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  #16  
Old 05-14-2007, 05:38 PM
reggaenaut reggaenaut is offline
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In this part of the city satellite sucks. A little rain and no picture. The cable service is much more reliable. However the telephone service Verizon is coming with a much superior delivery FIOS: fiberoptics straight to your bedroom. I have seen it in the neighboring areas and it is awesome. The cable people dread FIOS.
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  #17  
Old 05-14-2007, 05:39 PM
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Comcast

I have 3 sets and a HDVR in daily use and only one digital HD box. This will not make me happy. The 70 analog channels with no box is the big reason I have Comcast in this house. I do have Dish in home #2 but only have 2 boxes feeding 4 sets and a VCR and that works out ok. I just recently saw an X-10 for a rebroadcast system to send 1 box anywhere in the house. I see a way to have just the HD box and one regular box that will send it's RF out to the other tv's in the house using the existing coax.
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  #18  
Old 05-15-2007, 05:18 PM
frenchy frenchy is offline
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So what available options are there as far as convertor boxes from digital to analog, if you wanted to stay with Comcast but didn't want to have to pay them a ridiculous $7 a month for their box?
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  #19  
Old 05-15-2007, 05:19 PM
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AS I see it the big issue here is not Analog vs Digital, but the Bandwidth. The satelite and cable providers all want to provide more bang for the buck on existing available bandwidth.

I understand the conversion from analog to digital. However the real issue is the amount of compression beng used. The more the head end compresses, the lousier the picture becomes, but the tradeoff is that the cable provider is able to offer more chanels int he same amount of bandwidth.

Moving to digital is a good thing, but too much compression for the sake of craming an unrealistic number of chanels into a given bandwidth, is a bad thing.

I have an old style 10 foot c-band dish. The picture quality generally much better than the little dishes (Dish and DirectTv). However depending on what chanel I am watching, I may have low amounts of compression or high amounts. Last night I watched a movie tha was so badly compressed that the images were wavering and out of phase not to mention the poor resolution. It was a digital signal, but so highly compressed that the picture quality sucked big time. By the same token, I get the primary signal of Discovery HD theater, and that picture is second to none.

Over the air network digital transmitions from the major networks can be fantastic. Many of the prime time shows, and sporting events are now in HD. Tonight Show is great every night. Golf on tv is unbelievable, when the shots are done from a stationery HD camera, but the hand held cameras used by the camera men that walk around usually are of much poorer quality. HD is stil in its early stages. Just because you are watching a "HD" transmission dosent mean your will halways have a HD quality picture.

And of course Digital does not mean HD in any way, shape or form.

But back to my big dish. I get hundreds of chanels, both east coast and west coast feeds. I subscribe to all the premium chanels, HBO, Showtime, Stars, Cinemax, The Move Chanel, Flix, Sundance, Encore etc, and dozens of the usual basic package chanels that you normally expect on your cable or small dish. The difference is that my cost is about %30 less than cable or the small dish.

My annual subrscription is only about $750 (62.50/month) Warner cable wanted over $95/month for the same amount of programming. For me, at least, this ist he best way to get my television. There are some inconveniences, like being able to only watch this on 1 set at a time, but for our home that works very well.
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  #20  
Old 05-15-2007, 08:57 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Duffinator
Why wait? Do it now, you won't be disappointed.
Because I have 7 Televisions in the house and I hate those set-top boxes and having to rent them from the cable company. Only one of those TVs is HD and we rarely turn on the digital cable box to watch. If there is a ballgame or something on one of the basic HD channels we may turn it on, otherwise we watch the standard extended basic channels (networks, FOX, CNN occasionally, the Discovery channel, the History channel, and the Weather channel). The other 6 TVs are mostly for short duration convenience watching as opposed to sitting down and watching for several hours at a time. Having the ability to surf by simply using the Televisions tuner is more desirable to me than having to look through a directory to choose which program to watch. Sometimes surfing produces a surprise or two that is worthwhile. It is slow and difficult to surf with a set top box.

That's a long answer to a short question. The short answer is that I don't like to be forced to rent and use set-top converter boxes.
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  #21  
Old 05-15-2007, 10:09 PM
3Guncolor 3Guncolor is offline
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Cablecard's will be big in a few years. All those boxes end up costing a lot of money for the cable operator.
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  #22  
Old 05-15-2007, 11:04 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ultra-Hog
Because I have 7 Televisions in the house and I hate those set-top boxes and having to rent them from the cable company.
<snip>
That's a long answer to a short question. The short answer is that I don't like to be forced to rent and use set-top converter boxes.
Thats the spirit!!!!

Quote:
Originally Posted by 3Guncolor
Cablecard's will be big in a few years. All those boxes end up costing a lot of money for the cable operator.
We can only hope that they don't come up with some cockamamie copyrighted encryption....

BUT I wanna see them go DOWN......

I DID to my GREAT delight, years ago, witness the "death rattle" and final auctioning off of, an OVER THE AIR, SUBSCRIPTION / PAY PER VIEW television operation (Channel 44) in the Chicago area .
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  #23  
Old 05-16-2007, 04:41 AM
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I am having some wierd electrical problem in my house that killed the outlet for my living room tv. I havent had time to track it down, so I have been using the roundie which means I have to sit in a less comfortable chair. I have watched almost no tv lately. Call me a dreamer, but I truly hope that when tv suddenly goes blank for a lot of people, they realize that internet, dvd, (or real life) fills the broadcast tv time quite nicely. I'd love to see a new-coke style backfire. ntsc 'classic'!
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  #24  
Old 05-16-2007, 06:12 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 3Guncolor
Customers want more HD channels so the space has to come from somewhere.
I'd be willing to bet that 90% of the tv veiwing public knows nothing about HD vs Analog,what they do know is that they are constantly told that HD is better,so like every other red blooded American they have to keep up with everybody else,why do they need hd? because sammy know nothing that works at Best Buy told them they need it & all the commercials on tv back him up.

The same 90% of the tv veiwers have no idea how to calibrate their own television sets or their Home Theater recievers.Same goes for HDMI 1.3,all people know is that its new so they MUST HAVE IT.

As far as im concerned the whole HD & HDMI 1.3 craze is driven by the industry, not consumers.
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  #25  
Old 05-16-2007, 12:11 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by markthefixer
I DID to my GREAT delight, years ago, witness the "death rattle" and final auctioning off of, an OVER THE AIR, SUBSCRIPTION / PAY PER VIEW television operation (Channel 44) in the Chicago area .
I used to build boxes for OnTV back then. There were stores that sold "a bag of parts" that coincidentally was the complete kit, but they couldn't tell you it was for a decoder box. Those early scrambling methods seem primitive now. Later, Sportsvision was added, on Channel 60. They were only testing, not even in service yet, and we were already adding two-channel switches to our boxes... It was more fun to build the boxes than to actually watch anything with them, since the sound was mediocre, the movies were edited, and of course they were the dreaded "pan-and-scan" format.
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  #26  
Old 05-16-2007, 12:14 PM
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Richard D Richard D is offline
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And today I find this,

THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS ASSOCIATION reassured the NAB that digital-to-analog converters will be available to "every interested American." The converters will be necessary for analog TV sets when analog broadcasts cease in February 2009.

It's a conspiracy! Where is Muldar & Scully when we really need them?
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  #27  
Old 05-16-2007, 12:17 PM
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ChrisW6ATV ChrisW6ATV is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by panhead
Same goes for HDMI 1.3,all people know is that its new so they MUST HAVE IT.
I agree with you about HDMI 1.3 (as opposed to "regular" HDMI). It accomplishes nothing that even the tech-minded HD-watching crowd needs, but plenty of people think they need it or are waiting to buy equipment with it.

Regarding the end of analog cable and box-rental costs, there is always the option to drop your cable service entirely and use a "real TV" antenna. You can already buy a convertor box for less than US$100 to connect it to your analog-only TV sets.
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  #28  
Old 05-16-2007, 05:22 PM
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wa2ise wa2ise is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisW6ATV
I used to build boxes for OnTV back then. ... Those early scrambling methods seem primitive now. Later, Sportsvision was added, on Channel 60. They were only testing, not even in service yet, and we were already adding two-channel switches to our boxes... It was more fun to build the boxes than to actually watch anything with them, since the sound was mediocre, the movies were edited, and of course they were the dreaded "pan-and-scan" format.
We had a channel 68 that was a subscription service. "Wromentco Home theture". Seen the usual bootleg boards and such. When analog stereo audio for TV came out, one of the manufacturers (think it was Blonder Tongue) of the official descrambler boxes freaked out, making a statement saying something like TV stereo was some sort of communist conspericy. Thing was, it was fairly easy to modify a stereo TV decoder to get the movie soundtrack on the L-R part, and the timing signal to recreate a horizontal frequency pulse to push the horizontal sync pulses back to where they belong. to drive a variable RF attenuator hooked to the video IF.

Channel 68 quit the subscription business around 1985, became an over the air MTV type channel, and later became a home shopping channel, and now is a Spanish language TV channel.
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  #29  
Old 05-16-2007, 05:33 PM
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Richard D Richard D is offline
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building test boxes

In Miami we had OnTV in the late 1970s then HBO on MDS. We built our own converters and microwave down converters when HBO began microwaving their signal to hotels and condos before mass cable was run. It was more fun to build and tune the things than to actually watch the programming.
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  #30  
Old 05-16-2007, 06:44 PM
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wa2ise wa2ise is offline
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Wink

Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard D
In Miami we had OnTV in the late 1970s then HBO on MDS. We built our own converters and microwave down converters when HBO began microwaving their signal to hotels and condos before mass cable was run.
We had that up here in NYC area. Think they used the same spectra 2.4 gig wi-fi uses. If you still have the dish antennas and the antenna itself (but without the block converter part) you might be able to use it to hunt for wifi hot spots...
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