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Do Detailed HDTV Listings Exist?
nick_davison asks: "Having finally made the move to HDTV, I've been getting up to speed on the usual debates about HDTV (is 720 rows/frame better than 1080 served every other frame, 540 at a time? Is 1080i meaningless if all your signals are 720, and thus 1080 is just having to resample your image? Is 1080i and 720p meaningless if the digital signals bitrate is so low it's garbage anyway? etc). Trying to form my own opinions, I went looking for TV listings that would at least show the resolution of the signal (1080i or 720p) and, ideally, though I guess less likely, the bit rate. What I ended up with was, if I was lucky, TV listings that differentiated HD and non HD shows on HD channels but nothing more. Do such listings exist? Is this something the TV companies deliberately hide? Is there any way to even piece together this information?"
Even though you write you "finally" switched to HD, you are still an early adopter. Early adopters almost always have the blues because they pay more to get less, but earlier. TV networks and other providers are still weighing how much of their bandwidth to use for what kind of digital broadcast. They can, I believe, divide their total bandwidth up however they like. Here (San Francisco) the Public TV station, KQED, is broadcasting five lower-bandwidth channels simultaneously, so each cannot be of the highest resolution.
But there are so few receivers/tuners in use that can make use of high-resolution (above 480i, I suspect) that such broadcasts are very hard to find, if they exist at all. And, of course, cable nor satellite carry true HD, the first startup all-digital network having already gone dark, IIRC. Following this logic, it is easy to see why newspapers and TV listings do not bother to mention the format of HD sources.
The market will determine the future -- within the limits set by the political/monopoliticial/economic games that are sure to be played as there is so much money potentially involved.
I know how you feel; I am impatient to set up a MythTV box; but I was impatient ten years ago for PVRs, and look how TiVOs have come down in price once the market discovered them (and humoungous hard disks became cheaper!)
Chill out and enjoy the lower-quality HD broadcasts and cablecasts that are currently available; you're way ahead of the game. You probly won't have to buy any video hardware for a long time to come....