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Cable HDTV Not Ready For Primetime?
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."
It has nothing to do with HDTV, it's just that the cable monopoly really does not need to innovate or provide good service. Is this news?
early stages. One person can't figure out a new technology, that's no cause for panic. Not ready for prime time? Perhaps, but that is like saying you are worried because a 3 year old is not ready for college.
http://www.geocities.com/sethseekstruth/great_out
So, one guy has problems getting a new HDTV DVR to work correctly, and the conclusion is that cable HDTV isn't quite ready for "prime time"?
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.
This is not the difference between over-the-air TV and cable. This is not the difference between 8-track and CD. HD and digital cable are merely an incremental upgrade, using non-trivial technologies, to an already OK-for-most-uses/people setup. For everyone with a 25" TV screen, the people who don't have an entire 'home theater' room, HD and digital is overkill. Why would Joe Sixpack need composite, optical digital, DVI and Svideo outputs? People like TVs, existing cable, DVDs and VCRs because they are simple. RedOut->Red In, WhiteOut->WhiteIn, YellowOut->YellowIn, done. When digital shenanigans like the article happen, who can fix it? The drones at the TW help desk? The drones at the TW 'self service' center? Joe Sixpack? Its not ready for prime time because Nobody Wants It, thus it remains convoluted and kludgy, with competing standards and definitions (try explaining to your average Walmart shopper the difference between 480p, 720i, and 1080p and watch their eyes glaze over).
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The pain of early adoption at its purest.
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.
Having the DVI, RF and S-Video outs disabled on the box, along with "can't control the digital audio volume via remote" isn't a "one person can't figure out" thing. It is crap, and not ready for prime time, just like he calls it.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Bose = User who doesn't know anything about audio.
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.
I dont' think so much that "HDTV" persay isn't ready for primetime... it's that the junk/rushed DVR set top boxes being pushed out by the cable companies aren't up to snuff...
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.
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Metric did manage to get a foothold here in "the rest of the world", it's mainly just the USA who are still on the imperial system. HDTV is catching on in Japan and they are already broadcasting anime in HDTV (Samurai 7, for the curious) so I suspect HDTV is simply not ready in the US. It's even worse here in Britain though...
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Most US cable companies are taking the HDTV and/or Digital streams from the already compressed satellite feeds, decompressing them, and recompressing them all into a few digital 'channels' (or feeds, kinda like TCP ports), and whenever one station has alot of motion, all the other stations compressed onto that channel loose quality and become over-compressed, sometimes even losing signal all together.
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My parents have this exact SA unit, with Cox service, and their experience has been vastly different.
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.
Color TV was launched in the late 1950s, amid heavy advertising. I lived in a very upscale suburban community at the time and knew a number of early adopters.
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Mainstream. I think a number of you folks should go back and read up on what that means.
I'm pretty decent as far as tech stuff goes - when people in the neighborhood have an issue they call me.
But I read through some of your posts and all I could think of was "This is your idea of mainstream?" Mainstream means a wall socket and a plug. Mainstream means a single cable to connect and you're done. Mainstream means that OVER HALF of the "mainstream" folks still can't plug their computer in correctly, much less what you folks are talking about.
So, in that vein, the article is DEAD on. HDTV is NOT read for mainstream. Take off your geek-blinders for a second and realize that having to plug together more than one or two components is going to be FAR too difficult for most folks when they still have trouble programming their VCR.
What in the world does TW think of disabling any of the features in a device, especially ones which are a main reason to buy this device?
This is like buying a Maybach because of all the comfort and then learning that the backseats, air condition and the bar have been removed.
Where does this madness end? The poor bastard threw $10,000 down the crapper to be infuriated in the course of attempting to watch nauseatingly boring content (or the propaganda they call the evening news) peppered with ever-increasing quantities of advertising. This sounds like the behavior of a crack addict desperate for that next fix.
/. or NPR addictions, OK? :)
Kill your television! You will wonder how you ever found so much time to waste on the damn idiot box. Spend that time bettering yourself and sharing your time with friends and family. Get informed, get inspired, get out of the house; but do yourself a favor and get rid of your television.
But let's not discuss my
/. peeve #274: The word is neither "walla" nor "whala", it's voila. Phonics is a tool of the devil.
People want to watch television programming. In fact, these days, they want it more than ever, desiring a wide selection.
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 bitstream is 19.3 Mb/s. All those with 19.3 Mb/s net connections at your home raise your hand. Now consider what bandwidth you need if youhave two TVs in your house.
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How do you figure that you are running 1360x768 on an 800x600 LCD projector?
800x600 is not HD anyway.
I'm not trolling. I honestly wnat to know, why are we as a society bothering with HDTV? What does it give us, that we don't already have? A different aspect ratio? Letterboxing gives us that. Higher resolution? I've been to Best Buy and have seen their HD sets. I wasn't impressed. Broadcast flags? I can do without that, thank you very much.
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.
Analog TV has to follow stringent standards otherwise you get no picture at all. Sure, the picture can get fuzzy, but generally you are guaranteed a certain standard of quality.
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 analog cable.
Just because it's a higher frame resolution doesn't mean you get even detail across the entire frame. If you compress it enough, you can make a 1080i image look like a 56K webcam because the blocks internally create effectively a lower visible resolution. You'll have small pockets of native res and large pockets of lower blocky res.
Not only that, but with no fixed resolution for HDTV, what incentive is there to go for the highest HDTV resolution? The lowest HDTV resolution is basically the same as NTSC, only progressive (think DVD's representation of stuff shot on film). That is not really progress, to me.
And big screen TVs, why is it that you see them in the store showing 4:3 content on 16:9 screens? You know, I find messed up aspect ratios to be completely ugly. I don't think there is any advantage in either cropping a 4:3 NTSC picture or stretching it to 16:9 but if you buy a big screen TV then people tend to do just that as a matter of routine because the vast majority of programming is in standard def. Or if you have a plasma you are concerned about burn-in so you wind up watching stuff in the wrong aspect ratio.
What the FCC should have done is enforced a minimum res on HDTV and a maximum compression ratio. The consumer is generally too blind to tell the difference between marketspeak and the actual picture quality so they get suckered into the hype.
Just wait until HD-DVD comes out. If it uses standard DVD disks with MPEG4 compression on it, it's going to such in comparison to blue-ray with milder compression. MPEG4 is great for bootlegs but its limitations are not acceptable for a videophile format.