Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2018

Let me blog quickly to say I'm not impressed with much of DTV. Whoever designed this obviously did not test the technology using rabbit ears in the field.

Several big issues with reception.

* When DTV reception isn't good, you get complete breaks in the picture and sound. With good reception, DTV is super crisp. With troubled reception, like today for me with a particularly windy day, it's nearly impossible to watch because instead of being fuzzy, it skips.

* The sound skips as well with bad reception. There are serious breaks in sound. Never did I realize how important dialogue is to plot until I couldn't hear it. Even with horrendously bad pictures, analog transmissions tend to keep a steady sound track.

NOTE: This isn't an inherent limitation of digital TV. They could, for example, put out the sound track three or four times, perhaps ahead of the picture, and have the receiver put together a full track in time for the picture. This is a limitation inherent with the implementation that, again, wasn't well field tested. I'm in an urban area, nearly spitting distance from an interstate and a large mall. I shouldn't have trouble with my signal so bad that I'm back to watching analog on every channel when it's windy.

* It's nearly impossible to tune your antennae. With analog signals, you get instant feedback regarding the strength of your signal as you move your antennae around, add foil, whatever. Here, you have to pause with every move to let the receiver catch up and decode the signal, which takes about a half-second, before you can tell if you've improved your reception. Meanwhile, the transmission is unwatchable -- not merely fuzzy, but unwatchable. Getting sound straight, like I suggest above with redundant sound broadcast, would help a ton with the unwatchable part, but you still can't tune the antennae quickly.

The "signal strength" number reading I get from my receivers setup display isn't much better, as the box still has to decode the signal in the new position before it can get me a reading. Also note that moving the antennae at all invariably cuts out the picture and sound for a second. Not cool.

Also note that this Magnavox TB100MW9 (as well as every other Set Top Box (STB) I've seen) doesn't have any controls on the box. Lose the remote, and you're toast.

In sum, DTV is a better system if it's used in a controlled system. In practice, in the "real" field, it's, so far, grossly inferior to analog broadcasts. I realize I'm used to the fuzzy picture the same way I can listen to talk on AM through static and whines that drive others crazy. Yet even when I factor in that realization, today's bad weather tells me DTV wasn't as well engineered as it should have been.

So now what?

Labels: DTV

My official US Government DTV $40 coupons came in the mail today, and I wasted no time getting out to grab my DTV converter box. Here are some hints for those who are also still in the age of rabbit ears.

Finding the converter boxes wasn't difficult. I first visited Circuit City, which had two Zenith DTT900 models with a price of $59.99. I had planned on using my first coupon on the first box I found to pseudo-randomly test out what John Q. Public might experience, but there was no way I was spending over $20 for a converter box.

Circuit City had an interesting 8.5x11 inch paper beside the Zenith boxes explaining how coupons worked. One particularly devious point to notice is that you can't trade a box back in once you've purchased it. For instance, there's a model being sold online for $53 that claims to have the Picture-in-Picture feature. If you used your coupon on the Zenith and later learned of the PiP model, you can't trade the Zenith back in. If you return your box, it turns out the government gets its $40 back and, in this particular case, you get your $19.99 plus tax on $59.99 back in your pocket. This is pretty clearly not a fair proposition.

Wal-Mart had about twenty to forty Magnavox TB100MW9 models for sale that I could see, priced for $49.99, underneath its flatscreen televisions with an LCD display counting down the number of days before you could no longer receive analog TV broadcasts. I tried to purchase one with the DTV coupon, but the lady in electronics had no idea what to do and shuttled me to the registers up front. A twenty-five minute wait and one "CSM" -- which means Customer Service Manager in Wal-Mart-ese -- later, we finally figured out through trial and error that the DTV coupon should be rung up as a credit card for the amount of $40. I wouldn't even present the card to the cashier if you're buying from Wal-Mart. Just let them know you're using two forms of payment, the first being a credit card - NOT a debit card - with a $40 balance.

When I got back home, it took a little thinking to figure out the best way to hook up the TB100MW9. The DTV conversion is really going to obsolete a lot more of your hardware than is immediately obvious. I assume that my all-in-one remote, for instance, knows nothing of the converter box's remote. I'll try the Magnavox TV codes at some point, though I'm worried that I'll still have to switch to my TV to change volume. Secondly, if you have a VCR, you're not going to be able to record DTV broadcasts using the automatic timer. If you're grabbing shows every weekday and/or weekend, you're toast unless you buy a VCR with a DTV tuner, and in that case you'd no longer have nearly as pressing a need for your conversion box. It'd still be nice to have the converter, as you could watch a DTV broadcast as you taped another, much as your VCR's analog tuner works with your analog TV's. But enough of fringe combinations... remember that your current VCR's timer is toast come February of 2009, and it won't be timer recording DTV by channel, ever.

This Magnavox converter also has the annoying problem of not letting the antennae's signal pass-through. That is, after I plug my rabbit ears into the TB100MW9, I can no longer receive an analog signal with my television on the other end. The converter stops the antennae's signal whether the converter is in use or not, meaning all my television's built-in tuner will get is snow if the converter is installed in-line, which is the method suggested by the instructions.

For the next year, at least, I believe a much smarter setup is to keep the rabbit ears attached to my VCR, routing my VCR into my TV's "video in" ports, and then have my VCR's antennae out coaxial cable route to the converter box. My VCR doesn't "eat" the antennae's signal the way the TB100MW9 does, so the rabbit ears can still do double duty, providing the analog signal to my VCR and the digital signal to the converter, this way. I can tape an analog broadcast on my VCR using the automatic timer and watch DTV at the same time, if need be, at least for the next year minus some change. The only drawback is that the VCR can't, without some more wiring, tape the crystal-clear DTV reception I'm getting, nor the bonus channels I get from our educational/public TV channel and the bonus CW network channel NBC is running. Obviously after the DTV switch, you'll be able to route your converter box through your VCR and time when you tape on channel 3 or 4 - your converter box will be outputting to one or the other according to your choice, so your VCR will "see" whatever DTV channel you're watching on analog 3 or 4 - but not select which channel you tape. To make matters worse, the TB100MW9 is set up by default to turn itself off after 4 hours of no use. This saves energy, but makes it difficult to tape The News Hour every evening while you're away.

So I'm in the market for a remote and will soon be in the market for a new recording device with an automatic timer. I'm also waiting about a half-second when I flip for the new signal to be read before a picture hits the screen instead of benefiting from analog's instant feedback, killing the notorious channel surfing efficiency of guys like me by about 15%. I'm trading that for a much clearer picture (this new clarity really can't be overstated), three additional channels, and the ability to, at least for me, watch every channel I'd watched before without moving the rabbit ears at all. I'm also out about $13 after tax. That's non-trivial, I think. I'm not exactly destitute, but even I balked at laying down $24 for the privilege of watching DTV. Honestly, I bet it costs less than $24 to make one of these things, but that's just a hunch. Let's see what happens once the coupon program's over. And even at $13, I can't imagine what I'd be thinking if I was impoverished. Buying a new VCR, much less something like TiVo with what I believe is a monthly charge, is a hefty charge that doesn't exactly float my boat either. I also noticed a number of VCR/DVD combos that didn't tape, not even VHS, at the Wal-Mart, which struck me as particularly strange.

The TB100MW9 can do letterbox, zoom, or squeeze translations of the new DTV aspect ratio. That's a nice feature to have. Yet HD broadcasts are slightly cut off on the edges on my Zenith set. I think I also noticed some text blurring when it was down-sampled to 480i. The overall great picture isn't without its shortcomings.

I think that's about all I've got. Use your coupon as a credit card if you're at Wal-Mart, get ready to add yet another remote to your collection (the TB100MW9's buttons are incredibly small and elderly unfriendly to boot), prepare to long for the days when your VCR still worked as it was intended, and enjoy the picture and new channels. I'll rant about how this coupon program turns out to be something of a subsidy and free advertisement for Wal-Mart, Circuit City, Best Buy, and Radio Shack later.

Labels: DTV

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Monday, March 31, 2008
The price of piracy, perhaps This is an interesting line of logic regarding CD prices (within the context of a discussion of HDCP compliance) that I never really considered, being a naive idiot. Home Toys Article - HDCP: For Better or for Worse?: HDCP attempts to solve a serious problem that’s plagued the studios and other content producers for years and is something that is good for everyone. In fact, piracy is cited as the main reason why audio CD’s never got to that price point was promised when they debuted in the early 1980's. Now, every machine between your media (say, a Blu-Ray disc) and your TV must have some silly compliance checker before you can watch HD content. The entire move from analog to HD seems to me to be about digital rights management (as opposed to analog rights management which, for whatever reason, corporations didn't seem to be able to get down well). Now, with HD and a government mandated obsolescence of analog, corps get to try and protect their content all over again. If this isn't market collusion, I'm not sure what is. I think, from DRM-less mp3s sold and over-the-air television and radio, we can see that freely accessible often outweighs the cost to embed rights management functions into various media. I can get HD NFL games from the airwaves, for example, and likely rip them to my computer without a serious quality degradation. Still, I don't, and pirate repackaging doesn't happen (that is, nobody is selling unlicensed NFL seasons on DVD in any large quantities) precisely because the product is, in this case games, so danged easy to get. Extend to my "I'll pay iTunes to find the music for me," argument. Labels: DRM, HDTV posted by ruffin at 3/31/2008 12:25:00 PM
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Roll your own iMac! The biggest issue I have with iMacs is the way they make your monitor obsolete when your computer is. It's a very smart move by Apple, but painful for the consumer market roped into buying an iMac. Sonnet has a better idea, I think. Strap your Mac Mini to the back a monitor of your choice. Seems so obvious once you see the product. Sonnet: MacCuff mini: Sonnet's MacCuff™ mini mounting and security system frees up desk space by securing your computer to the back of an LCD display (or mounting it under a desk or table) while allowing full access to its ports and disk slot. How do you mount a computer to the back of a monitor? VESA mounting holes on the back of many LCD displays provide an ideal spot to attach MacCuff mini. Smart idea, especially the VESA mount integration. My only worry is heat; our Mini G4 gets awfully hot after so much as a bit of Flash action, much less something like WoW. Still, this is very tempting at $50. posted by ruffin at 3/31/2008 09:56:00 AM
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Sunday, March 30, 2008
MacBU, as strong-jawed as they come I hate marketing-speak and the specific, but very popular business mentality that when things aren't roses you couch it in terms that make things sound like they are. That said, I'm still as impressed as heck with the sort of pounding the MacBU takes from comments on its Mac Team Blog. I mean, from the spot-checking I've done, people hate Office 2008, or at the very least, greatly prefer Office 2004. Reports have 2008 incredibly slow on PowerPC, hogging 90+% of the CPU. 2008 is apparently missing features compared to 2004, including Palm Sync. Others say it's just a GUI facelift. Yet the MacBU keeps publishing positive posts, giving quick winks to the negative comments (like, "but for those of you who have been waiting patiently (or even not-so-patiently ;) for your copy of Office 2008 for Mac"), but without dwelling on them a bit. It's an impressive clinic in the ability for corporate-speak to bypass/ignore customer response. Nobody does it much better. posted by ruffin at 3/30/2008 11:00:00 PM
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Friday, March 28, 2008
That's not really hacking a MacBook Air, is it? There's some press going around about hacking a MacBook in under two minutes. That's not even close to what happened. Yesterday, the computers' exposure to attack was expanded by allowing hackers to go after any client-side applications installed by default, including Web browsers. Contestants were also allowed to replicate the common tactic of duping a user into following a link in an e-mail or visiting a malicious Web site. In Miller's case, he had set up a malicious Web site; the URL to that site was typed into Safari's address bar. So Safari 3.1 was hacked by hitting some audio/visual file. Real Life calls. Might finish later. posted by ruffin at 3/28/2008 03:15:00 PM
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Thursday, March 27, 2008
When rumors make sense Look, I don't know if this adds to its credibility, but the rumor of a smaller Mac Mini (Looprumors via Macrumors) makes a lot of sense. Looprumors claims that they have heard that both the iMac and Mac mini are coming soon. They uniquely report, however, that the Mac mini will see a 'dramatic change' in form factor, with a design that is 'less than half the size' of the current design. The iPod is getting lots "bigger" via the iPod Touch and iPhone, now PDA/WiFi/gaming consoles, and the consumer Macs are getting lots smaller, as with the MacBook Air. It's interesting that the Air is relatively inexpensive, cheaper than the low end MacBook Pro. It makes sense -- the Air is crippled from screen to memory to ports -- but Apple likes to sell cool, and I wouldn't've been overly surprised to see a high price. Between the Air commercial barrage, from American Idol to, well, everywhere, and the price, I think Apple's looking at the equation Small + Cool + Consumer == Buckige. For the Mini to get closer to an iPod, combined with the rumor that Intel is making a bid to power the next iPhone, and I think we've got a predictable direction being followed at Apple. posted by ruffin at 3/27/2008 10:35:00 AM
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Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Bonjour, Windows. If you've got a Mac sharing a printer on your network, hooking up to a Windows box couldn't be easier. Install "Bonjour for Windows", complete with printer setup utility, fire it up, and configure. I'm glad they've finally gotten this right. It's taken years when it shouldn't have, but the fix is finally in (pun intended). Unless, of course, your print server is running OS X 10.2 or earlier. Then you're out of luck, like I am. Guess the printer will be moving from the bondi iBook to the Mac Mini running 10.4. Labels: apple, Randmo posted by ruffin at 3/25/2008 06:03:00 PM
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Monday, March 24, 2008
How do you sell sand to the proverbial Arab? From Apple Said to Weigh Unlimited Music Deal - Forbes.com: Apple Inc. is mulling a plan to upend its iTunes business by giving people unlimited free access to the music library if they're willing to pay more for the iPod and iPhone devices they use for playing and storing the digital media, according to a report published Wednesday. Well, Apple's shares are up again. If this jive goes through, I imagine they'll jump again. I mean, what do you do to get people to buy another iPod if everyone's already got two? You bundle them with unlimited music. This is a good short-term idea, but potentially horrible long-term. As the Forbes piece also said, "Some analysts said the iTunes store is too valuable to Apple for it to give away the music in it." So if it happens, I'm betting it's a bundle with new iPod purchases, so BOOM goes the sales numbers that crushed the stock a few months back, and they're sold with a pretty hefty surcharge. And I bet there's some sort of sunset on the access, if only in the anticipated life of the 'pod, which is pretty well known at this point. Why horrible long-term? What do you sell the multiple iPod owner who already has unlimited access to the iTunes music store? Oh yeah, movies. Labels: apple, market posted by ruffin at 3/24/2008 09:46:00 PM
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NY Times allows politicians to define "education" So here's some of the content from an article the Times calls, Study Finds Record Education Earmarks: By ALAN FINDER Published: March 24, 2008 Congress set aside a record $2.3 billion in pet projects for colleges and universities last year for research on subjects like berries and reducing odors from swine and poultry... This isn't education, it's pork, and the so-called "education lotteries" running in many states could just as easily undergo the same moniker swap. Poor people pay for pork! At the very least, the Times should know to say "higher education," as they do later in the piece. The adjective is non-trivial in this case, both for specificity and to ensure your paper doesn't contribute to the political spin that's now couched behind the term. Luckily, the Times is trying to shed some light on the porky nature of higher education. I enjoyed reading the rationalizations given for the earmarks. But many lawmakers defend the practice, saying it enables them to support important local institutions and to encourage research that stimulates economic development or to addresses other public needs in their states. and An aide, Elbert Garcia, said Mr. Rangel was not available for comment late last week because he was recovering from an illness. Mr. Garcia pointed to a recent statement by Mr. Rangel about the center [named for Rangel and 'which will house Mr. Rangel’s papers']: "No matter how one feels about the role of government, it is clear that the future of our democracy lies in having the most talented people across all classes and racial groups to participate in public life." Great. Now the future of our democracy requires the foxes get their hands so deep into the academia that no undergrad can escape without having been pimped. This irks me. Labels: Other Stuff, pork posted by ruffin at 3/24/2008 08:06:00 AM
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Friday, March 21, 2008
You sure that's end-user ready? From our anonymous friends at Mac Rumors: With the release of Safari 3.1, Apple has started pushing Safari to Windows iTunes users. Good danged thing they didn't use 3.0, which stunk. It did nothing but crash for me on Vista. I've started using IE without add-ons as my second browser [for browsing] before finally tiring of that and using Seamonkey instead. That's right, I use Firefox twice now, after a fashion. Is this really "pushing" though? I suppose so, but to me it all depends on whether boxes are checked to download by default or not. If the Safari checkbox is an option for the Windows version of Apple's Software Update, then it isn't pushing if it's not checked by default. The all time winner for pushing software in my experience has been RealPlayer, which had a group of checkboxes where the ones you could see weren't checked, but the ones you had to scroll to see during installation were. That's not just pushing, that's underhanded and unethical. Of course, my bank recently sent something hoping to trick me into getting some, heck I don't even know what it is, some strange, convoluted life insurance by making me think I was just asking for a free credit report. My freakin' bank. I'll ditch them as soon as I get a round Tuit. posted by ruffin at 3/21/2008 12:32:00 PM
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Daring Fireball's F-N Headline Thank you, Emily Dickinson: Tomorrow: 750 words on whether I should have used a dash rather than a colon after "jackassery" in the first paragraph above. I really should get around to reading "How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong." posted by ruffin at 3/21/2008 12:26:00 PM
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Tunnel adapters and IPv6? I'll take your word for it: Q. Why do I have an 'Automatic Tunneling Pseudo-Interface' interface? A. IPv6 in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 uses the 'Automatic Tunneling Pseudo-Interface' for encapsulating IPv6 packets with an IPv4 header so that they can be sent across an IPv4 network. By default, IPv6 configures a link-local Intra-Site Automatic Tunnel Addressing Protocol (ISATAP) address on the Automatic Tunneling Pseudo-Interface. The link-local ISATAP address has the form fe80::200:5efe:w.x.y.xor fe80::5efe:w.x.y.x, in which w.x.y.x is an IPv4 address assigned to the computer. posted by ruffin at 3/21/2008 10:51:00 AM
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Thursday, March 20, 2008
Cleverly thwarting Adium & Pidgin Get Answers to Your Problems - ICQ.com: How do I change my password? Note that you can only change your password through the ICQ program. If you do not have ICQ, click here to download. posted by ruffin at 3/20/2008 03:14:00 PM
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TK in an hour (or so) I like to listen to a particular podcastable radio show that lasts, with the dopey commercials they recently added, about 85 minutes. When I'm going to be driving in a car that only plays "real" CDs, I'm in trouble. What to do? I'd really rather not burn two CDs, and I sure don't want to listen to Alvin and the Chimpmunks when I'm driving. Whaddya know? Audacity wins: My old MP3 player allowed me to speed up playback to 130%, which was really handy for listening to the 3-hour's worth of podcasts I'd listen to every week. Unfortunately my new MP3 player is missing this functionality, and I'm missing it as well. Anybody know of software that can 'convert' my MP3's to a faster speed? (Answer included. Basically, you want to know Effect--Change Tempo. Makes it faster without changing pitch. Pretty 1337.) Of course this has the added bonus of letting you listen to more podcast-ness in the same amount of time. Just previewing, it seems like 25% faster isn't too bad, though 130% faster was a little disorienting when I tried it. I'm willing to accept that 25% faster sounded okay only because I'd listened to 130%. It's all relative. I shoulda gone with 250% faster, and I coulda been happy listening to twice as much junk as before. Seriously, this is apparently a player-side option in newer iPods, and it's a pretty cool thing to be able to do. posted by ruffin at 3/20/2008 02:28:00 PM
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Note to self: Browser-side dbms?!! Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive * WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage: The current working spec for the HTML5 standard has a lot of exciting features we would eventually like to implement in WebKit. One feature we felt was exciting enough to tackle now even though the spec is still in flux is client-side database storage. So for the last few weeks andersca, xenon, and I have been cooking up an implementation! posted by ruffin at 3/20/2008 09:41:00 AM
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Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Taking my politics from Lynyrd Skynyrd Hand guns are made for killin Aint no good for nothin else... So why dont we dump em people To the bottom of the sea Before some fool come around here Wanna shoot either you or me Personally, if I'm understanding the issue correctly, I'm disappointed with the forecasts that the Supreme Court is likely to overrule DC's hand gun ban. There's only one thing that a handgun provides more easily than a long rifle, and that's concealment. You're going to have to come up with one heck of an argument to tell me why the Second Amendment guarantees you a right to hide from me that you're carrying a firearm. Guns don't kill people, people do. Concealed guns get people into positions where they don't know they're signing their own death warrant. If Lynyrd Skynyrd realizes this, I can't for the life of me figure out why the rest of us can't. I don't want to pry the gun from your cold, dead hands. I'd much rather you were carrying it openly in those hands if you feel you need protection. Labels: guns, Other Stuff posted by ruffin at 3/18/2008 11:11:00 PM
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Friday, March 14, 2008
Thanks for the reboot, Vista Quick note to say I wasn't real impressed to see that Vista had installed updates and rebooted without asking last night. This morning, all the browser windows I'd had opened, the documents I was editing, etc, were no longer open. Why not save what was going on into memory somewhere? Understanding that the updates make it hard to boot into exactly what you were looking from before, I still have to think the machine could keep some track of, say, my MS Word docs that were open. Firefox does a good job remembering "sessions"; why can't anyone else? Labels: vista posted by ruffin at 3/14/2008 09:34:00 AM
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Monday, March 10, 2008
.NET, not as popular as MS hoped The Google dev team is dropping .NET 1.1 support in the near future [from the] Google Data APIs .NET Client Library: For a lot of reasons, mainly additional work involved maintaining and testing under .NET 1.1, and the missing language features (every time i need to write another collection....) i am planning to move the base line of the code to .NET 2.0. This implies: -> no more .NET 1.1 solution files -> instead .NET 2.0 solution files (VS 2005 compatible) -> language features will be used that will no longer compile in .NET 1.1 (that is a gradual change). Normally when I see open source/use libraries making decisions like this, I think it's a sign of misplaced resources, but here... well, you tell me how many people are going to be affected by the change and what it tells us about .NET adoption rates. posted by ruffin at 3/10/2008 12:32:00 PM
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Saturday, March 08, 2008
jiPhone news Looks like Java is coming to the iPhone and, with it, an even better argument for me getting one. Still insanely expansive, and I've got a contract with Sprint grumble for a while yet, but this is very good news. From InfoWorld, brought to my attention via MacRumors.com: Sun Microsystems is developing a Java Virtual Machine for Apple's iPhone and plans to release the JVM some time after June, enabling Java applications to run on the popular mobile device. There's really only one thing I'd like to make for the iPhone right now, and that's a mesh-networking application. There's some concern Apple's against apps running in the background, and there's no doubt creating and sustaining a mesh network would eat batteries like mad when the network was used. Still, such a service, GPL'd, would really redo the cellular wars. I wondered how cheap an device you could make that could work with the newly/planned to be opened (for a fee) Verizon network... In other news, did you know you could get a router (no, for woodworking) for about the price of a videogame? Man, what have I been doing buying games?! posted by ruffin at 3/08/2008 06:32:00 PM
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Friday, March 07, 2008
The only idealism left is the bottom line There are very few absolutes easily identifiable in everyday life, but Microsoft's bid to make cash (bless their hearts) is one of 'em. It doesn't matter what sort of front they believe they need to put on. If they think they need to do it to make a buck, it's done. Check out this turnabout quote from Baller reported by Macworld UK: Ballmer suggested that Apple might charge Microsoft [a 30/70 split] to get Silverlight on the iPhone, though there is so far no evidence to support this belief. 'It sure seems like they're trying to charge a whole lot more money for it,' he said. 'Maybe Apple isn't welcoming open and royalty-free runtimes on it.' This is the guy that told Sun to put Java on Microsoft's back -- here meaning the old skool Microsoft embrace and extend, where Java would be able to do things on Windows it couldn't anywhere else -- and "ride baby, ride" or something similar? I mean, at least Apple tries to sell "cool" or "sexy", depending on your point of view. Google tries to "do no evil". What does Microsoft try to do again other than make cash? posted by ruffin at 3/07/2008 07:02:00 PM
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Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Day one with DTV: Noticeable drawbacks Let me blog quickly to say I'm not impressed with much of DTV. Whoever designed this obviously did not test the technology using rabbit ears in the field. Several big issues with reception. * When DTV reception isn't good, you get complete breaks in the picture and sound. With good reception, DTV is super crisp. With troubled reception, like today for me with a particularly windy day, it's nearly impossible to watch because instead of being fuzzy, it skips. * The sound skips as well with bad reception. There are serious breaks in sound. Never did I realize how important dialogue is to plot until I couldn't hear it. Even with horrendously bad pictures, analog transmissions tend to keep a steady sound track. NOTE: This isn't an inherent limitation of digital TV. They could, for example, put out the sound track three or four times, perhaps ahead of the picture, and have the receiver put together a full track in time for the picture. This is a limitation inherent with the implementation that, again, wasn't well field tested. I'm in an urban area, nearly spitting distance from an interstate and a large mall. I shouldn't have trouble with my signal so bad that I'm back to watching analog on every channel when it's windy. * It's nearly impossible to tune your antennae. With analog signals, you get instant feedback regarding the strength of your signal as you move your antennae around, add foil, whatever. Here, you have to pause with every move to let the receiver catch up and decode the signal, which takes about a half-second, before you can tell if you've improved your reception. Meanwhile, the transmission is unwatchable -- not merely fuzzy, but unwatchable. Getting sound straight, like I suggest above with redundant sound broadcast, would help a ton with the unwatchable part, but you still can't tune the antennae quickly. The "signal strength" number reading I get from my receivers setup display isn't much better, as the box still has to decode the signal in the new position before it can get me a reading. Also note that moving the antennae at all invariably cuts out the picture and sound for a second. Not cool. Also note that this Magnavox TB100MW9 (as well as every other Set Top Box (STB) I've seen) doesn't have any controls on the box. Lose the remote, and you're toast. In sum, DTV is a better system if it's used in a controlled system. In practice, in the "real" field, it's, so far, grossly inferior to analog broadcasts. I realize I'm used to the fuzzy picture the same way I can listen to talk on AM through static and whines that drive others crazy. Yet even when I factor in that realization, today's bad weather tells me DTV wasn't as well engineered as it should have been. So now what? Labels: DTV posted by ruffin at 3/04/2008 05:30:00 PM
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Monday, March 03, 2008
DTV Converter Box Coupons Arrive: Observations and Tips My official US Government DTV $40 coupons came in the mail today, and I wasted no time getting out to grab my DTV converter box. Here are some hints for those who are also still in the age of rabbit ears. Finding the converter boxes wasn't difficult. I first visited Circuit City, which had two Zenith DTT900 models with a price of $59.99. I had planned on using my first coupon on the first box I found to pseudo-randomly test out what John Q. Public might experience, but there was no way I was spending over $20 for a converter box. Circuit City had an interesting 8.5x11 inch paper beside the Zenith boxes explaining how coupons worked. One particularly devious point to notice is that you can't trade a box back in once you've purchased it. For instance, there's a model being sold online for $53 that claims to have the Picture-in-Picture feature. If you used your coupon on the Zenith and later learned of the PiP model, you can't trade the Zenith back in. If you return your box, it turns out the government gets its $40 back and, in this particular case, you get your $19.99 plus tax on $59.99 back in your pocket. This is pretty clearly not a fair proposition. Wal-Mart had about twenty to forty Magnavox TB100MW9 models for sale that I could see, priced for $49.99, underneath its flatscreen televisions with an LCD display counting down the number of days before you could no longer receive analog TV broadcasts. I tried to purchase one with the DTV coupon, but the lady in electronics had no idea what to do and shuttled me to the registers up front. A twenty-five minute wait and one "CSM" -- which means Customer Service Manager in Wal-Mart-ese -- later, we finally figured out through trial and error that the DTV coupon should be rung up as a credit card for the amount of $40. I wouldn't even present the card to the cashier if you're buying from Wal-Mart. Just let them know you're using two forms of payment, the first being a credit card - NOT a debit card - with a $40 balance. When I got back home, it took a little thinking to figure out the best way to hook up the TB100MW9. The DTV conversion is really going to obsolete a lot more of your hardware than is immediately obvious. I assume that my all-in-one remote, for instance, knows nothing of the converter box's remote. I'll try the Magnavox TV codes at some point, though I'm worried that I'll still have to switch to my TV to change volume. Secondly, if you have a VCR, you're not going to be able to record DTV broadcasts using the automatic timer. If you're grabbing shows every weekday and/or weekend, you're toast unless you buy a VCR with a DTV tuner, and in that case you'd no longer have nearly as pressing a need for your conversion box. It'd still be nice to have the converter, as you could watch a DTV broadcast as you taped another, much as your VCR's analog tuner works with your analog TV's. But enough of fringe combinations... remember that your current VCR's timer is toast come February of 2009, and it won't be timer recording DTV by channel, ever. This Magnavox converter also has the annoying problem of not letting the antennae's signal pass-through. That is, after I plug my rabbit ears into the TB100MW9, I can no longer receive an analog signal with my television on the other end. The converter stops the antennae's signal whether the converter is in use or not, meaning all my television's built-in tuner will get is snow if the converter is installed in-line, which is the method suggested by the instructions. For the next year, at least, I believe a much smarter setup is to keep the rabbit ears attached to my VCR, routing my VCR into my TV's "video in" ports, and then have my VCR's antennae out coaxial cable route to the converter box. My VCR doesn't "eat" the antennae's signal the way the TB100MW9 does, so the rabbit ears can still do double duty, providing the analog signal to my VCR and the digital signal to the converter, this way. I can tape an analog broadcast on my VCR using the automatic timer and watch DTV at the same time, if need be, at least for the next year minus some change. The only drawback is that the VCR can't, without some more wiring, tape the crystal-clear DTV reception I'm getting, nor the bonus channels I get from our educational/public TV channel and the bonus CW network channel NBC is running. Obviously after the DTV switch, you'll be able to route your converter box through your VCR and time when you tape on channel 3 or 4 - your converter box will be outputting to one or the other according to your choice, so your VCR will "see" whatever DTV channel you're watching on analog 3 or 4 - but not select which channel you tape. To make matters worse, the TB100MW9 is set up by default to turn itself off after 4 hours of no use. This saves energy, but makes it difficult to tape The News Hour every evening while you're away. So I'm in the market for a remote and will soon be in the market for a new recording device with an automatic timer. I'm also waiting about a half-second when I flip for the new signal to be read before a picture hits the screen instead of benefiting from analog's instant feedback, killing the notorious channel surfing efficiency of guys like me by about 15%. I'm trading that for a much clearer picture (this new clarity really can't be overstated), three additional channels, and the ability to, at least for me, watch every channel I'd watched before without moving the rabbit ears at all. I'm also out about $13 after tax. That's non-trivial, I think. I'm not exactly destitute, but even I balked at laying down $24 for the privilege of watching DTV. Honestly, I bet it costs less than $24 to make one of these things, but that's just a hunch. Let's see what happens once the coupon program's over. And even at $13, I can't imagine what I'd be thinking if I was impoverished. Buying a new VCR, much less something like TiVo with what I believe is a monthly charge, is a hefty charge that doesn't exactly float my boat either. I also noticed a number of VCR/DVD combos that didn't tape, not even VHS, at the Wal-Mart, which struck me as particularly strange. The TB100MW9 can do letterbox, zoom, or squeeze translations of the new DTV aspect ratio. That's a nice feature to have. Yet HD broadcasts are slightly cut off on the edges on my Zenith set. I think I also noticed some text blurring when it was down-sampled to 480i. The overall great picture isn't without its shortcomings. I think that's about all I've got. Use your coupon as a credit card if you're at Wal-Mart, get ready to add yet another remote to your collection (the TB100MW9's buttons are incredibly small and elderly unfriendly to boot), prepare to long for the days when your VCR still worked as it was intended, and enjoy the picture and new channels. I'll rant about how this coupon program turns out to be something of a subsidy and free advertisement for Wal-Mart, Circuit City, Best Buy, and Radio Shack later. Labels: DTV posted by ruffin at 3/03/2008 09:54:00 PM
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Saturday, March 01, 2008
DTV: Like a well-oiled scam Tried to check on the status of my DTV converter box coupon today, which last week was in the, "We've prepared your coupon for mailing," stage. As if last week's description wasn't bad enough -- what's involved in preparing a coupon for the mail, exactly, that isn't so trivially close to hitting the post office that's it's not already there? -- today, I get this. We're sorry for the inconvenience. An unexpected error has occurred and been logged. You will be redirected to the home page in 30 seconds. You know some major pork dollars went into the creation of this site. If you're going to rob the taxpayer blind, I'd at least hope the site would work. And I'd expect the coupons to show up. I've been less than impressed with the phone service here too. The obvious message is that this system isn't about giving out coupons. It's about not giving out DTV converter box coupons. What happens to the pot of money set aside if they don't have the maximum number of requests? Apply now, folks, but don't expect to actually get these things. And once you get them, don't expect to find one you can buy. What a joke. The airwaves, in an inverse Robin Hood move, are being stolen from the public and sold to the corporations with the passive blessing of the nearly unaffected middle and upper classes. posted by ruffin at 3/01/2008 08:45:00 AM
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