Yup, the wonders of Technology are about to explode in my home. In the area that for the last two years has held the honor of having the highest per-capita population of technology workers in the country, higher than Silicon Valley itself, Digital Cable is finally becoming a reality. What’s next? Cable modems? High speed internet access in my home for less than $100/month? Aaaah… I am but dreaming.
Sarcasm aside, it all sounds just nifty. A gazillion channels, digital music, etc. etc. Anything else I should be aware of? Is it going to require me to re-wire my surround sound/dvd/tv/vcr/electric hairbrush/power fork setup? Is it worth it?
I love digital cable. To me, the real advantage is all the show information you get. When you turn to a channel, there is a box at the bottom of the screen that tells you the name of the show, when it started, and how long it will last. Then you can press the Info button on your remote and you can see the actors, when the show or movie was filmed and a brief description of the show.
While you’re watching that channel you can use the arrows on your remote and scroll forward to see what’s on that channel for the rest of the day or you can scroll up and down channels and see what’s on – all while watching your show. It also has a Menu button that gives you a grid of shows and keeps the channel you’re on in the upper right hand corner. Such glorious information overload! I don’t know how I lived without it.
Well you’ll get a ton of movie channels. Mine has 4 HBOs, 3ea. of Showtime, Cinemax and the Movie Channel. A whole bunch of Stars & Encore, and I think a couple of more Bravos. Then there’s all the Discovery/History/Learning type channels I think about 10 split amongst them. The digital music is cool too! Kind of like radio stations in format, but with the nifty feature of being able to see the name of the song/artist/album and year.
The absolute best feature is the menu options(except they need to find a way of listing stand up). You can look for things by movies, time, channel, sports, kids, even adult. You can also search for stuff coming on weeks down the road. Which reminds me there are about 10 PPV channels and you can order them through the remote. They will also e-mail you to inform you of up coming PPV events.
Another neat feature is that you can watch one program while surfing for another. Info, tells you about anything on for the most part (including individual episodes). The sound quality is great. You can also set it to remind you of a movie or event as much as two weeks before it comes on.
Ok now for the minuses:
It takes a while to learn the remote and features (not for the gadget shy)
If you loose power to the box, it takes roughly two hours to reload the menu. You can still watch TV, but you can’t plan ahead (you’ll know what I meant by that soon).
As far as I can tell you can’t record from it. They may have corrected this by now but I don’t think so. This is not a major problem in my book as any movie I think about is generally coming on in the next week or so.
Expect it to suck major donkey ass.
We got it two weeks ago, and nearly tore it out after the first night. The menu is set permanently two hours ahead of current time, there’s too much crap, and the remote is huge.
We’ve actually resorted to takling to each other, petting bunnies, having sex or reading. There’s talk of getting rid of the television altogether. Now the cable MODEM, that’s another story.
Seriously, unless you NEED 12 HBO’s all showing the same movie you didn’t see in the theatre and wouldn’t pay to rent, and fifteen channels of PPV porn, and twenty music channels, save yer money and become a more interesting person.
No, I have nothing against TV per se, but digital cable worked for me like trying to cure yourself of a food craving by eating twenty pounds of it. Like twenty pounds of cotton candy, fudge, or bacon. You know it’s bad for you , but you start and then you find yourself with glazed eyes and a washed out feeling, on the couch at 03.00.
Funny you should say that False_God I rarely watch TV, except on Sunday and Wednesday night. But the kids watch more.
I din’t have that pre-set two hour thing on mine. Perhaps it was your cable company. I also don’t get that much porn on mine, I think 4 channels (i haven’t watched any though so I may be wrong).
Ours came with no porn (you pay extra for it. How much did you pay, False_God?), customer service was incredibly helpful, a bunch of great movie channels for free (HBO, Cinemax and Showtime were extra $, which we didn’t have the money for - good thing, because we had plenty).
The only thing that was a pain was the fact that we couldn’t get local programming - FOX, NBC, CBS, ABC. Some sort of FCC guidelines. However, I believe that they are now allowing access to these through your connection.
Be prepared for absolute wonderfulness. I don’t watch a LOT of TV, but when I do, I like to watch something quality. The menu really helps you navigate to find the good stuff. If you can read the word “menu”, you can use the remote control.
I’m with Zoff! My favorite part is being able to put on a show and then surf for a better show. And I don’t know what I’d do without the built in “tv guide”! I’ll look at what’s on in the next few days and set reminders. Then, when I’m watching something, or when Mr. Sunshine has one of the gazillion ESPN channels on and a show I want to watch comes on, the little reminder thingie comes on and tells you it’s time for your show. You never have to miss your favorite show again!
Plus, you can program a bunch of “favorite” channels, and then you press the “FAV” button and it surfs just the pre-programmed favorites. There is a parental control option so you can lock certain channels with a password…all sorts of great stuff. When I watch t.v. on non-digital cable I don’t know what to do with myself! We convinced both our parents to get digital so we don’t kill ourselves when we go visit.
I think the most important thing to understand about the answers you’re getting in this thread is, YMMV. It’s possible/likely that everyone here is answering from a different perspective, having a different cable provider.
Personally, I’m a big fan of digital cable. The quality on the stations that broadcast digitally is great, and the on-screen channel guide is even better than the DSS that I had put into an office a while back. If you really find a use for all of those digital music stations, I’d be surprised, and I’m not sure I really care about 50 pay-per-view stations (I think we’ve bought precisely ONE movie in the year or so that we’ve had digital cable… and our local cable company only offers one PPV channel via their analog service, now).
“Then you can press the Info button on your remote and
you can see the actors, when the show or movie was filmed and a brief description of the show.”
Yeah, you can do that with a free feature on new TV’s, it’s called Guide Plus. Costs absolutely nothing. Also you can select a show from it’s list & it’ll record it for ya. It shows what films are coming for like a whole week in advance. Its On select tvs, printed on the front of the tv, just enter your zip code.
Our digital system does allow us to tape; we can even tape one channel and watch another (non-digital) channel. Ask your installer if he can set it up that way for you.
I’m agreed on the above points about the joys of the menu, picture and sound quality, variety of programming, special features, etc. Customer service has been above average.
Be prepared for Superman 2 once a week!!! I don’ know why they never show the other half dozen episodes, but the second one is on at least once every week!! What a waste. I don’t think any of the movie channels have ever shown anything I was enterested in watching. The Discovery channels I like though.
Love the selection hate the delay. It is true you can page through the menus quickly but if you are not familiar with the titles you really don’t know what the show or movie is about. It takes about 4 seconds to advance from one channel to the next so if you were in the habit of running through the entire lineup watching a few seconds of the channel to see if the program was interesting on digital cable this would take a half hour! I hate the time lag, on regular cable you could switch channels instantly, on digital be prepared for a big time delay.
I can’t wait for us to get the Pizza Hut channel, although I would prefer another company, I think Poppa John you can order off the web …, hey gotta go!
zip------------------->
We have it. It’s cheaper than regular cable for us.
There is a brief delay when loading new pages in the guide, but it’s nowhere near 4 seconds, more like a half-second. We don’t have any premium channels, but it’s still handy for the surfing and planning ahead features.
Occasionally compression artifacts (I’m assuming that’s what they are) show up for a second or two, probably caused by line noise. It’s not common enough to be an annoyance, however.
You must not have your hookups routed correctly, or perhaps your VCR input is set wrong, because as Proudest Monkey and Handy hinted up there, you certainly can record from digital cable.
I really like having digital cable! We have the Total TV package, and since they recently raised the cable rates again, we pay less for this than we were paying for expanded basic cable.
I agree with everyone who says that the on-screen menus and TV Giude are indispensible. Once you get into having those features, you will wonder how you ever lived without them!
There is a channel called NOGGIN, which shows mostly educational programming for the kiddies, but can be highly entertaining for us adults, too. If you get NOGGIN, be sure to check out the program Sesame Too. It’s like a Sesame Street recycling program. It seems that this show consists of a “best moments of” the original Sesame Street Discovery-Science also has many fascinating shows.
False_God said,
This is no lie. My wrist and shoulder were actually sore for the first 3 days, and it took a while to figure out that it was from this new, big-ass remote! (makes me sound like a couch potato, dunnit?)
But, like my SO would tell you, “there’s still nothing on, and now there are twice as many channels with nothing on!”
It’s all subject to taste.
For me to record, my problem was the fact that my vcr would only go up to channel 225, and the movie channels were higher than this, 300+, so I had to have the tv on the channel I wanted to record, and the vcr on channel 3. And I had to leave the tv on and couldnt surf, or change the channels.
We had problems with the connections going into the house, and at peak times during the day, the sound would come in, but the picture was pixellated and lagged behind, but that could have been fixed by re doing the connections. I just had it free for a month, and gave it up, but they let us keep the remote.
