Haha, it doesn’t look as though it will affect me, if CBC is correct about Whitehaven in Cumbria being “in the northwestern corner” of Britain. Obviously Scotland just vanished completely into the sea or something, so no television to worry about, not that I watch the thing anyway.
I might see about getting a telly again when I ever understand all this this techy stuff*. For the meantime, the compulsory television watching when I have to visit my mother is quite enough. Oh well, “Coronation Street” and “Emmerdale” are always good for a laugh, so that’s tomorrow evening sorted out. Eek.
I mean, I’m not even clear whether, if I were to go and buy a cheap ordinary television set, and one of the Freeview box thingies, would they work together and would that work for this grand “digital revolution”, or if one needs to buy a big expensive thing with lots of mysterious initials in its name. Oh well, will find out some time. Important to be able to keep up with great events like The Naming of the Blue Peter Cat, I suppose.
It’s not just grass. It’s grass and HAIR! I swear, billions and billions of dollars (euros and pounds) spent to see individual hairs.
What’s funny is: You watch shows like CSI and see the amazingly good lookin girl with the plunging blouse and can tell where they stopped applying the makeup at the bottom of her neck.
And our only local HD news channel - you sure can see the guy sweat on camera.
Nature channel stuff is pretty good…unless you’re in Best Buy, surrounded with 50+ inch HDTVs while an 8 foot spider injects it’s digestive juices…into it’s prey…in glorious HD!!!1!!
Well, as I said in a different GQ thread, digital does not equal HD. You can use your SD equipment as long as you have some way of decoding the signal, whether it’s built-in to the TV or an external box.
Yeah. HDTV went quite a ways down my priority list when I was passing by a TV store and the news was on and I realised I could see the spackling around Lloyd Robertson’s pores…
I don’t know how it works in the US, but in Australia (and most other places, from what I gather) Digital TV is free- there’s no cost involved, except that of getting a Digital Set Top box, which will set you back all of $50 from the supermarket for a Standard Definition one, and you can get High Definition SD boxes for around $150.
Most new TVs have either an SD or HD DVB-T tuner built into them anyway, FWIW.
I’ve got a Digital Set Top Box and it is an improvement over standard analogue broadcasts, even on a CRT TV (it brings the picture and quality up to that of a DVD, which is a bit clearer than standard terrestrial TV), but unless you really care about that sort of thing (and most of us don’t; terrestrial TV is fine), there’s no compelling reason to switch to DVB-T.
The other thing is that a Digital Set Top Box generally plugs into your TV through RCA or Component inputs, and has its own remote, so to use it, you need to go through the following steps:
Use TV Remote to turn TV on.
Use TV Remote to select “AV” channel
Use Digital Set Top Box Remote to turn STB on
Use STB remote to change channels
Use TV remote to adjust volume
Given that most people already have at least three remotes for their TV, VHS, DVD/ Home Theatre system setup, it’s not surprising they don’t want to add a 4th one for something that isn’t a vast improvement on what they already have, which is understandable.
My digital tuner is in my DVD player, so I turn on my Amplifier with one remote, and my TV and DVD/Digital Tuner (including channel selection) with the second remote. Done.
And Universal Remotes, which are commonly available, would most likely reduce that down, too.
Not a chance. With set dates for switchovers, the surge in demand is predictable, so there’ll be a thousand Chinese entrepreneurs gearing their factories up for production. If anything, I can see a huge glut of low-end digital TVs being sold for peanuts.
My TV detects the scart input from the digibox and defaults to AV when switched on; the digibox has its own volume control too - so in theory the TV volume could be left alone, but there’s still a bit of remote juggling.
The volume control on my g/f’s Sky box doesn’t seem to do much, perhaps its only if you plug speakers into the red and white sockets at the rear that they affect the volume. One thing that can be said for NTL is that their volume control works on the output through the scart lead.
You’d be amazed how incompatible with many TVs, DVDs, VCRs, etc those things are. And even if they are compatible, a lot of people are either too stupid or too lazy to work out how to programme them.
Honestly, I wonder if anyone in Queensland actually went to (or goes to) school, judging from the reactions I get when I suggest that people having problems with things should read the manual that came with the product first before yelling at me that it doesn’t work properly…
I agree, except it’s not stupidity or laziness, but complexity. I had one that could be programmed to send any control sequence for any button - trouble is that you have to try them all in sequence until you find the one you want, and on the way through to finding the control code that represents, say, ‘menu’, you cycle through a load of other valid codes, fucking everything up on the TV. It was a nightmare.
Also, they never have enough buttons, or the right buttons, so you end up having to compromise for some of the more advanced functions.
A friend of mine dealt with the multiple/lost remote problem by sticking them all to one of those paddle-shaped kitchen chopping boards - but that looked really daft.
You’re absolutely right, some of them are tortuously complex, with the ability to run every appliance in your house etc- I can totally understand not being able to get those to work. But the basic Universal TV remotes- with a power on/off button, volume control, channel numbers, and TV/AV button- aren’t that hard to work out if you take a minute to read the manual, instead of blindly pointing it at the TV and wondering why it isn’t working.
For me, it went the opposite way. When we saw the potholes on Brad Pitt’s nose on a 60" screen, it was the first time my wife had ever acknowledged my presence while he was on screen. Hurray, HD!
Then you want a Logitec Harmony remote. It was the only real option raised by three or four different stores when we talked about it. I got a $150-$200 one for $70 off www.woot.com and have been really pleased with it.
It’s got a USB cable and connects to your PC (or Mac), you tell it what you have and it does the heavy lifting. mine’s a less nifty model with ‘watch TV, play DVD, Play Music’ buttons along the top. I also have ‘play Xbox, play Wii, Listen to iTunes’ on the programmable part of the display.
On the computer, you tell it that ‘Watch TV’ turns on your Samsung TV, your Dish Network PVR, your Marantz tuner, set the TV to AV 1, the Tuner to ‘DSS’, and it does all of that without a whole lot of button mashing.
Since it’s a PC app and uses an internet connection, it stays current if you buy something new.
BUT as previously stated, you do not need a digital TV to get digital TV signals - just a SCART input and a decoder box, which you can now pick up for about £12 I believe!
This falls squarely into the “Too Hard” basket for 99.999% of the people I deal with at work. The Logitech Harmonies are great remotes- I’ve only ever had 1 come back, and that was because the guy’s girlfriend hit the roof when she found out what he’d paid for it and made him return it- but we like to make really sure we don’t sell them to n00bs, because otherwise they bring them back because they can’t use them and we end up with a damaged/packagingless/otherwise “not-new” $200 remote that we have to reduce below cost to sell.
Over on this side of the pond, we’re not quite there yet. I think that’s partly because something like 80% of the people in the cities have cable, and most of the rural dwellers have satellite, the digital versions of which come with their own decoder boxes. And when people upgrade their TVs, they’re getting flatscreen LCD or plasma, which all have ATSC digital-TV tuners built in. Not many people are using only over-the-air TV there days. So most of the market for standalone ATSC digital tuners is already occupied.
I haven’t been to an electronics store looking specifically for TV stuff for a long time, but I googled for standalone ATSC tuners a while back, and there wasn’t much out there. If they start advertising the cutoff dates, presumably there will be more available.
If I am to believe what I’m told by early-adopter acquaintances, digital, at least in its early implementations in many locations, had a history of strongly disliking marginal signals and echoes/interference and of not being happy if you did not get a clean line-of-sight shot to the source and a strong signal. This was a problem in locations such as Manhattan, where the large number of tall steel structures would create signal “shadows” and reflections, and also in areas that are “clear” but where where the transmitter/repeater may be all the way to the other end of the next county over, making the signal weaker at the receiving end. Many digital receivers would just go bluescreen at locations where an analog receiver with a standard aerial would still reliabaly give you pics and sound, albeit fuzzier.
It may be that as the conversion progresses, repeaters become more numerous, more powerful, and better synchronized to avoid interference, and off-the-air digituners become correspondingly more fault-tolerant and sensitive; but you’ll already have created an expectation that you need an elephant trap of an aerial to catch that signal.
(BTW, I am concerned about the potential for a major e-waste disposal issue once it dawns upon the Huh?What? segment of the population that the authorities are serious and they WILL proceed with what they’ve been warning for the last 4 years. )
Especially when you consider that a 16:9 standard definition picture is no higher in resolution than most 4:3 pictures. They just stretch the picture out horizontally, which will make MPEG artefacts more visible. And they’re already bad enough in 4:3 on some channels that use very low bitrates. Although for 4:3 some of the channels use very low horizontal resolutions like 544 pixels and scale that up to 4:3. It’s all about cramming as many channels as possible into a fixed total bitrate.
http://dtt.me.uk/ shows you how much the resolutions and bitrates vary among Freeview channels. BBC1 is by some distance the best (partly for technical reasons), and you need only compare football on BBC1 to, say, ITV2 to see it.
For the meantime, the compulsory television watching when I have to visit my mother is quite enough. Oh well, “Coronation Street” and “Emmerdale” are always good for a laugh, so that’s tomorrow evening sorted out. Eek.