Meador Manor

So what is high definition TV? Answers vary widely! My own standard would be an image that is at least 720 pixels high (preferably 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels high) and is delivered at a reasonable bandwidth. While many services now feature images that large, the bandwidth can really bite.

Here’s what fake HD video looks like by ZDNet‘s George Ou offers an interesting glimpse of how image quality can degrade. I had previously noticed this issue with the high-def channels I used to receive via my local cable company, where macro-blocking and other bandwidth problems were much more visible than in most of the over-the-air digital broadcasts I now view with my rooftop antenna.

Complicating the comparisons is that all high-definition video is heavily compressed using different algorithms, which vary in their efficiency. MPEG2 is commonly used but less capable than the more modern H.264/MPEG4 and VC-1 codecs.

The video options currently available to me at Meador Manor appear to stack up as follows:

*Apple won’t release high-def movie rentals for Apple TV for another week.

One can see that physical media still retain a huge quality advantage over the online options, and I’m very pleased that I now have broadcast HDTV enabled. I don’t know what effective bandwidth my cable TV service was providing for its HD channels, but I would subjectively rate those channels as between DVD and Antenna Broadcasts in the above table, with the cable HD shows occasionally dipping very low in quality with image break-ups.

I won’t be giving up my NetFlix DVD and HD-DVD disc rentals anytime soon, but I have found the Amazon Unbox on my TiVo to be far superior to the NetFlix online streaming service both in picture quality and in convenience. NetFlix is trying to compete with the Amazon/TiVo and Apple TV services by now offering free unlimited streaming to almost all NetFlix customers. But the poor image quality due to limited streaming bandwidth, the occasional hang-ups in the video stream, and the hassle of getting the computer-based images onto the living room TV are huge drawbacks.

Well, it didn’t take me long to re-invest the forthcoming year of monetary savings from cancelling cable television. Tuesday night I kept an appointment to sit down and watch a wonderful live high-definition transmission of a NOVA episode on broadcast PBS. And sure enough, a phone call briefly interrupted the viewing and I had no way to record the show except in standard def on an old VCR or an obnoxious DVD recorder. So I went out and bought a TiVo HD DVR with three years of prepaid service. Now I can record and watch high-definition signals again and pause live TV, just as I did for several years with my old cable DVR.

TiVo HD at Amazon

I saw my first TiVo in action years ago when visiting an old friend in Colorado. His young daughter sold me on the thing’s merits, but when I went to digital cable I used their Motorola DVR to tune in and record standard and high-definition shows. To steal a phrase from Jerry Pournelle, it was “good enough”. Reminds one of Windows vs. Mac, and I’ve yet to find the money to buy a Mac although I’ve promised myself my next computer will be an expen$ive but elegant Macintosh since they can now finally run Windoze in a pinch.

My new TiVo is, of course, wonderful. A person with a digital cable package likely cannot justify its costs over the bundled DVR deals from the cable company, but now that I’m reliant on over-the-air broadcasts the TiVo HD is my ticket to maximizing the potential of those signals.

Besides offering a great interface for finding, watching, and recording shows (including its fun habit of recording things it thinks you might like), the TiVo HD can wirelessly network to your home computer to play music and podcasts, show photos, watch movies from Amazon Unbox, etc. But I already have an Apple TV, and the Apple TV was much easier to set up and operate.

The TiVo kept generating all sorts of odd behaviors, errors, and seizures when I tried to connect to my home computer. I knew my firewall was likely to blame, so I made sure ZoneAlarm had authorized the TiVo services it could see. When that didn’t help, I then spent far too much time trying to tweak open the TiVo-desired ports on my network router, all to no avail. The TiVo would see the computer and other network services briefly, but they could never be accessed reliably.

Having troubleshot my way through the problems several times, I finally decided to disable ZoneAlarm and reboot the TiVo and the TiVo Desktop server software on the computer. Still no luck. So I went in and UNdid all of the painful port tweaks on my wireless router. Success at last!

Evidently my free version of ZoneAlarm wasn’t opening the ports properly, and my router hardware tweaks were just making things worse. So now, with the router back to its normal configuration and my computer protected by the lackluster firewall built into Windoze, it appears my TiVo has full functionality.

But my Apple TV still has a much better interface for listening to music and podcasts via iTunes. Hopefully Apple will offer an upgrade soon so it can rent instead of only buy downloaded movies – TiVo’s partnership with Amazon Unbox is ahead on that count. Why in the world would you buy a downloaded movie when you could rent it far more cheaply? But I can already watch many “free” hours of streaming movies on my TV through my laptop computer thanks to my NetFlix account and computer-to-TV adapter. So it looks like I won’t take much advantage of the computer-network functions of my TiVo, despite all of the tedium in making them functional.

But I certainly will enjoy recording great high-definition PBS broadcasts. It always drove me crazy that the local cable company carries several HD channels, but not PBS. I’m looking forward to viewing NOVA, Soundstage, and American Masters in high definition.

My TiVo’s antenna tuner does one better than the Samsung digital tuner I was using previously – it can tune in analog signals as well as digital, so I can easily watch ABC Channel 8 from Tulsa. That station’s digital signal on channel 10 isn’t strong enough for my antenna to pick up, unlike the other Tulsa stations. Hopefully that will change after February 2009 when the nearby analog channel 11 goes away and the ABC station can boost its digital signal’s power. And the TiVo downloads its viewing guides through the internet, so they extend much further into the future than the limited viewing guide the Samsung unit assembled from the information encoded into the broadcast digital signals.

I’ve already decided to give the Samsung tuner to my parents in OKC so that they can enjoy digital television in place of the analog broadcasts they currently view. That will carry them on past February 2009 and can even serve up some nice high-resolution video for them whenever they finally buy a high-definition television.

Well, I’m feeling a bit Blu, because Blu-Ray may well have won the format war for high-definition video discs. Why does that make me sad? Because I bought an HD-DVD player a couple of months ago so I could watch my brand new and very expen$ive remastered Star Trek Season 1 episodes. They were only available on HD-DVD and at that time the format war seemed endless since it was going on through another holiday season.

All of that changed in the past couple of days with Warner studios announcing they are switching to only supporting Blu-Ray, which only leaves two major studios, Paramount and Universal, in the HD-DVD exclusive camp. Rumors are flying that those final studios will switch and the format war will be decided with the death of HD-DVD.

So I may be out over $350 with my soon-to-be-obsolete HD-DVD player and discs and having to face buying a Blu-Ray player on top of that. Ouch. Betamax, anyone?

I cancelled my cable TV service today, only retaining the 5-MB internet service. No more HDTV via cable, no more digital cable TV, not even basic analog cable TV. I decided to stop wasting about $60 per month on such services since I get almost all of my audiovisual entertainment these days from internet podcasts or Netflix DVD rentals, and increasingly can find the rare TV show worth watching via the internet, by renting a series on DVD, or through BitTorrent sites.

So I decided to revert to over-the-air broadcast television, which is free once you’ve installed your antenna and a receiver. But now it is digital broadcast television, which is a great improvement on the old analog system that will go off-air in February, 2009.

In my case, I already had a VHF/UHF television antenna pointed toward Tulsa strapped onto my home’s chimney. I put it up back in 1995 so I could pick up Star Trek Voyager, which wasn’t being carried on my local cable system but was on analog broadcast. It was quite a chore to pound the grounding rod eight feet into the ground and strap up and wire the antenna, but it did work. The effort seemed wasted when a week or two later they started carrying Voyager on cable; I never used the antenna much after that.

But this week I bought a refurbished Samsung digital TV receiver box from an online reseller and hooked it up to my old weather-beaten antenna. Now I can enjoy eleven useful digital stations on my TV – I won’t ever watch the six religious channels and one children’s channel I can also pick up on it.

The stations all come in very clear, which is a relief to us old farts who grew up on analog broadcasts with their ghosting and interference patterns. Digital transmissions include error correction, so pretty much either come in great or not at all.

Better yet, I can pick up NBC, CBS, PBS, FOX, and MyNetwork TV in 1080 high-definition, the same resolution as an advanced Blu-Ray or HD-DVD disc. (I haven’t found a way to pull in the ABC affiliate’s digital signal yet, which I believe is carried on a VHF instead of a UHF channel. Oh, and purists will note that the advanced video discs can output progressive video to a top-notch television, while the broadcast version is interlaced, but my older HDTV can’t show progressive 1080 signals anyway.)

I even get a weather channel, since NBC’s Tulsa affiliate runs a full-time sub-channel with constant news and weather info. And I get a free program guide, since digital shows include the necessary data for my set-top box to convert into the same kind of guide a cable box will create.

What is particularly interesting is that the broadcast high-definition shows I’ve received thus far appear to be of better quality than the high-definition channels I used to receive via cable. Why? The cable company may be squeezing down the bandwidth to fit more channels on their system, or they could be having trouble processing the signal for their system. On cable’s HDTV stations I’d often see macro-blocking , signal delays, freezing, and other visual annoyances. But so far the over-the-air broadcasts are quite clean and clear.

My next challenge is to figure out the best way to record the broadcast shows for time-shifted viewing. I really liked having a DVR on the old cable box and would hate to have to go back to recording tapes on my old VCR. I have an older DVD recorder, but it is ridiculously difficult to hookup and operate. So I plan to buy a little plug-in HDTV tuner for my laptop computer. Then I can also hook it up to my antenna and use the computer itself as a DVR. I already have a little converter to output the computer display to my television using component video. I can easily pay for the extra tuner with the $60 a month I’m saving.

This cost-saving measure comes after I recently ditched Ma Bell after a lifetime of usage. I cancelled my AT&T landline phone and replaced it with a limited-service Vonage internet phone. I can still use my cordless house phones, still have caller ID and voicemail and the rest, and my new number is unlisted so I never get interrupted by beggars from various charities or annoying politicos or marketers. And I don’t have to keep the cell phone charged and my Vonage phone has 911 location capability.

Being cheap never felt so good!