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I STILL Want My HDTV
jhaberman writes: "Slate.com has an opinion piece talking about the horrific mess the HDTV rollout has been. It seems everyone's
been to blame from the hardware manufacturers, to the cable/satellite companies,
to the producers of the actual shows. I fell into the trap a year ago buying a
top of the line Sony Wega digital TV and I STILL don't have ANY HDTV! Here's why..."
I paid so much and winter olyimpics is all i get? Heck, i stay with my 10 year old Sony.
With almost no content to view in the HDTV format who wants to pay thousands of dollars to buy a set that can display it? Not me. I am happy with my current set. Just as with the film The Matrix providing a great vehicle to push DVD players HDTV needs to come up with its 'killer' show. Something so awe-inspiring that we, the viewing public, just can't live without. Good luck.
If Darwin was right, you'd be dead by now.
I mean, it takes AGES to D/L a low-res DivX, I cannot even imagine how long it would take... oh, you were talking about *analog* TV? The one without keyboard? The one that according to this poll isn't used by many slashdotters? <g>
Rather than whining about not being given the option to vegetate in front of inane rubbish at improved resolution, why not rejoice in the fact that you have an incentive to go outside and interact with the world, it's considerably less pixelated than even HDTV.
Why would anyone want to go outside, meet people or do things ? Instead, you can watch others have fake adventures or get your opinions and desires programmed in rather than going to all the trouble of figuring them out for yourself. You can achieve a state of lower consciousness - it helps pass the time while you wait for death.
If you must watch TV, at least buy a mirror to put up above the screen. That way you can look up from time to time and compare the excitement on the screen with the futile existence of the vegtable on the couch.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Its called DVD. My friend and co-worker has a killer entertainment system with the centerpiece natrually being his HDTV. He uses it almost exclusively for DVD. He has all of the expensive decoders, but doesn't use em much. Lets face it when you're pulling the waves out of the air, static at 1080 is still static.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
At least the USA is making inroads into HDTV. Here in the UK, only a few channels seem to be able to broadcast widescreen effectively (namely the BBC and Channel 4).
BSkyB (part of News Corp.) seems totally incapable of doing any 16:9 broadcasts. For instance, Enterprise is shot in 16:9 but we get it as 4:3, even though most pay TV in the UK is now on a digital platform (DVB) and a sizable percentage of homes have a widescreen set. Certainly as a percentage, more homes in the UK have widescreen than the USA has homes that have HDTV
Just like most people I'm not going to pay $2,000 for a set then another $600 for an idiotic "receiver", no matter how many shows you broadcast in HDTV. Set what prices you want, they're your TVs; but don't whine when we don't start throwing money at you. And don't try to swindle us by separating the decoder and the set, that's just idiocy.
From the article:
"Fox probably thought, 'Since widescreen at 480 is good enough for the millions who watch DVDs, why spend a lot more to please the few purists?'"
As much as I hate to admit it, from a purely business standpoint the network executives are probably being most prudent in not commencing with the conversion at this point.
Like any industry, television networks are in business to make money and their executives have an obligation to move forward with the best strategies possible to realize this goal. Unfortunately, what may make good business doesn't always equate to what promotes progress.
To use a simple metaphor, one need look only as far as the automobile industry. We have known for years that automobile emissions are bad for the environment. Additionally, we have much (if not all) of the technology available this very minute to switch to an alternative fuel source resulting in vehicles which would be much more 'environmentally freindly' - ethanol or electic power. Why don't we convert - because the automobile industry is just like the television industry, they are in it for the money. The obvious positive progress aside, such advances increase overhead and decrease corporate profit margins - aka 'bad business'...
I think it suck as much as anyone - I own a wide-screen, HDTV compatible set!!! However, putting myself in their position, I can't argue with their decisions at this point in time...
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
..and came across a few links that show all the HDTV broadcasters in the U.S. Kind of interesting, there's one in a town 100 miles north of myself.. woohoo.. :P
www.nab.org
www.hdpictures.com
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
Give me a break. The FCC has tended to be a corporate tool for the past few decades, and HDTV rollout is no exception; it was the corporations who pushed the FCC and Congress to set HDTV standards.
The corporate sector is a hundred times more greedy and short-sighted than even the most ineptly run government agency.
DirecTV is carrying HDTV on channel 199. Of course you need the HD DirecTV Receiver, to go along with your HDTV. They are carrying 16 Hours a Day of HDTV transmitted by HD.NET which was founded and run by Mark Cuban of Broadcast.com and Dallas Mavericks Fame. Currently they are running the Olympics in conjuction with NBC. The schedule can be found here Hey it's not the latest movies yet, but if you're really jonesing for some HDTV it's better than nothing...
The problem with a burner and HDTV is you'd need hardcore compression to squeeze any amount of HD video onto CD-R. HD 1080i resolution (1900x1080) has about 6x as many pixels as SD 480i (720x480) resolution. Plus, I'd want something a bit better than DiVX for compression if I'm going to make full use of my $2000 television. I paid for HD, I want to preserve the quality. Hell, uncompressed 24-bit 1080i is 176 MegaByte/sec. That's friggin huge considering that the latest IDE drives can't even do 50 MB/sec. Lossless compression hasn't gotten that good yet.
Perhaps one of the big sci-fi shows could accompish this. A show like "Friends" isn't going to see much benefit from HD, whereas special-effects saturated shows like "Enterprise" or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" might. Alas, while the genre has grown substantially in recent years, I don't think it has the mass-market appeal to be a true killer-app.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Well, the industry pushed the standards, but it was the FCC that asked them to initially. It all comes down to bandwidth, and the sad fact that we just don't have enough to go around down at the low end of the spectrum (where signals carry well). Digital transmission will allow the FCC to phase out the current wide-band analog TV bands, and to re-use (i.e., sell) the bandwidth for things like fleet dispatch, which is always screaming for more spectrum.
While the ISM and similar bands (900MHz and 2.4 GHz home wireless) are great bands for their purposes, they don't tend to overcome terrain obstacles as well as lower frequencies (and no, this is not really a question of broadcast power). So it is natural for the FCC to want to make more effecient use of the spectrum by reclaiming wide analogue channels and replacing them with narrow digital channels, thus freeing spectrum for other uses. That's what we pay them for. That's their job.
While I am happy to see some attention being bandied about concerning HDTV, I wish it were a little more accurate. It is a complicated subject though, so it is a comming thing in the articles that have been written to not be 100% factually correct.
For example, you do not NEED two dishes for DirecTV... only the one oval dish. Two would also work though. For Dish, you do need two.
Fox digital broadcasts are not simply "480 lines". They are 480p, like a progressive scan DVD player. While a FAR cry from CBS's 1080i, or from ABC's 720p, it is still much better than what most people see even on their DVD's. Fox has other problems in their presentation though. For example, they "zoom" the picture so it fills a 16x9 TV. This effectively cuts off an inch on the top and bottom of the picture. Why they don't just send it through standard, like ALL the other networks do, and leave it to the viewer to decide on how they want to view it (standard, stretched, zoomed, etc), is beyond me.
Another little known fact, is that the OTA (over the air) broadcasts that are available to most, comes in a better picture quality than analog cable, digital cable, or digital sattelite. It is a very noticeable difference too. The digital broadcasts done OTA are not compressed in any way... great 480i picture (usually better since many/most HDTV's use a line doubler of some sort). Broadcasts done over cable or satellite are all compressed to certain degrees, resulting in pixelation and downright nastiness. Some are better than others, but OTA is better than all of them.
If you like to watch TV, I think it is worth it. Check out www.antennaweb.org to see what digital channels are available in your area, and what antenna you would need to receive them... I guess there is a place to check.
Check out www.avsforum.com to learn all you could ever want to know about anything to do with Home Theater, HDTV, HTPC, and more.
The information is out there; the problem is that you have to go look for it. I agree... the sales people should know more about this stuff so consumers don't get screwed. But really, is sale person's lack of knowledge about a product they are selling something new?
Jeff
(unfortunately I can't take credit for this one. It was written by a fellow slashdotter a while back, and I've lost the attribution. If the author is still out there, let me know and I'll send you a beer ;-) )
For those interested in a brief history of HDTV, here it is:
Here's how it went:
Broadcast Industry asks for bandwidth for HDTV
FCC says "OK, we'll set aside bandwidth for HDTV"
FCC says "What standards?"
Industry says 'No Standards Please' and come up with EIGHTEEN recommended formats for HDTV. I am not shitting you.
FCC says "Isn't 18 different standards a bit much?"
Industry says "Shut the fuck up FCC, we know what we are doing. The 'market' will handle this!"
Consumer Electronics dudes whine "18 formats make every thing cost more, you are fucking us!"
FCC says "OK, it's your call on standards, 18 formats is fine, infact there are NO STANDARDS AT ALL, 'cause we are letting the 'market decide', but you start broadcasting HDTV now or we take back the FREE bandwidth."
Industry says "What? We really just want the free bandwidth. You really want us to do HDTV??
Congress says "Fuck you Industry. Broadcast HDTV or we'll legislate your asses back to Sun-day!"
Industry says "We're fucked. 18 formats? Why the hell did we do that? Let's change it."
Consumer Electronics dudes say "You ain't changing shit. We are already building the boxes you said you wanted built."
FCC says "Yah, ya boneheads we told you 18 was too many, now you gotta live with it."
Industry says "Well FCC, will you at least make the cable companies carry the HDTV at no charge?"
Cable companies say "Fuck you! You gotta pay! Bwah-ha-ha-ha!"
FCC says "Yep, no federal mandated on HDTV must carry, we are letting 'the market' handle that"
Industry says "We are so fucked. We are spending 5-10 million per TV station in hardware alone and have 1000 HDTV viewers per city, even in LA!"
Consumer at home says "Where is my HDTV? Why does it cost so much? Fuck it, I'm sticking with cable/DirecTV."
Consumer electronics dudes, broadcast industry, FCC, and congress all cry. Cable companies laugh and make even bigger profits.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
Next time you're in your local electronics store and the sales sharks notice you glance at one of their HDTV's, make sure to ask them about all the additional hardware you would potentially need to actually view HDTV. See how honest of an answer they give you... Its been my experience lately that these guys have been so hard up to unload these TVs on people ("HDTV is the thing of the future... And that future is now!") they'll tell you pratically anything. I had one guy tell me that I could receive HDTV signals from *any* local cable provider. I wonder how many truly uninformed folks are out there with new TVs thinking they are watching HDTV.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
I'd like to make a case for blaming Neilson ratings. They determine whether a tv is tuned to a particular channel, and not whether people are actually watching it right? Well that allows TV stations to over report their viewership. Since media conglomerates want to appear to have more people watching for longer times, in prime demographics, maybe useing that extra spectrum they were given for many standard channels rather than one HD channel would allow them to more efficiently inflate their viewership to increase their ad revenue, while provideding more time to schedule infomercial programming for us insomniacs.
But if there were accurate reporting, ie people leaveing to get a pop when a commercial came on, sleeping through the news, in short if it tracked how much time people really spent watching TV, they might find trends which I'll preceed to predict with no basis in fact and only wild speculation as my guide. I would bet people with HD TV's recieving HD programing would spend more time watching TV than average, watch longer, and prefer HD programs to standard programs. Since they have the money to spend on purchases like HD TV's and are willing to spend it, it puts them in a better demographic. But most importantly, I'll try to justify this assertion with hand waving and magic powder, that they'd be more likely to watch commercials, as HD commercials would feature more eye candy and probably be more entertaining. And I'm not just talking about Victoria's Secret.
If the viewing habbits were accurately compiled, and my prognostication came to pass there might be a very real, very powerful market pressure where to get the really lucrative advertisers you have to have a HD signal.
But again, just how I think it might really be.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
If you use a computer monitor as your display, HDTV isn't terrifyingly expensive. That's no good if you want a 45 inch screen, of course, but it's a heck of a lot better than nothing.
I bought an HDTV box a little while ago and wrote an article on the subject of getting all this stuff happening for cheap. You can read the article here.
(-1, Wrong. Troll or daft, the eternal question...)
Catalytic converters have been legally required on all petrol cars in the EU since '92 IIRC. In the UK, leaded petrol is now only available on the condition that it doesn't sell more than a certain (extremely low) percentage of the total market. Any car which requires it either has to be converted, run on LRP or accept that maybe 1 in 30 garages carry fuel they can use. Further, emissions regulations are tightening on a very regular basis for new cars - which are also taxed according to volume of CO2 emissions. Older cars are subject to emissions tests in their annual roadworthiness test (can't run a car without one) and if they fail, they're off. Finally, you can be pulled over and tested at random to establish that your emissions are within defined limits and fined if they're not, plus required to get the vehicle up to standard within the time or it's off the road. Tailpipe emissions are never pleasant, trust a cyclist, but they're rather better than they might be over here.
As for LPG, erm, no. Conversions are actually subsidised for many vehicles, not taxed more than anything else. I'm assuming you mean 20,000 km -well, that's around the breakeven point in one year IIRC. Conversions don't have to be done every year, sir.
Yes, we have tax at that sort of level on the petrol. Something has to pay for the road building and maintenance and for healthcare costs from vehicle accidents and pollution related illnesses. Personally I quite like the idea of mass transit such as buses and trains being subsidised by cars, considering that they're far less socially invasive and help reduce congestion, along with providing mobility to those who can't drive (can't afford / too young / disabled) which means they can be economically active, too, which seems A Good Thing.
All forced by the government.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
HDTV is still a solution in search of a problem, as far as I can see. When a set + decoder costs over $2k (and up, as opposed to conventional TV sets being well under $500 for a nice one), there's no compelling advantage that makes it worth the extra money. There's a lot better things the average person can do with that money.
The problem is that HDTV is nice for the enthusiast, but useless for most people. Improved quality of DVD playback is nice, but despite the success of the DVD format, typical viewers are not trying to replicate the theater experience at home. Heck, most of them wouldn't know how if they wanted to (and could afford it). I just can't see people who don't know how to set the clock on their VCR being able to find the sweet spot for a 5.1 speaker system.
Does HDTV have a shot? Of course it does. But the networks need to get serious about it (and soon), prices on the equipment need to plummet (no more than a 20% price difference between an HDTV monitor and the equivalent NTSC TV) to the point where folks are willing to shell out the cash, and the issues with cable companies need to be worked out pronto. And consumers need to demand high-quality video, otherwise all we'll wind up getting someday is 4 channels of the same crap on an HDTV frequency. Yippee.
I should be a perfect target customer for HDTV. I'm a technically-oriented person. I make a good living. I have not one, but two DVD players (one is in the bedroom), several computers, surround sound in the living room, and I only have a 27" set to go with it. I ought to be heading for upgrade city, but I'm not.
I've looked longingly at a 40" widescreen set that I see every time I go to Best Buy, but I just can't justify $2200 for a TV set, no matter how hard I try. Other than the DVD film I watch every couple of weeks, there's just no advantage to the big set. One of my friends has a huge widescreen projection HDTV set (he did well in the stock option roulette game), and I've watched movies on it - they look great. But TV looks just as crappy, only bigger. So what's the point? Guys who made a lot with stock options are far from an ideal market, especially nowadays.
Maybe in a couple more years this'll be worth revisiting, but HDTV is dead in the water for now, and justifiably so. There just isn't any real benefit that makes it worth your disposable income - unless you have a ridiculous amount of income to dispose of.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Nobody has mentioned that the HDTV rollout has been stymied deliberately -- by the media corporations who are reluctant to broadcast their best material throughout the airwaves. If THE MATRIX were broadcast in glorious HDTV, imagine the carnage! You could capture the non-compressed HDTV signal to a hard drive, and you'd actually have a video version of THE MATRIX that was superior to any version you could buy. Plus, you wouldn't have to worry about any DVD copy protection/region encoding.
In short, the media companies are terrified that this will put them out of business.
When I briefly owned an HDTV decoder, the manual's fine print read something like this: The HDTV broadcast standard is still emerging, and this decoder may not be able to decode all or any future HDTV broadcasts. (Especially since BIG MEDIA is still planning to implement copy protection to protect their crappy Hollywood assets.)
I sure wonder how pissed off Joe Early Adopter is going to be when he finds out his $700 set top decoder won't decode any HDTV signal worth watching!
Of course, since true copy protection of digital signals is probably impossible, I would probably bet that Big Media will do everything possible to delay and stymie the HDTV "rollout". Just like DAT.
--
tomRakewell
I just call DirecTV. I have a "dormant" account. Each year, they put NFL Sunday Ticket on my spring bill. Each year I call up CS and ask, "$140 is a pretty good chunch of change - are all the games going to be broadcast in High Definition?" Each year the rep has informed me that the games would not be in HD. Each year I tell them to cancel my Sunday Ticket and call me when they start broadcasting in High Def.
I vote with my wallet.
--
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The higher resolution is not comparable to the switch from black and white to color.
Even so, the FCC has not chosen (I believe) standards that are backward compatible, as was color to black and white. Let's face it. Color TV probably would have taken a lot longer to get into the markert if it had had been backward incompatible.
The end result for most consumers is that they resent being put on the treadmill of upgrading their techonology just because something is supposed to be better. Heck, how many companies were/are still using Cobol when Y2K rolled around. Or look at the hassle MS gets because it wants people to upgrade their computers every three years, even pulling software off the shelves in favor of the last version, trying to force people into shorter and shorter upgrade cycles.
And not every tv station is going to be able to spend money to upgrade to digital right away. The outcry when people are _forced_ to buy new tvs, and these are all high priced items, will kill tv in america. Most folks will say, "I can't afford a thousand dollar tv". They may go down to walmart for something for a couple hundred bucks. But a couple of gs for a bood tube? To hell with it. I know TV is not that important to me. I'll live without, and probably will be better of for it. Just imagine not being able to see allof those political campaign ads because of incompatibility of technologies.
paradise.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I don't think it was $10,000 impressive though. :)
.... from a guy talking to a class about 15 years ago. His general theme was that although the technology had been around for a long time, certain political barriers were delaying it's release. But, he added, in just a few short years, it will replace conventional television.
Here's some HDTV Highlights (Feb. 1981-March 1998).
For those of us who are used to PAL, the increase in quality that HD gives you is negligible in the home.
For those of you used to NTSC, it's huge. Progressive scan helps as well, but it's the stable colours and the resolution that make the difference.
However, the one thing we have been involved in has nothing to do with HDTV, it's to do with HD in the cinema. And the trend there is to cut the costs of making a movie by doing it all digitally. The nice people who make film stock rake in a small fortune every year on stock; in comparison, HD tapes are free! HD provides close to 2K resolution (a film industry term) and anything you see that has been into a computer for effects work will have been scanned in at 2K res.
So, HDTV is certainly not a technology looking for a market, it's just that in the US, the need to replace the awful quality of analog NTSC transmission with something better is much more pressing than in the PAL world. Hence the heartache.
Any transition is painful, but the real crime in the USA is that you're going to be saddled with an off-air transmission system that is not up to the job. The FCC, in it's infinite wisdom, has decided that rather than fall in with the rest of the world - and the laws of physics - it will mandate the 8-VSB specification as the only modulation standard for the US Digital TV broadcast transition (rather than the more recent and just plain better COFDM standard). The FCC seems to have almost completely ignored the technical arguments - instead, it has followed the advice of various industry groups - like the ATSC - who's members control the 8VSB technology. So don't forget to blame the FCC is all this mess!
However, having spent some time in the US, I will also say that the thought of getting the crap that goes out on TV in sharper detail makes me shudder....
No matter what the hardships, it is being rolled out. I live in a community of 50,000 people and we already have HD simulcast on our NBC affiliate.
I work for a company that owns over ten television stations and we're simulcasting on half of them and others will be by next year.
Has anyone seen the Olympics on HD? It's incredible! The reflections on the ice, the shiney gold helmets. The detail in the fabric on the outfits! I could go on. Plus, the sound is great. You can actually hear the movements in the snow or ice.
We've taken the Olympic HD broadcast and pretty much aired it 24 hours over out HD channel.
Sadly, the film on HD shows up what appears to me to be the same (ER or West Wing). However, anything on video looks great.
You do have to be wary, Fox said that they broadcast the Superbowl in HD. This was the not case. They just letterboxed it and upsamlped the stream. It made for some great pixelation at the end when they threw out the confetti.
It'll get there, and the TV set prices will be cheaper, eventually. Until then, I and the other 10+ people in our community will enjoy it.
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
First off, I work for one of the major manufacturers of HDTV systems.
There are a number of glaring factual errors in the article. First of all, there are about a quarter-millon HDTV _displays_ SOLD total (that's not counting the ones sitting in warehouses). But there are only about 25,000 decoders SOLD (again, differentiate versus those sitting in warehouses. I have _no_ _idea_ where the article author got 300K+ decoders sold). The vast majority of HDTV displays are being used to display DVD / LD output, and have no means to recieve off-the-air transmission.
In short, the average HDTV station has a viewership of less than 200 people.
The current FCC rule is also "stations do not need to relinquish their analog bandwidth until 2005 or until 85% of their viewing market is equipped to recieve HDTV signals." Essentially, that's an infinite delay, as even _color_ TV didn't hit 85% until 1998.
Another omission: Service Area: the field test of HDTV's 8VSB digital modulation screwed the pooch; actual propagation of the signal in a multipath environment (i.e. where people live, with things like telephone wires, tall buildings, etc.) is _far_ worse than predicted. The current tests I've seen on real deployments indicate between 3 and 10dB worse performance than predicted, almost all of it due to multipath. In other words, a perfectly viewable analog signal does not predict a decodeable HDTV signal from the same transmit/recieve pair, as although there's adequate field strength, the signal/noise ratio is insufficient to get a good decode. Since HDTV either decodes correctly or the ECC fails, there's no such thing as a "noisy signal", you just get an onscreen message saying "No signal at all". You can't watch a weak HDTV signal, all you see is bluescreen.
Given all those factors, most station managers are seeing the writing on the wall (and the million-dollar-a-year power bills - work out how much it costs to run a 10-megawatt system for 18 hours a day at 10 cents a KWH). They're taking advantage of an FCC rules loophole- the right of a station to lower their transmitter power without renegotiating their license, and have cut the power outputs of their transmitters drastically. Since "effectively nobody" is actually watching HDTV, this inconveniences no one and saves the stations a bundle of money on the electric bill.
I've been lucky enough to live in a city (Boston) where I can receive a lot of HD programming with just a simple set of rabbit ears (It turns out the simpler the antenna the better for receiving an HD signal, you can also get HD net (great channel) over satellite) But I have to say that my roommates and I (2 electrical engineers with masters degrees and 1 CS guy) have had to do a lot of research on just how to run and tweak the HDTV and our reception. When an HD program is properly produced and transmitted it totally blows you away. The local PBS channel was doing testing awhile back and had a program about Italy on and to be honest it was like looking out an open window at Italy, completely amazing. Conversely if you watch HD programming on CBS the shows look much better and there is definitely that HD 3d effect but the network has chosen to use filters or a process to make the image look like a film, i.e. a softer less defined image. Where HD really has shined consistently is with true HD sports broadcasts. (The last super bowl was billed as an HD broadcast but really wasn¦t) With the wider aspect ratio you can see so much more of the field in an incredibly higher detail. In hockey games when a slap shot bounces off a post you can see the shot come in and bounce off the post where with a traditional broadcast you usually only hear the ding off the post. That being said NBC has made a choice to simulcast their digital TV signal with their HDTV signal for the Olympics which means sometimes the signal isn¦t as good as it could be, some pixelization on high speed shots with objects moving inside of the point of focus. Really a very small thing, but I¦m told if NBC didn¦t waste bandwidth on the extra signal it would not occur. (BTW - God bless Mark Cuban for getting NBC to allow him to broadcast the Olympics even if they are a day behind) DVD will never look as good as true HD programming even with a progressive player, don¦t get me wrong DVD look great but for example ABC has been running James Bond films and Indiana Jones movies in HD and comparing the bond films to the DVD version (no Indiana Jones DVDs yet f¼) The HD broadcast of even very old films is completely amazing. There are still the limiting factors of the original film but the image of the HD broadcast is much better than the DVD version. Finally playing Halo for the Xbox at 480p in co-op mode on a 50 16:9 screen rocks! It will be interesting to see how games look when Xbox game makers start shipping games that run at higher res. (Xbox is the only game console with true HD support)
Porn today sucks. It's boring. Like any other vicarious form of entertainment, it requires suspension of disbelief for it to be enjoyed. But with the lousy acting, directing, stories - and pretty much everything else - there's plenty of disbelief. Hell, with all the fake tits, formulaic scenes, and uninspired moaning they can't even make the sex believable. To say nothing of the offensive levels of sexism (contrary to popular belief porn is not inherently sexist), or numerous other factors. All it is is people screwing on camera for money.
All the more reason for the real networks and producers to get involved. Porn IS the killer app. Demand for porn is nearly universal among men, and if they bothered to work on the stories they could make it appealing to women too. One need look no further than the demand for Yaoi Doujinshi among women to see that this is true. There's money to be made, and Hollywood has more than enough of it. They certainly pay the actors enough. At an Indecent Proposal sum of one million dollars per episode each, I don't see why every episode of Friends DOESN'T have a different permutation of the cast members gettin' it on, culminating with an orgy in the series finale.
Can you imagine how much better porn could be with real acting, a hefty production budget, and a schedule based on weeks rather than days? I can. It's time to stop burying softcore smut on the premium channels, and bring porn to prime time.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I suspect the "filter" involved here is the film on which the show is shot...AFAIK, news, sports, and soaps are the only things that get shot with video cameras instead of motion-picture cameras (news and sports because they're live, soaps because they're cheap). If a show does a live episode (like ER did a couple of years or so ago), the difference is blatantly obvious since they have to use video cameras for anything that's live. Everything else gets shot on film and is then telecined to bring the framerate up. (Film is typically 24 fps. NTSC is 29.97 fps. What's the framerate for ATSC?)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
A few points:
1. There is no static. You either get the channel or you don't.
2. Digital cable is not HD. In fact, for the most part, the quality of the signal decreases as Cable TV companies try to squeeze more channels into less bandwidth.
3. DVDs are not HDTV killer apps. they look better, but they're still 480p. True HDTV (1080i or 720p) is amazing, but HD-DVDs are held up for reasons related to the next point.
4. The real problem for studios is that there is no copy protection on HDTV hardware. They are afraid of giving out theatre-quality resolution video, and component outputs (95% of HDTVs) have no built-in copy protection. It's not enough that there is no commercially available HDTV signal recorders. Networks and studios are belatedly seeing HDTV as a chance to integrate copy controls to prevent unauthorized recording, copying, etc. to combat TiVO/Replay. There had been at least one HD-DVD player that was pulled from the market shortly after introduction. As part of this, the industry is moving to Firewire instead of component signals, because Firewire has copy protection built into the hardware, obsoleting 99% of existing hardware. A Firewire -> Component converter is unlikely, because that would defeat copy protection. This pisses the early adopters off and hardware manufacturers are not interested in producing cutting edge new hardware which may be obsolete under the new Firewire standard, and distributors and retailers don't want to be stuck with unsellable new hardware.
5. There are websites that have information about which channels are broadcasting around your area and antenna recommendations.
--I hate people when they're not polite -"Psycho Killer", Talking Heads
Heh, that was a while ago. Did you save it somewhere? Or is it deep in the /. archive?
I actually wrote it for my fraternity mailing list. The reference to Sun-day is an inside joke.
It pays to be a broadcast engineer in discussions like this.
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First of all, what is avertised as 'digital cable' is not HDTV. It is somethign completely different. 'digital cable' is the equivalent of DirecTV or Dish Network over a cable instead of over and satellite dish.
The HDTV signal is a very tightly compressed signal. To give you an idea, the native production format is around 1.5 GIGAHz of bandwidth. This can be squeezed down to a 19.3 MEGAbit/second signal. The 19Mbs signal can be shoved through a 6MHz pipe.
There are several pipes you can listen to at you house, each is handled differently.
Over-the-air:
You need an arial antenna (rabbit ears or rooftop yaggi) to recieve the signal. Then the signal must be run through an ATSC decoder. The decoder aka settop box, decodes the MPEg and creates a HD signal that you feed into you HD montior. Care must be taken that you chose a settop box that has outputs that match the input of your monitor. ATSC decoders are $1,000 last time I checked. Could be less now. What you get -> Possibly 5-6 HDTV stations of the local area with less than 15 hours/week of actual HDTV programming.
DirecTV:
You buy the special DirecTV HDTV reciever for $700 or so. Hook it up to dish antenna, plug into your HD monitor. What you get -> ONE channel of HBO movies. That's it...
Cable TV:
Most cable TV systems do not retransmit the HDTV signal, you have to check with your cable provider. If they do, you will probably need settop box from the cable company that makes a signal that feeds a second ATSC decoder settop ($$), then that feeds your HD monitor. What you get -> Depending on local cable system, you may get some of the local HDTV stations.
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Let me break it down for you... MONEY.
The natinal debt caused Bill Clinton's Administration to try to make the FCC become a profit center for the US Federal Govt. So why give the people their airwaves for free when you can sell the band and pay down the debt?
So they (the FCC) were going to sell the bandwidth to the telephone companies (where the money is in T-com) for cell usage, until high compression digital phones made the idea worthless several years into the plan. Every television engineer in the world saw this coming. They all said, "this whole plan will dry up when digital phones come along, because this is predicated on the idea that telecomm technology won't advance. Telecomm tech is one of the fastest advancing techs out there, if not the fastest." Of course, digital cells came out, and all of that HD band move for the sell off became useless. We (broadcasters) were stuck with the grandchild. Cable, of course, makes the highest profit in the industry, and hasn't had to do a fucking thing.
Now we (local television stations) are stuck with the idea of making millions of dollars of changes for a pittance of high end users... when most people watch TV for the shows, not the technical specifications. Many have never heard of HD.
Bill Clinton did this to us. He wanted ways to pay down the debt without slashing anything, so he hit the one industry that is one of the most regulated short of atomic energy, and wrapped it up in a bow that said, "progress." It was a big lie.
Why is is not here yet, even though it is regulated to be here RIGHT NOW?
Well, most of the broadcast quality digital equipment is made by single manufacturer overseas companies (like Sanyo or Toshiba), so they can charge literally whatever they want without worrying about anyone messing with them... why? They pushed the idea on the FCC, and they hold all the patents. Its literally the whole Rambus thing all over again. When the FCC says jump, local television stations are forced to say, "How high, Master?"
The current cost per HD user nationwide is several thousand dollars in the hole per user, if not tens of thousands, depending on the market.
I understand the reason for the FCC, but their power is absolute over private businesses that already give people what they want OR THEY FAIL MISERABLY. The truth is, the FCC lost touch along the way. Completely became a post for political insiders to sit on like being the Drug Czar, and now they just constantly muck up a system that is extremely market reactive. No one in the FCC knows shit about television. They have a late 70's Sesame Street NPR attitude about one of the most cutthroat businesses out there.
HDTV is not in your hometown market because they can't afford it. Period. The Gov't can say, "We need you to be HD NOW!" and they respond with, "We just got hit about as bad as the airlines, we just laid off workers... we don't have millions lying around for 15 A/V enthusiasts. Up yours. Pull our license. See what the people think about that when people can't get 'free' local TV all over the country."
That is where we stand. The TV stations try to look like their complying, because they like their license. The FCC wants a cool new standard, no matter what it costs to the common man and television stations.
And it was all over trying to sell off your public trust of the bandwidth to big rich phone companies, because politicians like big government programs and waste, and it was an idea that was fundamentally flawed because they thought the world was going to be analog forever. Way to go FCC. Are YOU EVEN AWAKE?
I love my HDTV... If only I could get programming... However, I love running my DVD (progressive scan) and Gamecube at 480p... There is a nice difference. I bought my set knowing that it would be mostly for 480p.
However, what you're all missing is the power that DTV has IF the broadcasters use 480i.
I don't recall the exact numbers, but at a 480i DTV transmission, each broadcaster will be able to broadcast 5 or 6 channels. Recording the shows at 1080i shouldn't be a big deal, and they can broadcast them at 480i.
This means that with an OTA Attennae (once DTV has its act together, reasonable anntennaes should become available), you could pick up 40 channels or so...
Now, I love my HDTV 6.1 Stereo system, etc. However, I want OTA to be as good as analog cable, just with a better signal.
That means that the cable company needs to offer me something to keep my business.
Right now they compress signals as much as possible to include more pay-per-view, but its really the same pay-per-view just starting every 30 minutes.
Sorry, but that won't keep my $80/month flowing. HBO and Starz are great, but there is no reason they can't rent descramblers directly and send their feeds on a broadcaster's OTA signal.
The cable companies started to get their act together when the Satellite companies started to really make a push. When OTA competes with them, then Satellite and Cable will have to really offer something.
I look foward to the day when I can get 40 channels for free or drop $50-$100/mo. to get HDTV signals, etc. I mean, there is no reason for shows not to be recording in HDTV, that way they can be sold on HDVD later on and the broadcasters can sell the rights to carry their HDTV signals if the cable companies want to exist.
Alex