After my DVD player died and I was able to bring it to life, I noticed a button on it I had never used before. It was the Progressive Scan button. I bought this DVD player partly because it was progressive scan meaning that instead of showing you every other line of the picture 60 times a second it would show you a fresh frame 60 times a second. But apparently it would only do that if you pressed this button and I had never done that.
Category: Uncategorized
Trying to Save the Season
One of the headlines I read yesterday said that professional hockey players have agreed to take a 24% reduction in salaries in order to end the current labor dispute in the NHL and save the hockey season after already missing 85 days of the season.
The bigger problem? I didn’t know that *any* games had been missed. It never even occurred to me that the hockey season should be underway right now.
Last year I remember reading that the NHL’s current TV contract was over and they were taking bids for a broadcaster to buy the rights. The problem was that nobody wanted the rights. The final price they were able to negotiate was $0 (but at least they will be on TV still, or would have been if they had any games). And the league is losing $250 million a year.
HDTV DVR
Even though I already bought a HDTV decoder box, Dish Network is now selling their HDTV Digital Video Recorder Model 921 for $550 whereas last year at this time it was $1000 if you could find it (it had just come out). Because the HDTV signal has 5 times as much information as a regular signal, recording HDTV programs takes much more disk space and processing power. The 921 has a 250 GB hard drive in it and it still only lets you store about 25 hours of HDTV programming (or 180 hours of regular programming; that’s more than 5 times, but satellite signals are compressed). Dish itself only broadcasts a limited number of HDTV stations because it takes up a lot of bandwidth on their satellites too. They have HD versions of Discovery, ESPN, and TNT as well as a HD movie channel and HDNet with various HD offerings for $10 a month. Broadcasting hundreds or thousands of local channels in HDTV would take so many satellites that it may never happen. So Dish made sure the 921 could receive HDTV signals through an antenna and record them.
Sunnipaev
I’ve gotten a couple of e-mails from Martti since he went back to Estonia. For my birthday he sent me the following birthday card:
That crazy Garfield!!!
HDTV Reception
Last year when I bought my Sony HDTV it was “HDTV ready” meaning it couldn’t actually show you HDTV signals it was receiving. When I first moved into the house I had terrible TV reception with an indoor antenna. Then I got a neat looking antenna that didn’t really work. Then I eventually bought a big multi-pronged aluminum one and put it in the attic. That didn’t work all that well either. But eventually local stations were offered on satellite (first DirecTV then I switched to Dish Network) for $6 so I just paid the extra for very clear local stations. When I got the Dish PVR with its built in digital recorder, having the local stations over satellite was a real plus.