clara turn on their perfectly good 1988 Zenith, and get static. They now have to go buy new TV's to use cable service, because consumers demanded digital transmission. In fact, this WILL happen when the OTA conversion happens in 2009, but OTA viewers may get subsidized boxes. (It will be interesting to see the FCC enforce the separable security statute with that one.) Cable companies get to eat the cost. In fact, this week the FCC guaranteed that cable companies eat the cost for an additional 3 years. They mandated that all cable providers (coax based only) provide a viewable analog OR digital signal to all subscribers until 2012. Linkage (pdf warning) [fcc.gov] It would be easier to comply by sticking with analog signals for the mandate, but customers (and the FCC) are demanding digital broadcast.
"But wait," you say, "they can get a digital cable box and keep the older TV!" Well, sure, but then we get to hear about how the cable company is bleeding it's customers dry by charging for equipment. I call horseshit on this one. Cable companies charge an average $7.50 monthly lease fee for the box that costs them $300 upfront, plus maintenance and repair. In "only" 40 months of maintenance free operation of that box, the cable company breaks even. Yeah...that's certainly not what I would call milking the customer.
"Why can't they use a third-party box, like a TiVO?" you might ask. They certainly can but to access encrypted channels, the box will need CableCards, the abomination of technology that they are. I work in the billing department and since they are authorized through our billing software, I support and troubleshoot CableCARDs on a daily basis. They have potential, and would work SO much better if manufacturers would standardize on a set of firmware...but I'm diverging from the point. Besides, the bigger question is "WHY DOESN'T ANYONE ELSE MAKE A 3RD PARTY BOX?!" Personally, I think there is not currently a market for cable boxes. How much money did TiVO lose last quarter [google.com]? Ah...only $17 million.
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What we need is true subscriber/a-la-carte programming. Can you explain to me why I have to pay $40 a month for cable...which then has advertisements? I'm pretty sure that we have the technology so that, say, if I JUST want to watch Stargate or Rome or South Park then I should be able to pay for specifically what I want. Hell, I woul
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Re:The Catch 22 of being a cable MSO (Score:4, Interesting)
Cable companies charge an average $7.50 monthly lease fee for the box that costs them $300 upfront
Maybe I'm crazy, but after several decades and millions upon millions of cable boxes having been manufactured and distributed, they want us to believe that those things cost more than 40 bucks up front? That's hard to swallow. I work in an industry that requires the assembly of customized electronics equipment and while the prototypes might cost $10,000 or more, the mass produced units are ALWAYS less than a hundred bucks. I have a feeling the cable companies are doing just fine for themselves on that equipment lease fee.
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My numbers are certainly NOT wrong, and in fact were slightly low. Our dual-tuner DVRs [wikipedia.org] cost just over $500 per unit, direct from MOTO. The DCT2524 is $300. http://broadband.motorola.com/business/digitalvideo/product_dct2500_settop.asp [motorola.com] We would have liked to move to the DCH-700 which is a slick little digital only box, but they do not comply with the FCC separable security
Surely, you know these are more than mere "zapper boxes" or frequency remodulators. At the minimum, dual QAM/analog tuners, diplex filte
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"But wait," you say, "they can get a digital cable box and keep the older TV!" Well, sure, but then we get to hear about how the cable company is bleeding it's customers dry by charging for equipment. I call horseshit on this one. Cable companies charge an average $7.50 monthly lease fee for the box that costs them $300 upfront, plus maintenance and repair. In "only" 40 months of maintenance free operation of that box, the cable company breaks even. Yeah...that's certainly not what I would call milking the customer.
I've seen simple little Motorola DCT700 [motorola.com] digital cable boxes deployed by Comcast that are smaller than a Mac mini and have just two video outputs (coaxial and composite). Aren't these "barebones" cable boxes more than good enough for old TVs? Will these cost anywhere near $300 in 2009? They look pretty cheap to me and I expect them to be cheaper in two years, but I could be wrong.
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I was merely trying to explain the position coax-based TV providers have been put in. I failed to expand on the Microsoft comparison, though. I had intended to add that just like Microsoft, cable companies get dragged through the mud even when actually trying to help the end user experience.
Then again, if cable = Microsoft, this would be Soviet Russia...TV watches YOU!
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And yes, HiTS is a crazy way to build channel maps. We only have a few HiTS systems left, and eventually they will migrate to our regionalized DACs.
Does anyone still watch TV? (Score:2)
Missing the point (Score:2)
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HD
I'm pretty sure I'm being cheated, let's see: (Score:3, Funny)
Currently shopping for alternatives.
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On your third point, my employer would charge just $62.50/mo for the options you've described. $42.50 for basic (includes 6 unencrypted HD channels: ABC/NBC/FOX/CBS/ESPN/ESPN2), $19.95 for the DVR. The a
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I think I'm about to set up an old box as a MythTV, switch to $16/month basic cable, and just buy any TV shows I want outside of 2-13 on DVD. If I can manage to get OTA HD, I'll cancel the cable altogether.
For the internet...DSL, as much as I tend to d
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Feel the signal. (Score:5, Funny)
I feel the cable to see if the signal is rough and bumpy, or smooth and wavy. Why, how do you do it?
Put out my Television in 1998 and did not regret. (Score:2)
One of the many reasons (Score:3, Interesting)
Both analog and digital? (Score:2, Interesting)
Example:
Channel 27 = TNT analog (confirmed using analog-only TV tuner card)
Channel 401 = TNT digital (has visible artifacts when the signal is weak)
Channel 1827 = TNTHD
All three channels have the same programming at the same time.
If you can't tell.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not condoning actions such as delivering a channel in Analog that you are paying to receive in Digital, but my question to you as Devil's advocate is this: You ask how you can be sure you are receiving the channel in digital; if you can't tell the difference, can it really bother you that much?
And I'm not talking digital as in ATSC (HDTV), because there's really no way to fake that; I mean the regular cable channels that get broadcast in "digital" format but really there's not much difference.
Aikon-
It's Not The Loss In Quality... (Score:2)
It's not the loss in quality on the DVR that's the problem. It's the fact that the analog broadcast takes up a whole lot more space on the hard drive afterwards than the digital channels.
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Most locals should be digital anyway---given that there's a FCC deadline.
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The new deadline is the analog cutoff for full power licenses and that is about 2 years away. So at this point, if you can receive the NTSC signal of station then they should have a digita
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Re:Incessant whining! Argh! (Score:4, Informative)
I had this problem a few years ago and called the cable provider. The technician who came out identified a simple barrel connector in the cable demarc box was attenuating the signal by about 12 db instead of the expected 0.5 db. It took him just minutes to trace out the wires and replace the connector (he also replaced the cable ends while he was at it,) and it didn't cost me a cent.
So I agree that you should do a bit more investigation before calling shenanigans.
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It doesn't matter if they can tell the difference. They signed a contract agreeing to digital cable and they're not getting it.
At the very least it means they could be paying $xx less a month for the same thing. Not to mention the cable companies committing fraud and using false advertising.
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