Seriously, If there is so little room in the house that you NEED flat panel, then you probably won't be able to sit far enough from the screen that you need anything larger than 36".
720p HDTV has 4x the resolution of (the effective resolution of) NTSC. Thus, the ideal ratio of viewer distance to screen size is halved.
If you like to sit 8' from your 27" NTSC TV, you'll want to either sit 4' from your 27" HDTV, or get a 54" HDTV and put it in the same place.
Putting a 27" HDTV in the same spot as your old 27" TV is a waste of money. The picture will look noticably clearer, but you'll be missing most of the added detail. Pixeated pictures look crappy, so people general put their TVs far enough away that the percieved resolution is limited by the eye, not the TV.
Or better yet, the digital TV mandate shouldn't specify a resolution at all. Broadcasters should be allowed to use their alloted bandwidth for either multiple standard def channels or for fewer higher def channels.
Of course, that is what the mandate specifies, so I'm not going to get too bent out of shape over it,
Re:Tivo has always been on my todo list
on
Can TiVo be Saved?
·
· Score: 1
You're going to have to spend another $25 or more to get the rest of that capture card, plus another $75 and a lot of hassle for a video card if you want to connect your PVR to a tv(as most people do).
Oh, and good luck watching DVDs with that CD-Rom drive.
This is an essential feature for sports fans in particular. For example, if I want to record every Cubs game or I make wishlists for "Chicago Cubs" and am done with it. My TiVO will now record such disparate programs as "Dodgers vs. Cubs" at 1:20pm Thursday on WGN and "Wednesday Night Baseball: Chicago Cubs at Houston Astros" at 8:00pm Wednesday on ESPN.
and DirecTV will be offering a set-top box AND DVR as a combined package
I paid $100 for 2 new DirecTiVo units in the spring of 2002. This is not new technology.
Comcast offers both "On Demand" branded video-on-demand and an integrated DVR/Digital cable box.
The On Demand service is mostly useless unless you subscribe to premium channels, but it is pretty cool if you have HBO. Otherwise the content consists largely of glorified onfomercials and pay per view movies.
Comcast also has DVR settop boxes available for an additional monthly fee. These function more or less like a TiVo, and are certainly no cheaper than many TiVo configurations.
For example, where I live Comcasts "Digital Plus" package is $63.50 monthly and a DVR box is an extra $15.00/month for a total of $78.50/month. I currently subscribe to an similar package with DirecTV/TiVo for a total of $47/month ($42 for programming + $5 for TiVo).
I know one guy at work who charges his Prius from current off his roof and hardly pays anything for electricity.
A Prius is a gas electric hybrid. It charges itself.
And experimental hardware is very cheap and accessible to design and produce, even in limited quantities.
If by "cheap" you mean "very expensive relative to other computer peripherals," then yes, it is cheap.
If I had $150 to spend on a computer related toy, some new fangled wonky keyboard would be pretty damn far down the list.
Phone numbers (In the US, at least) are limited to
10 digits because research shows the average person can only memorize 10 digits,
Phone numbers were limited to 7 digits so people could remember them. Our phones remember them for us now.
Yeah, good luck time shifting TV with your mac mini.
Sure, you could add a decent amount of external storage ($150), wireless networking ($79) , a DVD burner ($100), a TV Tuner ($200) and a PS2 ($150) to your Mac mini to turn it into a multimedia center, but a) it will no longer be small and b) it will cost $1200.
I have an iPod and I occasionally buy songs from iTMS, but I also subscribe to Rhapsody, and I love it (well, except for the Windows Media Player dependancy).
For $9.99/month I can listen to as much new music as I want (the catalogs of these services, iTMS included, skew heavily towards new music).
There is a lot of music out there that I want to here, but much less music that I want to hear twice. Using Rhapsody, I can screen out the 90% songs that I am not interested in.
Then, depending how rich/lazy/extralegal I am feeling, I can either purchase the music I actually like from iTMS, rip the stream from Rhapsody, or find a torrent of the album I'm looking for.
Whichever method I use to obtain a permanent copy of the music, I don't waste time or money on music I don't want. I find the $10/month to be well worth it, becasue at the end of the day I have a better music collection because of it.
That said, there are drawbacks. The software is Windows only, and there is no way to integrate your music collection with the player.
Will I only be able to watch the HDTV content on an HDTV capable monitor?
Unless you can watch it on HDTV incapable monitor, in which case said monitor would be...HDTV capable!
To seriously answer your question, if you have a monitor that can do 1280x1024, you have an HDTV ready monitor.
It can only play all ready encoded video, which is much different than only being able to watch already-recorded shows. You can watch (and pause) live TV over 802.11* if you have a linux backend, which is a pretty cool.
I actually just installed a Mythtv front end port on my wifes iBook last night. I'd provide a link, but they appear to have been/.ed already.
If you put Schumacher in a perfect two-year old car and the rest of the field in current cars, I doubt he'd manage a win a single race. The cars improve enough each season that you must have both the car and the driver.
This is absolutely correct. THe 5th and 6th place qualifiers were routinely qualifying at the previous year's pole time this year.
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A brief R of TFA would reveal to you that Dell is not and has never been in the business of procucing plasma TVs.
Hell, they don't even make computers, what would make you think they have suddenly decided to open a plasma factory?
If its a CRT projection, sure, but not if it is DLP or LCD.
720p HDTV has 4x the resolution of (the effective resolution of) NTSC. Thus, the ideal ratio of viewer distance to screen size is halved.
If you like to sit 8' from your 27" NTSC TV, you'll want to either sit 4' from your 27" HDTV, or get a 54" HDTV and put it in the same place.
Putting a 27" HDTV in the same spot as your old 27" TV is a waste of money. The picture will look noticably clearer, but you'll be missing most of the added detail. Pixeated pictures look crappy, so people general put their TVs far enough away that the percieved resolution is limited by the eye, not the TV.
Sorry for the omission, but in the name of full disclosure, I will add that my father works for TI.
Three words...
dee ell pee
1280 vertical lines * 720 horizontal lines * 20 bit color * 30 frames / 1 sec
=
552,960,000 bits / sec
That's how they prevent recording.
Yeah, that was my point.
I should have just said that instead of trying to be cute.
The rampant adoption of PVRs? They are attatched to what, 5% of TV's in the country?
Or better yet, the digital TV mandate shouldn't specify a resolution at all. Broadcasters should be allowed to use their alloted bandwidth for either multiple standard def channels or for fewer higher def channels. Of course, that is what the mandate specifies, so I'm not going to get too bent out of shape over it,
You're going to have to spend another $25 or more to get the rest of that capture card, plus another $75 and a lot of hassle for a video card if you want to connect your PVR to a tv(as most people do). Oh, and good luck watching DVDs with that CD-Rom drive.
This is an essential feature for sports fans in particular. For example, if I want to record every Cubs game or I make wishlists for "Chicago Cubs" and am done with it. My TiVO will now record such disparate programs as "Dodgers vs. Cubs" at 1:20pm Thursday on WGN and "Wednesday Night Baseball: Chicago Cubs at Houston Astros" at 8:00pm Wednesday on ESPN.
and DirecTV will be offering a set-top box AND DVR as a combined package I paid $100 for 2 new DirecTiVo units in the spring of 2002. This is not new technology.
While the idea of automatically removing commercials is a good one, this suggested implementation is just dumb.
The verb "tivo" is firmly established in the American lexicon. I'd hardly call that a failure of marketing.
Tivo's financial problems can all be directly traced back to thei strategy of, "sell the unit at a loss, make it up on volume."
TiVo puts nice software on top of their commodity hardware platform, but they haven't done anything significant to put them ahead of the imitators.
Comcast offers both "On Demand" branded video-on-demand and an integrated DVR/Digital cable box. The On Demand service is mostly useless unless you subscribe to premium channels, but it is pretty cool if you have HBO. Otherwise the content consists largely of glorified onfomercials and pay per view movies. Comcast also has DVR settop boxes available for an additional monthly fee. These function more or less like a TiVo, and are certainly no cheaper than many TiVo configurations. For example, where I live Comcasts "Digital Plus" package is $63.50 monthly and a DVR box is an extra $15.00/month for a total of $78.50/month. I currently subscribe to an similar package with DirecTV/TiVo for a total of $47/month ($42 for programming + $5 for TiVo).
I know one guy at work who charges his Prius from current off his roof and hardly pays anything for electricity. A Prius is a gas electric hybrid. It charges itself.
My PS2 steering wheel took 2-3 seconds off my GT3 lap times.
/., I would be all over it.
More importantly, it helped me suspend disbelief when I was pretending to drive a car on my TV.
If a controller shaped keyboard could help me suspend disbelief while I try to make interesting points on
And experimental hardware is very cheap and accessible to design and produce, even in limited quantities.
If by "cheap" you mean "very expensive relative to other computer peripherals," then yes, it is cheap.
If I had $150 to spend on a computer related toy, some new fangled wonky keyboard would be pretty damn far down the list.
Phone numbers (In the US, at least) are limited to 10 digits because research shows the average person can only memorize 10 digits,
Phone numbers were limited to 7 digits so people could remember them. Our phones remember them for us now.
Yeah, good luck time shifting TV with your mac mini.
Sure, you could add a decent amount of external storage ($150), wireless networking ($79) , a DVD burner ($100), a TV Tuner ($200) and a PS2 ($150) to your Mac mini to turn it into a multimedia center, but a) it will no longer be small and b) it will cost $1200.
You can record a song off of Napster at least as easily as you can record a show off HBO. Open your sound recorder, hit record, hit play in Napster.
I have an iPod and I occasionally buy songs from iTMS, but I also subscribe to Rhapsody, and I love it (well, except for the Windows Media Player dependancy). For $9.99/month I can listen to as much new music as I want (the catalogs of these services, iTMS included, skew heavily towards new music). There is a lot of music out there that I want to here, but much less music that I want to hear twice. Using Rhapsody, I can screen out the 90% songs that I am not interested in. Then, depending how rich/lazy/extralegal I am feeling, I can either purchase the music I actually like from iTMS, rip the stream from Rhapsody, or find a torrent of the album I'm looking for. Whichever method I use to obtain a permanent copy of the music, I don't waste time or money on music I don't want. I find the $10/month to be well worth it, becasue at the end of the day I have a better music collection because of it. That said, there are drawbacks. The software is Windows only, and there is no way to integrate your music collection with the player.
Will I only be able to watch the HDTV content on an HDTV capable monitor? Unless you can watch it on HDTV incapable monitor, in which case said monitor would be...HDTV capable! To seriously answer your question, if you have a monitor that can do 1280x1024, you have an HDTV ready monitor.
It can only play all ready encoded video, which is much different than only being able to watch already-recorded shows. You can watch (and pause) live TV over 802.11* if you have a linux backend, which is a pretty cool. I actually just installed a Mythtv front end port on my wifes iBook last night. I'd provide a link, but they appear to have been /.ed already.
If you put Schumacher in a perfect two-year old car and the rest of the field in current cars, I doubt he'd manage a win a single race. The cars improve enough each season that you must have both the car and the driver. This is absolutely correct. THe 5th and 6th place qualifiers were routinely qualifying at the previous year's pole time this year.