Digital Lifestyle

Shop damnit!! Shop!!!

We spent $200 at Target tonight. LED Christmas lights, some groceries, a few odds and ends and a poster frame. No gifts tho.

Spent 70 at grocery. Went for bread and milk.

I bought an xbox 360 recently. They brought out the christmas bundles which means you can get a 360 pro with a 60gb hard drive and two free games for $400AUD which is the same as a wii. some retailers are throwing in extra games and now different retail chains are trying to out do each other on how many free games they throw in.

>Spent 70 at grocery. Went for bread and milk.

Man, that better be damn fine bread & milk...

New firmware for Late 2008 portables.

I bought an $8 pair of RCA rabbit ears, and hooked them up to my been-dreaming-about-it-since-I-was-8 big-screen TV, in anticipation of the Dish Network installer showing up in a week or so.

$8 goes a long, long, long way...

OTA Digital HD is probably the best looking outside of Blu-Ray.

The satellites and cable channels have to re-over-compress their signals. Verizon's FiOS TV is supposed to be very pretty, but I don't have it, or cable, or satellite, because I would watch too much TV if I did. As it is, I'm behind on my stories :/

Tom:

Serious question (for a change) with your connections, do you know of any trustworthy reference type site that really has valid comparisons of satellite and FTTN type video? I have coder friends at ATT who claim that the FTTN network is grossly undersized and massively re-compressed content is the result, but I suspect a lot of them also seethe with contempt for their employer, imagine that...

The Uverse offer seems like it makes sense for me to switch my POTS to VOIP and the FTTN internet service seems like it ought to be a no-brainer over cable modem, but even then I am not sure. I am not luddite, but I know more than enough folks who have been burned by Comcast VOIP or Vonage on a DSL line and the anguish they had to endure (mostly from sheepishly caving in to spousal taunts of "I told you it wouldn't work") when going back to POTS is not something I need...



Any and all non-fanboi / basher references are appreciated.

I was shopping uverse last night. Not in my area it appears. Read a lot of negative reviews.

Stan,

Most of my knowledge about the differences between the various delivery compression rates and quality of service comes from the AVSForums. There was a bitrate comparison for the same content between the various services (which I can't find at the moment) which clearly showed who re-compressed the head-end source and who didn't.

Here's an interesting comparison between BluRay, Digital HD cable and AppleTV HD:
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/apple-tv-20-vs-blu-ray-dvd-hd-cable-the-comparison/

hm. was wondering if it was the settings on my tv or on the ps3 that kept my resolution at 1080i, not 1080p.

ddt

Quote
tomierna
OTA Digital HD is probably the best looking outside of Blu-Ray.

The satellites and cable channels have to re-over-compress their signals.

This isn't necessarily true of all cable systems. Comcast has gone on record saying that they do not re-compress their HD channels. They send out the unaltered MPEG2 stream that they receive from the sources.

This is obviously going to change when they switch over to MPEG4 in the next year or so, though.

Comcast has also been caught lying in the past.

Still can't get in the PBS "Second Channel" with very much clarity, despite their broadcast tower being just two towns over - which is a shame, as Channel 36's "Create" channel is like the Travel Channel, TLC and HGTV all rolled into one, with no commercials and a lot more brainpower. (Their hosts are all dead fish, tho. The worst was the guy hosting the Sicillian travelogue - not only did he have child-molester glasses, he also had the most stilted and affected speaking style since MotorTrend TV... and the royalty-free soundtrack was also selected by the MTTV production crew after drinking wine and eating Xanax.)

That said, Pushing Daisies OTA HD was jaw-dropping - it was like a cartoon with real people somehow living in it. Tim Burton on prozac, directing a Michael Chabon script. I have such a crush on Snook, you just don't know.

The rest of prime-time OTA HD sucks utterly, despite being very pretty, and was taken up by unbelievable police procedurals guest-starring the editor from the old Max Headroom show as a "Lets Be Careful Out There" Police Captain.

Is this the line for the petition to remaster and bring Max Headroom to Blu-Ray? If so, I'm standing in it.

Funny you bring up max. He's the spokesman for the UK's move to digital tv. Ties both discussions together.
Search YouTube for channel 4 max headroom.

Radioshark HD: 2 years of vapor and counting

Shame about pushing daisies being canned. It's one of absolutes favorites.

I have Uverse and it has been great after the install which took over half a day as we waited for someone to come out to fix the line up on the poles. Since I got it installed it has not been down once (knock on wood) and the speed of 18 down/1.5 up has been great. I had DIRECTV HD before and the picture quality looks the same. The real killer feature of Uverse though is the VOD, pretty much all the pay per view channels have their shows and movies on demand along with some of the cable channels. There are also something like 705+ PPV VOD movies.

Daniel

Did you get the VOIP with uverse?

Which DirectTV box did you have? I really don't wanna give up my Phillips TiVos -- I own 'em and they rock