Maybe this is a GQ, but it has to do with TV so I put it here.
I have a radio receiver that picks up TV channels so I can listen to the football game while I do other stuff around the house. The broadcast audio is about 4 seconds ahead of what I’m seeing on cable TV. That’s irritating. Is there–realistically–anything I can do about it?
No.
Sure there is. I recommend investing in a set of wireless headphones or a wireless speaker system and hooking that up to your cable box or home theater system. Using an FM transmitter would work as well.
The reason for the delay is that Comcast is getting their signal from a satellite dish rather than directly over the air like your radio. Even at the speed of light, it takes a few seconds for the signal to be beamed to a satellite in orbit and then back to the ground again.
At our place, the lag between different signal paths for baseball was always noticable but tolerable. But this past season it was horrible. What had happened is that the digital TV signal is being delayed even more. So if we switched to the raw old analog TV signal from the cable (via the VCR’s tuner connected to the incoming cable), the delay was far less noticable.
As a computer guy, I could hypothesize that the extra digital delay is due to encoding at one end and decoding at the other. But, this was not the first season with digital cable.
Comcast is doing something Not Right. (What a surprise!)
Also possible - If you are using a DVR box, the 4-second delay is the time that the box has as a lead-in to record the shows.
Probably somewhat related–I have Cox Digital in my living room, regular analog in the bedroom. When the same channel is on both TV’s, there is a delay between the two–but only on the broadcast networks. The cable stations sync up correctly.
I do, and it does. Thanks for the info!
Considering that orbit is something like a couple hundred miles up, and light goes 186,000 miles per second, this is not true.
There is, however, some delay obviously. I’m guessing that it’s computer processing time at different stages. One of them may be in the satellite.
For a while we had (Comcast) digital in the livingroom and analog in my office, and there was a noticeable time lag on all channels. We figured it was the digital box slowing things up, which, among other things, took an astonishing amount of time to boot up and find the server and such.
We resolved the problem easily, however, by dumping the (worthless) digital service. We watched exactly one non-analog channel on rare occasions. The digital signal was no better. And if we’re going to pay for TiVo, I want real TiVo, not TiFaux.
Still hoping to work this out. Most wireless headphones are IR, which means line-of-sight. The FM transmitter is sitting here on my desk while I sneer at it. In my high saturation RF environment*, it (the $70 one from NPR) is useless. Who makes a better transmitter and what will it cost?
*I live about 1/4 mile from at least 9 broadcast towers, radio & TV.
Communications satellites are usually in geosynchronous orbit, which is 22,241 statute miles high. As the signal has travel both up to and down from the satellite, that alone is enough to add about a quarter second delay.
The 900 mHz units seem tailor made for this. Check it out.
Sadly, the 900 MHz phone I tried also was, uh, noisy. The 2.4 GHz is better and that’s what we now use. I’m thinking I will have to wire a set out to my chair and give up on the strolling around thing. <sigh>