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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."
Can someone please explain HDTV to me? While I was in the states this summer, I saw HDTV on a ~60 inch television. It was amazing. What exactly is this technology, and more importantly, what's the status in Europe? :-)
I live in Denmark myself.
sounds like it's not ready for sale, what a mess. HDTV reminds me of the metric system, always a promise for a better future, but never grabbed hold of enough marketshare to make a diff. The best tech doesn't always win (eg- VHS vs Beta, MS vs Linux...)
CB*&^A(#@$
free ipod and free gmail!
The pain of early adoption at its purest.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Television is dead and HDTV is even more dead ... how many years have they spun standard after standard?!
Computers and the net will take over as the receivers of the future.
HomeTheaterPC anyone?!
mine works just fine.. had it for about 6 months, and no problems at all.
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.
DVR Customers Get Autumn Freeze
(found via TV harmony blog)
Have to give credit to TiVo for remaining (ever so slightly) ahead of the generic cable company DVRs (for now...)
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Just accept the fact that 4:3 TVs and go on. See in HD the width is 16:9 and if you want to watch 90% of the Broadcasts in today market than that 16:9 is going to have to be stretched or chopped from the 4:3. Now lets say that you accepted that 90% of the broadcasts are 4:3 and that neither chopping nor stretching is acceptable then what do you do - get a 4:3 TV.
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.
I have one of the TimeWarner HD-DVRs he writes about. The box is really flaky. Go over to AVS Forum and you will see a lot of complaints on it. Im almost sorry I gave up my rock solid Tivo for it, but am hopeful that through firmware updates that the constant stuttering of sound and video and lockups will stop.
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.
--Spooky Action At A Distance
Ok... read the article. Time Warner cable sux... he has nothing to say bad about the hardware other than the crippling done by TW. He also is displeased with the channels that TW provides.
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)
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
The spec for a full HDTV signal with DD 5.1 audio is an uncompressed 18 megabit/sec stream vs like 1 for a regular channel. No way is the cable company going to allow an HD channel to consume 18X the bandwidth than a regular channel, so they trhottle the heck of of them. Leads to poor picture, artifacts, slow tuning, all the things the article referes to. Right now (SW Houston) the OTA HD signal from my local affiliates is FAR superior to anyhting the TWC puts out. Problem is most folks either a) are not sophisticated enough consumers to know the difference or b) are so happy to get any HD content after buying a 5K TV set they accept sub-par signals as the best they can get. Gonna be a while before this resolves itself, till then go buy a yagi antenna from Radio Shack and enjoy real HDTV (assuming you have an OTA set top box.....)
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
Read the article; the cable company actually disabled the outputs that would give the poor guy his HDTV picture easily.
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.
"Why does the box use gray letterboxing for 4:3? Why is my 1080i picture so blurry? How could 480p SD look this bad?"
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.
I bought a 27 inch Sony HDTV a few months ago. It wasn't that much more expensive than a Sony SD TV. While the other brands of TVs have really caught up (and in some cases surpased) Sony in regulat TV quality, the comparison between Sony and non-Sony HDTVs (tube-based) at least was quite dramatic. Sony was just much crisper, much clearer. I got a 4:3 TV since most of the content I'll be watching is regular (Adult Swim, HGTV), and either stretching or showing the gray bars on the sides of a 6:9 was more annoying than black bars above and below. On Time Warner, there are only 5 or 6 HD channels, 2 more if you subscribe to HBO HD and Showtime HD. So there isn't that much choice. I'd say I only watch one or two shows in HDTV a week. The networks that do have HD, most of the programs with the exception of some prime time shows, are in regular definition. If you're a DVD movie buff, DVDs will play better on an HDTV, even though DVDs are standard defintion. If you've got a progressive-scan DVD player and a 480p input for your HDTV, film-based DVDs (not video/TV-based) will play about 30% sharper on an HDTV (interlaced TV reduces apparent resolution by about 30% because of the optical effect of interlacing). If I had to do it over again, I'd probably just go with a regular defintion TV.
I have a non-HD Scientific Atlanta unit, and I did try their PVR for a while -- it lasted 2 days at my house. Why? Absolutely horrific design.
The fans (?) and hard drives spun constantly, caching was non-existant, and to achieve the 30-second replay I believe the write-head was in constant use rather than caching this in RAM. It needed to be rebooted several (!) times a day and often severely chopped up recorded (and current) A/V.
That being said, I'm avoiding PVR technology from Scientific Atlanta like the plague. I wish Time Warner would cooperate with Tivo to create a unit that worked over the USB connection, or equivalent. The Time Warner PVR was a piece of junk!
I've got a Motorolla digital cable hdtv receiver from Mediacom Cable, attached to an HD-capable LCD projector. It works flawlessly. I had to get a component->VGA cable (not a scan or color converter though, the projector does YPbPr and all the HD scan modes), but other than that, no worries. So, looking at all this guy's troubles, I guess I'd have to say your mileage may vary dramatically.
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.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
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!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
You know that 16:9 can fit within 4:3 with no problem right? As long as the resolution is high enough on the display it doesn't matter. HD is 1080i or 720p at 16:9 - My (remember cheap) 800 x 600 4:3 DLP Projector is just a few pixels shy of HD at Progressive scan. Now when my projector poops out in a few years, I will then buy most likely a 1080p native Projector or something even higher (?) but the price will lower than today.
As for price, the current HD (16:9) projectors cost quite a bit more than the current run of the mille 4:3 computer projectors. Save your money and it 16:9 will still fit within the 4:3 frame. Best part is that nothing is preventing me from getting a HD turner and using it, my configuration is modular.
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.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
You can thank the CE folks for this. Everybody has the next greatest thing, and they want IP revenue for it. If you're sending bits, use a simple cable with the bandwidth to hold it. If you're sending analog, use RGB. It's amazing how easy it is to match the red, green, and blue RCA cables to their respectively color ports, just like everyone is used to with red and white audio, or yellow composite video. There's no magic here.
As for royally fucking up HD, you need only look at the multitude formats in the ATSC spec to figure out what the problem is. Amazingly, my $99 (1998 dolllars & tech) KDS 15" computer monitor can sync to 720p without a hiccup. But don't tell the TV manufacturers...they're certain that requiring progressive scan will cost hundreds of dollars extra per TV set.
Unfortunately, we've fallen into the "my solution is marginally better" trap, where each revision must be incorporated to stay current (i.e. video compression). The market is very bad at sorting out winners and losers in this game, because the stakes are so high ($5000 TVs) that many people will sit on the sidelines as long as possible, slowing adoption and preventing a winner from emerging in an efficient fashion.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It's amazing to me that they expect us to spend good money on such things and make them incredibly difficult to use. When I spend more money on something, I expect it to be better. With SD, I buy a TV set at best Buy and plug it into the cable. Done. With HDTV (judging by the posts here), I have to pay more for a crippled set-top box, and deal with problems with aspect ratio, crappy signals, I have to be a cable genious (wtf - RCA/RGB to D-sub 15?), many of my favorite channels/movies not being in HD, and deal with no audio control.
I don't see the average consumer, including myself, wishing to deal with this. As much as I would enjoy a clearer picture from my set, I have enough grief with my current SD system.
This guy seems a bit biased to me. I just got the same SA 8000HD box myself last week. Here are my thoughts...
First, he spent too much for his display. I got one of the new Mitsubishi 62725s and it was only $5000.00, and to be honest, I think it's much better looking than the Sony LCDs out there now. Mind you, this is coming from somebody that owns a lot of Sony hardware, and is quite happy with it.
Second, there are plenty of options when it comes to connections, and while he does say that it wasn't that big a deal, I still think he made too big a deal about it.
Now on to the quality. This is where I do tend to agree with him on some things. I too have seen some issues with the picture stopping for a second. It is a little disappointing at first, but it's never been more than a second. I have also seen some noise in the picture from time to time. I don't know if this is a problem with the signal of the fact that we're coming off the disk or what.
However, I'm very very happy with the picture quality on most of the stations. It looks awesome! It's true that some stations look better than others, but the overall quality of the picture is more than worth the money if you ask me.
I found myself giggling several times this weekend while watching football. The picture is unbelievable. I stayed up several nights watching IMAX type productions on "The Serengeti" and "Mystical Cities of Asia". Like I said, the football is amazing! I can't wait to go home and watch more!
One thing that sucks about Time Warner is that they don't have CBS HD available. At least where I'm at.
There are some good and bad things that's for sure. However, I don't think it's as bad as this guy leads you to believe. Overall, I give it a B+ experience thus far.
- Kevin
The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
It sounds to me like this guy made some good choices and some bad choices in picking his equipment, although anyone who'd spend $3500 on a Bose audio system shouldn't call himself an "ubergeek" (idiot, maybe, but not ubergeek).
I recently upgraded from a 32" CRT to a 50" plasma HDTV and have not had any of the issues he's had. My cable company (Comcast) uses Motorola DCT-6200 cable boxes, and is has DVI, Component, S-video, and composite outputs all active at the same time. It even has working firewire outputs for connection to a DVHS recorder.
Some points from his article:
1) I can't figure out why he's complaining about no volume control from the cable remote. All the cable box does is pass the digital sound bitstream through to the decoder. To implement a volume control, the cable box would have to decode the sound, adjust the levels, and re-encode before sending it to the decoder. Doesn't his Bose sound system have a volume control? If he doesn't want multiple remotes, he can buy a universal remote.
2) The box uses "gray letterboxing" to prevent screen burn-in.
3) His channel switching time seems excessive. My STB switches channels in well under a second, even when the display needs to switch aspect ratios. It's hard to tell from his description if this is primarily a cable box or a display problem, but I suspect the cable box.
My experience with HDTV couldn't have been more different than this guy's. Everything worked right the first time for me--the total setup time was only 2-3 hours, and this included drilling 1/2" holes in a solid brick wall to mount the plasma display. I get 6 local HTDV channels (including all of the networks), INHD, INHD2, Discovery HD Theater, ESPN, HBO, Showtime, and one or two more. Picture quality is fantastic on all of these. There are times, however, when I see digital compression artifacts, or dropouts on the HD channels, but these are rare.
Watching the CBS shows (CSI *, NCIS, JAG, etc.) in HD is really great. The widescreen picture and surround sound has to be seen and heard to be believed.
Some DVDs look better on the HD display, and some don't. You can really see who took the time to do a good job (Star Wars trilogy) and who didn't (Harry Potter movies) on the transfers. The good transfers are fantastic and the poor ones are almost unwatchable, but that's not the fault of the display.
So is HDTV for everyone? No. I certainly wouldn't expect someone like my mother to be able to install and us a HD setup as complicated as mine, but anyone reading Slashdot shouldn't have any problems with the technology.