The home theatre was already there. I had an HD-ready set, and a receiver. I also had my girlfriend's old gutted gateway PC just sitting around. I bought a MyHD MDP-100 HD tuner card (I got a used one for $120, but new is only $199 last time i looked).
The cheapest I could have managed the ability to tune HD would have been a $300 set-top box. That doesn't count the cost of adding recording ability, a digital scaling 1080i DVD player, or the ability to play games on the big screen. To be fair, the games required me to scrounge an old radeon and buy the $30 HD dongle from ATI. Nontheless-- the cheapest, bare-bones HD tuning solution was still more than DOUBLE the cost of sticking an HD card in a PC, and gaining both HD tuning and recording.
Still, there was absolutely no cheaper way to get HDTV into my system than the HTPC route. Not by a long shot.
If you don't have an old PC handy (it doesn't have to be much-- a hardware MPEG card does all the work) it will cost you more-- but I'd argue that you still won't find HD tuning, HD recording, and digital DVD scaling to 1080i for the cost of a cheap (or used) PC and an HD card.
Just barely. An HTPC really is a good deal, depending on what you're trying to do.
It depends entirely on what you want to do. Consider my situation-- I had an HD-ready set, and wanted an OTA tuner and the ability to record HD broadcasts digitally.
Like a lot of people around here, I had an old PC laying around doing nothing. I bought an HDTV tuner card for $120 (used, new would have been $199) and stuck it in. Now I can record 10 hours of HDTV, and tune my local stations. A standalone tuner box would have been a minimum of $300, and the ability to record (maybe with a digital VCR) would have been another $300.
The MyHD MDP-100 tuner card has the nice side effect of being able to play back DVDs, and upscale the output to 1080i or 720p digitally. And because it's a hardware MPEG card, it doesn't need much of a system to run it. A PIII and 128MB of PC100 is well more than it really needs.
It wasn't $700 or $200, though-- it was $120. Aesthetically, it fits entirely behind the TV, and the one case fan isn't too noisy. Because I only use it for 2 or 3 shows a week, it's off the rest of the time and noise is not an issue.
Down the road, I'll build a better system-- but heck, even at $700, it beats out a 1080i DVD player (or standalone scaler and normal DVD), OTA HD tuner, and HD recording solution price-wise. A $30 ATI dongle lets me play PC games on the big screen in HD, too, so add an XBox with a component kit to that list.
They really can be price-competitive with a lot of other things, and a good quiet case and heatsink with underclocked CPU can really give you some advantages you can't get without spending a TON of money to do it another way.
When the HD Tivo is $300, *then* I'll have something to switch to. (but it still won't do the games, DVD scaling, or archive the HD shows to Xvid or WM9-- so my HTPC will probably soldier on.)
I *am* lazy, but no, I didn't make it up. You can thank my spending too much time in the tivocommunity.com forums, where everybody types things like "standalone tivo" and "DirecTV DVR Powered By Tivo" so much that it kinda makes sense to abbreviate as "SA Tivo," "Dtivo," "DirecTivo," or "DirecTV Tivo".
I didn't notice any smirking about my mislabeling of the DirecTV DVR Powered by Tivo-- too hard too correct me on that one, too? Half-assed nitpicking, at best.
You want the ChannelMaster GainMaster triple-LNB dish. It's a direct replacement for the DirecTV Phase III tri-LNB dish, and will give you 65% more signal while only annoying your significant other 25% more than the normal dish.
This place has it available in a variety of packages with multiswitches and diplexers, etc...
I'd like a slightly larger dish to pad my signal a bit "just in case," although I have yet to lose my picture.
I've got the triple-LNB three-satellite dish from DirecTV-- is there any sort of third-party replacement for this? Or would I be stuck trying to convince my girlfriend that three 30" dishes really DO make the house look nice?
I fiddled with that on my old series 1, but MAN did it eat the disk space. Still, it's doable. And I think some of the DVD-burner/SA Tivo combo units do this already with their high-quality modes.
You can use a normal standalone tivo with any source. A dedicated satellite tivo (currently) has several advantages over using an SA tivo for satellite, though:
1. No need for any sort of control cable or "IR blaster" or serial connection to make your standalone tivo control your cable or satellite tuner box.
2. Two built-in tuners. Record two shows at the same time, while watching a third that you've already recorded. This is freaking fantastic, and I hope we start seeing 2-tuner SA tivos as well.
3. Pure digital recording. With a DirecTivo, it records the digital stream straight off the satellite. If you use an SA tivo and a satellite tuner box, the stream gets decoded by the satellite box and then re-encoded to mpeg by the tivo. You'll see quality loss.
Anyway, just wanted to lay it all out. An SA tivo works with everything, and is truly in its element with analog cable. A DTivo is fantastic and has several advantages, but is can't be used for anything but DirecTV.
I've had my dish for six months now. We get severe thunderstorms, and the dish is currently covered in snow. I'd say it's about 2 inches worth of ice and snow, covering the dish and the feedhorn.
I haven't lost signal yet. Ever.
I did, however, lose my Comcast cable service roughly a dozen times over the two years I had it, once for two weeks. (And it took my internet access with it.)
There's still time for DirecTV to catch up to Comcast's level of shit, but so far it's been fantastic.
And there's no beating a $50 all-digital tivo with two tuners. Solved all of the "whose recording gets priority" arguments with my girlfriend, and we can record two things while watching a third prerecorded show.
My only warnings: Make sure your installer does it right-- he needs to ground the lines. And don't let him drill through your shingles. That's just retarded. Your mileage will vary greatly on the quality of installer you get.
I would say we're not even close to the "tiny return for huge effort" point. Game designers do a fantastic job of hiding our current limitations, though-- we just never see the stuff our systems can't handle. When was the last time you saw a forest scene that looked like a real forest? No, not a meadow with a handful of trees that's mostly just flat grass-- a *forest*, with hundreds of thousands of plants in view anywhere you turn.
We need approximately a gajillion more polygons before we've got good representations of natural stuff. Buildings and open fields (deserts, etc...) look good now, but they're not the whole world. Heck, most systems couldn't handle a representation of the handful of (old, large) trees in my yard that didn't cop out on the branches and leaves.
Seriously. This is a case of video games being guilty by association. The kid's DVT was caused by sitting, not by video games. People get this on long airplane flights on a regular basis. Reason? Not the flying-- it's the *sitting*.
Oh well. Blaming it on the playstation makes a catchier headline.
It's Dreamworks. Just goes to show how hardcore the association between "Good CG Movies" and "Pixar" is. Anytime somebody else makes one, people just assume it was Pixar.
Yeah, no doubt. I was inches from an excellent deal on a "Cannon Elf APS Camera" 6 years ago, before I changed my mind and decided to wait for digital. Two mistakes for the price of one! Guess the secret's out now.
Especially since slashdot will repeat this tomorrow for anybody who missed it.;)
An exellent point. Although DNS still has to have a "root," and is by nature centralized-- there can still be plenty of redundancy. Centralization doesn't necessarily mean "reliance on a single box."
That's absolutely right-- I saw a DVD version of the original Metropolis, taken from the old black-and-white film, and it was without a doubt the worst dvd i have ever seen in quality terms. The film noise (pops, scratches, flickering between frames, etc...) was so enormous and so full-screen that there just wasn't enough bandwidth to display it well. As a result, it was like watching realvideo on a 56k modem. Blocks, blocks, blocks, as far as the eye could see.
I'm surprised I didn't see this mentioned above-- maybe I just overlooked it.
Anyway, although the "official" clients have been dead or dying for some time, verichat is alive and ticking. It's a multi-IM client, similar to Trillian. You do have to pay for it, but it was something like $30, so no big deal. Works with MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, AIM, and IRC, and the fee includes access to verichat's proxy server, which keeps you logged-in, online, and stores messages for you when your phone goes out of service.
If you're in the app, it's just like using an IM client, if the app is closed (because PalmOS is not really big on multitasking) IMs come in as SMS messages from the proxy server, and the verichat app captures them. I use it daily on my Treo 600.
DirecTV Tivos don't have to worry about any of this stuff. Currently, they're a major version behind in software, don't support HMO, and have their USB ports (which is where you'd plug a network adapter) disabled.
DirecTV is PARANOID that opening up their tivos like all the rest of them is going to result in rampant digital copying, and networks packing up and leaving.
So you're not missing out on anything-- DirecTV won't have it anyway. Just the standalone tivos.
They could cache the site, but initally point the links to the real site. When the site realizes they're flooded and sees all the slashdot.org referrals, they can phone in to slashdot and say "hey, could you turn on your cached version?" This way, the caching is only done when requested by the site and there are no permission problems.
In any event, it benefits nobody for there to be articles posted that can't be read. Not slashdot, not the readers, not the site, not the site's advertisers. I do wish they'd pick SOME sort of solution for this.
There's half a dozen options available with just a minute's thought about it:
1. Cache like google. Remove when asked. 2. Cache, but don't use cache unless asked by site. 3. Wait to post article until permission to cache is granted by tiny web site. 4. Post article without tiny website links pending permission to cache, add links after permission. 5. Post article with links to tiny website immediately, but continue attempting to obtain permission to cache and use cache after permission obtained. 6. Cache in advance, but do not use. Only post cache link *if* original site fails. Remove cache if asked.
While every revolutionary theroy may come from somebody regarded as a crackpot, ALL the crackpot theories come from crackpots, too.
And I suspect the ratio is something more like 10000 to 1 for the "real crackpot" to "misunderstood revolutionary" ratio.
So remember-- while the occasional nutty theory turns out to be the new revolution, the truth of the matter is that most nutty theories are just nutty theories. Even if this is the ONLY way we get revolutionary theories, it doesn't change the fact that most of the time, the crackpots are crackpots. Give it time to sort itself out. If the theory proves viable, it will be shown over the next few decades.
You're right, you're just not looking hard enough. Or maybe you went to the nasa link, where they're not so well arranged. The little images ARE the ones that were assembled into a panorama. The link to the guy's site has them all organized into stereo pairs (I assume they just used all left or all right to make the pan).
The pairs are arranged like this:
(Right Cam) (Left Cam) (Right Cam) (red/blue)
You can cross your eyes and look at the first two, or use cardboard tubes and look at the second two, or use red/blue glasses and look at the fourth.
Even the "color" cameras are black and white. They have nifty color wheels that rotate over them, and the unit takes pictures in succession to get the red, green, blue, IR, and several other shades i'm nor sure of.
Why do they do it this way? With the exception of the relatively new Foveon CCDs, "color" digital still and video cameras work in one of two ways-- 3 CCDs and a prism that splits the colors off to each CCD, or 1 CCD that has a grid of R, G, or B pixels arranged in blocks like this:
RG GB
Note that this means your true full-color resolution is about 1/4 the advertised value (yes, your 4 megapixel digicam actually has 1MP red, 1MP blue, and 2MP green). Most digicams (except the Foveon CCDs and 3CCD video cameras) work this way, and use neighboring values to calculate the full RGB value at each pixel.
Using a single CCD and color filters gets you the accuracy of a 3CCD camera minus the weight and power consumption of two extra CCDs and a prism. It has the disadvantage of not being so good for fast action shots in color. Fortunately, those rocks are sitting pretty still. If something fast should happen, and the camera happens to catch it, we will still have a nice sharp B&W image of it.
Actually, cheating on consoles is a bit of a mixed bag. If someone DOES find a cheat, the unchangeable hardware and software make the cheat unstoppable. SOCOM for the PS2 is a prime example of this-- the game has been ruined for online play by rampant cheating. And there's no way to issue a patch to fix it.
That "fixed platform" is both a blessing and a curse-- if the software/hardware isn't perfect, you've got cheats set in stone.
Don't sign up for online bill payment through the individual companies. That way you don't have much control, and it would be a huge fight if their records were incorrect.
I use firstib.com, and they've been fantastic. They are set up to receive e-bills from anybody set up to do that, which turned out to be something like 3/4 of all my bills. The bills show up, and I get a notification, and go in and manually pay them. (You can set it up automatically, but I prefer to do it myself)
This way, if a company fudges a bill, or charges you a late fee incorrectly, or loses a payment, the bank has records and staff to deal with it. I have had all three of those problems, and firstib has resolved them all for me with just a quick note.
Lean on your bank. They give you a hedge and a "paper trail" against screwups by the companies billing you.
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The home theatre was already there. I had an HD-ready set, and a receiver. I also had my girlfriend's old gutted gateway PC just sitting around. I bought a MyHD MDP-100 HD tuner card (I got a used one for $120, but new is only $199 last time i looked).
The cheapest I could have managed the ability to tune HD would have been a $300 set-top box. That doesn't count the cost of adding recording ability, a digital scaling 1080i DVD player, or the ability to play games on the big screen. To be fair, the games required me to scrounge an old radeon and buy the $30 HD dongle from ATI. Nontheless-- the cheapest, bare-bones HD tuning solution was still more than DOUBLE the cost of sticking an HD card in a PC, and gaining both HD tuning and recording.
Still, there was absolutely no cheaper way to get HDTV into my system than the HTPC route. Not by a long shot.
If you don't have an old PC handy (it doesn't have to be much-- a hardware MPEG card does all the work) it will cost you more-- but I'd argue that you still won't find HD tuning, HD recording, and digital DVD scaling to 1080i for the cost of a cheap (or used) PC and an HD card.
Just barely. An HTPC really is a good deal, depending on what you're trying to do.
It depends entirely on what you want to do. Consider my situation-- I had an HD-ready set, and wanted an OTA tuner and the ability to record HD broadcasts digitally.
Like a lot of people around here, I had an old PC laying around doing nothing. I bought an HDTV tuner card for $120 (used, new would have been $199) and stuck it in. Now I can record 10 hours of HDTV, and tune my local stations. A standalone tuner box would have been a minimum of $300, and the ability to record (maybe with a digital VCR) would have been another $300.
The MyHD MDP-100 tuner card has the nice side effect of being able to play back DVDs, and upscale the output to 1080i or 720p digitally. And because it's a hardware MPEG card, it doesn't need much of a system to run it. A PIII and 128MB of PC100 is well more than it really needs.
It wasn't $700 or $200, though-- it was $120. Aesthetically, it fits entirely behind the TV, and the one case fan isn't too noisy. Because I only use it for 2 or 3 shows a week, it's off the rest of the time and noise is not an issue.
Down the road, I'll build a better system-- but heck, even at $700, it beats out a 1080i DVD player (or standalone scaler and normal DVD), OTA HD tuner, and HD recording solution price-wise. A $30 ATI dongle lets me play PC games on the big screen in HD, too, so add an XBox with a component kit to that list.
They really can be price-competitive with a lot of other things, and a good quiet case and heatsink with underclocked CPU can really give you some advantages you can't get without spending a TON of money to do it another way.
When the HD Tivo is $300, *then* I'll have something to switch to. (but it still won't do the games, DVD scaling, or archive the HD shows to Xvid or WM9-- so my HTPC will probably soldier on.)
Hilarious.
I *am* lazy, but no, I didn't make it up. You can thank my spending too much time in the tivocommunity.com forums, where everybody types things like "standalone tivo" and "DirecTV DVR Powered By Tivo" so much that it kinda makes sense to abbreviate as "SA Tivo," "Dtivo," "DirecTivo," or "DirecTV Tivo".
I didn't notice any smirking about my mislabeling of the DirecTV DVR Powered by Tivo-- too hard too correct me on that one, too? Half-assed nitpicking, at best.
You want the ChannelMaster GainMaster triple-LNB dish. It's a direct replacement for the DirecTV Phase III tri-LNB dish, and will give you 65% more signal while only annoying your significant other 25% more than the normal dish.
This place has it available in a variety of packages with multiswitches and diplexers, etc...
I'd like a slightly larger dish to pad my signal a bit "just in case," although I have yet to lose my picture.
I've got the triple-LNB three-satellite dish from DirecTV-- is there any sort of third-party replacement for this? Or would I be stuck trying to convince my girlfriend that three 30" dishes really DO make the house look nice?
I fiddled with that on my old series 1, but MAN did it eat the disk space. Still, it's doable. And I think some of the DVD-burner/SA Tivo combo units do this already with their high-quality modes.
You can use a normal standalone tivo with any source. A dedicated satellite tivo (currently) has several advantages over using an SA tivo for satellite, though:
1. No need for any sort of control cable or "IR blaster" or serial connection to make your standalone tivo control your cable or satellite tuner box.
2. Two built-in tuners. Record two shows at the same time, while watching a third that you've already recorded. This is freaking fantastic, and I hope we start seeing 2-tuner SA tivos as well.
3. Pure digital recording. With a DirecTivo, it records the digital stream straight off the satellite. If you use an SA tivo and a satellite tuner box, the stream gets decoded by the satellite box and then re-encoded to mpeg by the tivo. You'll see quality loss.
Anyway, just wanted to lay it all out. An SA tivo works with everything, and is truly in its element with analog cable. A DTivo is fantastic and has several advantages, but is can't be used for anything but DirecTV.
I've had my dish for six months now. We get severe thunderstorms, and the dish is currently covered in snow. I'd say it's about 2 inches worth of ice and snow, covering the dish and the feedhorn.
I haven't lost signal yet. Ever.
I did, however, lose my Comcast cable service roughly a dozen times over the two years I had it, once for two weeks. (And it took my internet access with it.)
There's still time for DirecTV to catch up to Comcast's level of shit, but so far it's been fantastic.
And there's no beating a $50 all-digital tivo with two tuners. Solved all of the "whose recording gets priority" arguments with my girlfriend, and we can record two things while watching a third prerecorded show.
My only warnings: Make sure your installer does it right-- he needs to ground the lines. And don't let him drill through your shingles. That's just retarded. Your mileage will vary greatly on the quality of installer you get.
I would say we're not even close to the "tiny return for huge effort" point. Game designers do a fantastic job of hiding our current limitations, though-- we just never see the stuff our systems can't handle. When was the last time you saw a forest scene that looked like a real forest? No, not a meadow with a handful of trees that's mostly just flat grass-- a *forest*, with hundreds of thousands of plants in view anywhere you turn.
We need approximately a gajillion more polygons before we've got good representations of natural stuff. Buildings and open fields (deserts, etc...) look good now, but they're not the whole world. Heck, most systems couldn't handle a representation of the handful of (old, large) trees in my yard that didn't cop out on the branches and leaves.
You sure that's not just a stock photo? I don't think they ever mention what console the kid was using. Or I'm just missing it.
Seriously. This is a case of video games being guilty by association. The kid's DVT was caused by sitting, not by video games. People get this on long airplane flights on a regular basis. Reason? Not the flying-- it's the *sitting*.
Oh well. Blaming it on the playstation makes a catchier headline.
It's Dreamworks. Just goes to show how hardcore the association between "Good CG Movies" and "Pixar" is. Anytime somebody else makes one, people just assume it was Pixar.
Yeah, no doubt. I was inches from an excellent deal on a "Cannon Elf APS Camera" 6 years ago, before I changed my mind and decided to wait for digital. Two mistakes for the price of one! Guess the secret's out now.
;)
Especially since slashdot will repeat this tomorrow for anybody who missed it.
An exellent point. Although DNS still has to have a "root," and is by nature centralized-- there can still be plenty of redundancy. Centralization doesn't necessarily mean "reliance on a single box."
Thanks for the clarification!!
The internet is somewhat decentralized, although I understand that some backbone consolidation over the years has left us with some weak spots.
DNS, however, is pretty centralized.
That's absolutely right-- I saw a DVD version of the original Metropolis, taken from the old black-and-white film, and it was without a doubt the worst dvd i have ever seen in quality terms. The film noise (pops, scratches, flickering between frames, etc...) was so enormous and so full-screen that there just wasn't enough bandwidth to display it well. As a result, it was like watching realvideo on a 56k modem. Blocks, blocks, blocks, as far as the eye could see.
I'm surprised I didn't see this mentioned above-- maybe I just overlooked it.
Anyway, although the "official" clients have been dead or dying for some time, verichat is alive and ticking. It's a multi-IM client, similar to Trillian. You do have to pay for it, but it was something like $30, so no big deal. Works with MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, AIM, and IRC, and the fee includes access to verichat's proxy server, which keeps you logged-in, online, and stores messages for you when your phone goes out of service.
If you're in the app, it's just like using an IM client, if the app is closed (because PalmOS is not really big on multitasking) IMs come in as SMS messages from the proxy server, and the verichat app captures them. I use it daily on my Treo 600.
DirecTV Tivos don't have to worry about any of this stuff. Currently, they're a major version behind in software, don't support HMO, and have their USB ports (which is where you'd plug a network adapter) disabled.
DirecTV is PARANOID that opening up their tivos like all the rest of them is going to result in rampant digital copying, and networks packing up and leaving.
So you're not missing out on anything-- DirecTV won't have it anyway. Just the standalone tivos.
They could cache the site, but initally point the links to the real site. When the site realizes they're flooded and sees all the slashdot.org referrals, they can phone in to slashdot and say "hey, could you turn on your cached version?" This way, the caching is only done when requested by the site and there are no permission problems.
In any event, it benefits nobody for there to be articles posted that can't be read. Not slashdot, not the readers, not the site, not the site's advertisers. I do wish they'd pick SOME sort of solution for this.
There's half a dozen options available with just a minute's thought about it:
1. Cache like google. Remove when asked.
2. Cache, but don't use cache unless asked by site.
3. Wait to post article until permission to cache is granted by tiny web site.
4. Post article without tiny website links pending permission to cache, add links after permission.
5. Post article with links to tiny website immediately, but continue attempting to obtain permission to cache and use cache after permission obtained.
6. Cache in advance, but do not use. Only post cache link *if* original site fails. Remove cache if asked.
Etc....
Oh well... we can dream, right?
While every revolutionary theroy may come from somebody regarded as a crackpot, ALL the crackpot theories come from crackpots, too.
And I suspect the ratio is something more like 10000 to 1 for the "real crackpot" to "misunderstood revolutionary" ratio.
So remember-- while the occasional nutty theory turns out to be the new revolution, the truth of the matter is that most nutty theories are just nutty theories. Even if this is the ONLY way we get revolutionary theories, it doesn't change the fact that most of the time, the crackpots are crackpots. Give it time to sort itself out. If the theory proves viable, it will be shown over the next few decades.
Just AAC2AAC? Only without the copy protection. That way we keep our compression loss to one generation.
You're right, you're just not looking hard enough. Or maybe you went to the nasa link, where they're not so well arranged. The little images ARE the ones that were assembled into a panorama. The link to the guy's site has them all organized into stereo pairs (I assume they just used all left or all right to make the pan).
The pairs are arranged like this:
(Right Cam) (Left Cam) (Right Cam) (red/blue)
You can cross your eyes and look at the first two, or use cardboard tubes and look at the second two, or use red/blue glasses and look at the fourth.
Even the "color" cameras are black and white. They have nifty color wheels that rotate over them, and the unit takes pictures in succession to get the red, green, blue, IR, and several other shades i'm nor sure of.
Why do they do it this way? With the exception of the relatively new Foveon CCDs, "color" digital still and video cameras work in one of two ways-- 3 CCDs and a prism that splits the colors off to each CCD, or 1 CCD that has a grid of R, G, or B pixels arranged in blocks like this:
RG
GB
Note that this means your true full-color resolution is about 1/4 the advertised value (yes, your 4 megapixel digicam actually has 1MP red, 1MP blue, and 2MP green). Most digicams (except the Foveon CCDs and 3CCD video cameras) work this way, and use neighboring values to calculate the full RGB value at each pixel.
Using a single CCD and color filters gets you the accuracy of a 3CCD camera minus the weight and power consumption of two extra CCDs and a prism. It has the disadvantage of not being so good for fast action shots in color. Fortunately, those rocks are sitting pretty still. If something fast should happen, and the camera happens to catch it, we will still have a nice sharp B&W image of it.
Actually, cheating on consoles is a bit of a mixed bag. If someone DOES find a cheat, the unchangeable hardware and software make the cheat unstoppable. SOCOM for the PS2 is a prime example of this-- the game has been ruined for online play by rampant cheating. And there's no way to issue a patch to fix it.
That "fixed platform" is both a blessing and a curse-- if the software/hardware isn't perfect, you've got cheats set in stone.
Don't sign up for online bill payment through the individual companies. That way you don't have much control, and it would be a huge fight if their records were incorrect.
I use firstib.com, and they've been fantastic. They are set up to receive e-bills from anybody set up to do that, which turned out to be something like 3/4 of all my bills. The bills show up, and I get a notification, and go in and manually pay them. (You can set it up automatically, but I prefer to do it myself)
This way, if a company fudges a bill, or charges you a late fee incorrectly, or loses a payment, the bank has records and staff to deal with it. I have had all three of those problems, and firstib has resolved them all for me with just a quick note.
Lean on your bank. They give you a hedge and a "paper trail" against screwups by the companies billing you.