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Our new plasma showed up early! The Stereo Shop said it would take a week, but the guy left me an email on Wednesday afternoon so of course we had to go get it. We settled on the Panasonic TH-50PZ850U…decided against the Pioneers since they’re selling off their plasma business to Panasonic, and decided that the tv having ethernet is pretty cool (for firmware updates and such), even if we don’t use the youtube and picasa features. We were a little bit torn about the Pioneers since they support DLNA, but oh well, maybe it’ll be more established next time we upgrade. Since we are switching up to blu-ray and needed everything to be 1080p, that meant a new receiver as well (so that we can switch HDMI)…this time we went up a level to the Denon 4308ci (our last was a 3803). We were going to wait for Black Friday on the blu-ray, but the Stereo Shop offered us their black friday price on the Sony BDP-S350, which we were going to get anyway, for $199 (I think we could’ve gotten it for $179 from Sears or K-Mart on Friday, but figured why not). He tried to sell us Monster HDMI cables too but we came to our senses, there. The TV had to be unboxed to fit in the Subaru and it was like Tetris trying to fit the receiver and blu ray boxes in there too.

OK, I ALMOST came to my senses about HDMI. We had ordered HDMI cables online for like $5 each but they are being shipped ground from California. This was fine when we thought the TV wouldn’t be here until next week. But the sight of a blu-ray player sitting there on the shelf was bugging the hell out of me. In the interests of marital harmony, Paul suggested we go buy 2 cables from Wal-Mart…the minimum we’d need to hook it into the receiver and hook the receiver to the TV. $60 for impatient geekdom. But man, Wall*E and Nightmare Before Christmas looked and sounded great…when we finally figured out how to get the blu ray player to pass through the audio as bitstream (had something to do with the bd live or additional content audio setting; we had it on ‘Mix’ and we needed ‘Direct’).

The other thing was, the TV came with a stand but not bolts for other mounts (we have a low A/V shelf with pole mount)…had to go to Lowe’s to get them.

So now we’re just waiting for HDMI cables so I can eliminate component/optical for the cable box and one DVD jukebox, which frees up enough component connectors on the Denon that I can finally eliminate the manual switchboxes…yay. Next up, new motherboard and/or video card for Mooby so we can hook that up HDMI as well.

This is the first time we bought A/V equipment where everything had an ethernet jack. First thing we did with all three was get firmware updates. Can’t wait to see how the Sony blu-ray jukebox will turn out–will we finally get a complete disc title listing without having to type them all in?

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My dad got an article into a UK video publication recently (he’s an HD consultant and recently worked on Collateral and the Miami Vice movie). Here’s his IMDB page and his consulting website.

So, we finally gave up on the Philips RC9800i remote. The Pronto line was just so much better, more configurable, easier to use…about all the 9800 had going for it was the color display. Things that were annoying abou it:

• you couldn’t pick which buttons you wanted displayed on the screens nor where they were displayed, nor the labels on them (except for a very few ‘user’ buttons on each remote). Even the buttons you didn’t program were left on the display to go ‘ding’ if you hit them.
• you had no control over what macro keys would appear on any given ‘watch’ remote. For example, although the ‘Watch DVD’ screen included the aspect button from the TV remote, the one for watching replay or cable tv did not. So, if you wanted to change the aspect ratio of the tv, you’d have to go to the main screen, pick individual remote, pick the remote, scroll through the screens, and find the key. On the Pronto, I always had a hard key dedicated to this function for all the remotes.
• No control at all over the functions of any of the hard keys
• Long pauses and lock-ups
• You could only scroll through device screens in one direction, meaning a LOT of screens to flip through in some cases (not to mention the annoying program guide which I never used)

In other words, it was meant for ‘ease of use’ in setting it up (wizards but no ProntoEdit), but very little configurability and ease of use for power users.
I’m going to give the old remote to my parents; their setup is less complicated and might not cause them as many issues with the remote. My dad might like it; he used to work for Philips (video cameras).
I ended up picking up a Philips TSU3500 Pronto. It’s one step up from the old TSU3000 we had. I would’ve loved a 7500 but didn’t feel like spending 6-700 hundred dollars for it; the color’s just not worth double the cost for me. Another nice thing about this choice: I had saved our old 3000 config file and was able to save it as a 3500 file and write it to the remote without having to do any new programming! I might pretty it up this weekend a bit, but it works now.

Looks as if the Tivo Series 3 won’t have TivoToGo after all. That makes it almost infinitely less likely I’ll buy it…while I’d love a better interface than the piece of shit Scientific Atlanda 8300HD offered by Time Warner, I’m not willing to pay $800, a monthly fee, cable card fees, *and still* not be able to get my content off it.

By the way, Time Warner, you suck, too: “As of January 2006, any new digital services added will NOT be available with a CableCard.” That includes new channels such as Universal HD.

More on DRM.

Finally got the Philips RC9800i all programmed. Good: it’s in color, not bad interface, price, wireless stuff (I guess, seems pretty useless for me). Meh: Not very configurable (no PC software to edit every last button/screen as in Pronto series); the only user editable keys are 8 user defined ones for each device; very limited hard keys (only the ones you define for menu up/down/left/right/ok, mute, volume, channel); no way to mix keys from different devices on one screen or assign them to a hard key (biggest problem one for me is the ‘aspect’ button for TV); locks up sometimes; device icons are listed as very generic ‘PVR’, ‘DVD’ etc so if you have more than one you have to remember what order they’re in; it displays keys on the remote even if they have no code assigned to them; no way to move around or delete keys from the display. I like being able to set up remotes exactly as I like; this doesn’t quite fit the bill but I guess it’ll work for now. I do like the form factor and UI, and it seems pretty responsive.

A CableCard HD Tuner card. Meh: Windows only (probably due to the CableCard requirements).

ReplayTV PC Edition. Meh: no HD support yet. Windows only, even for streaming.

HDTivo (standalone; series 3). Meh: no more lifetime service fees. Isn’t it weird how they announced this right after Replay exited the set-top business?

Blu-ray/HDDVD. Meh: why did there have to be two? And the whole thing about possibly limiting resolution on component outputs (thus screwing us early HD monitor adopters).
I used to be an early adopter. Lately I’m feeling like I’d be a schmuck to buy into any of these half-assed technologies.

The lengths I’ll go to to save $30-$50 (depending on seller) for Texas Ranch House on DVD:

• Recorded in HD on TWC DVR because I wanted to watch it in HD at least once (yeah, I know my final product is SD DVD but at least it’s a nice clean source).
• ‘Save to VCR’ from there to standalone ReplayTV box, wait 2 hours per night’s recording (no, no easy means of extracting data directly, and it’s not mine so I’m not likely to break into it)
• DVArchive to download it to my laptop
• gopdit to determine edit points (remove few commercials, chapter points to skip ‘next time’, credits, etc
• rtvedit to apply edit file from previous step
• rtvconvert to get it from Replay format into something more palatable to DVD (splitting into m2v and mp2 as future steps like that better)
• mplex the audio and video back together (don’t ask why. At least it’s all in sync.)
• take screen shots, edit out music clips, etc; gimp it into menu screens and a bunch more steps to stick it all together
• dvdauthor it
• mkisofs it
• copy the iso back to our media machine
• burn to DVD

See ReplayToDvd wiki for some details.

Just think, this is still fair use. Maybe not for long. If only I didn’t have to go through that additional digital to analog conversion….

I’ve spent the past few days completely obsessed with Texas Ranch House (in HD, on PBS). In particular, following threads on TWoP (lots of snark and actual posts by RH Jared) and Yahoo Groups (where you’ll find posts from Mrs. C, Vienna, Johnny, Ian, and Rob). What’s really funny is reading both forums over the course of the airings. Initially everyone’s fairly sympathetic to everyone, but by night 4, watch out Cooke family! Which, by the way, was jaw-dropping. To think Mr. Cooke whined for weeks about how everyone should respect his business acumen, then it turns out he didn’t do the one job he was most responsible for (keeping perfect books), and has the bad business sense not to realize the RH’s were probably the most important piece of the whole puzzle. Call their bluff, indeed. You have to wonder if the producers didn’t tell them their performance would be graded based on whether the ranch could actually have continued.

Loved Howie. We’re convinced he’s part Italian Greyhound or Whippet…check out those legs and tail! Our joke was that the dog must’ve been fed a lot of beans over the course of the production, and that his name should’ve been Beans. So every time we saw him, we yelled Beans! and pretended he was constantly scheming for more of them so he could stink up the ranch house/bunk house.

I don’t get DRM for music. They’re already selling whole albums in non-protected, unencrypted formats (ie the CD), which you can rip and do whatever you want the songs. But if I only want one or two songs off an album, generally I’m stuck with whatever lame DRM’ed, compressed format they feel like selling. And don’t tell me I can go buy a subscription on one of the non-DRM MP3 sites…I only want a few songs at a time, and very rarely what they’re selling (although I did recently buy a copy of Jonathan Coulton’s ‘Code Monkey’).

So what’s the purpose of DRM? To force me to buy entire albums when I only want a couple of songs? To prepare me for some kind of sucky future in which most music is DRM’ed and there are no CD’s? C’mon. Is it so much to ask? I *want* to pay for a copy of these songs. I just want them in the same format I’d get them in if I happened to buy the entire crappy album. You don’t seem to mind selling me a CD that I can rip to whatever format I like. Maybe it would encourage artists to produce albums that are more than just a few good songs, with the rest being filler?

Speaking of DRM, kudos to Sony for making their first-gen blu-ray stuff export full-res over all connections. It almost makes you happy to be an early adopter (well, early/middle anyway, 3 years) of an HD monitor. Still, even though we had a DVD player within about a month of their original release, I doubt I’ll be getting off the fence with regards to HD or blu-ray DVD. It’s not so much the player as the thought of replacing the media in one format or the other.

• Clerks II
• Superman Returns
• Nacho Libre

That should keep you alive at least through the summer. A little longer:

Tivo Series 3. Junk your cable company’s piece of crap DVR.

The Time Odyssey series.

If you’re looking for something more long-term, try the Earths’ Children series. 26 years from the first book til now, and we’re still waiting for one (or) more. We’ll be lucky if the author lives long enough to finish it.

I love that Time Warner was able to get my billing straightened out within a few hours, so we could get a DVR (had to break out cable TV services as residential since they don’t allow DVR for commercial sites, and we have Homebusiness Roadrunner out of our house for telecommuting purposes).

I love that I was able to pick up an HD DVR the same day from their East Rochester office, so that I could finish out the Olympics in HD.

I love that I can view and record HDTV, and that the DVR has more than one tuner (although, the HD lineup is still stinky, especially if you don’t want to pay them the extra $5 for HDNet/ESPN, and probably soon Universal).
That being said, Scientific Atlanta’s 8300HD is the worst piece of crap DVR UI I’ve ever used, with the possible exception of the Dishplayer (whom I forgive for being a *very* early DVR).

How, with the far superior Tivo and Replay UIs having been out for years, could Sci-At come up with such a steaming turd? See my continuing comparison.

OK, so I’ve been waiting for the technology to mature before getting an HD DVR.

Waiting for them to work out the copyright issues so they could allow video extraction, without my having to go through an additional analog-to-digital conversion on another box (yes, I’ve been spoiled by ReplayTV and DVArchive) to edit the video and burn a DVD (yes, this is still legal. It’s called fair use, if we’re only making a copy for ourselves).

Waiting for CableCard so that I don’t have to connect the analog output of a cable box to an external DVR that *does* allow video extraction.

Tivo version 3 may be that box. But I don’t feel like waiting months.

Time Warner has the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD. So far, I’m finding it has an extremely crappy user interface compared to either ReplayTV or Tivo. But at least it’s HD, I didn’t have to pay for the box, and when I get sick of it I can just take it back to them and cancel whenever. Like when the Tivo V3’s come out.

A work in progress.
Note the new wiki (in link) icon. Pee insisted either I make a new icon that didn’t cut off Icky’s head, or forgo an icon entirely.

A lot of people probably have good memories of their childhood when they watch TV shows or movies from the era in which they grew up. I think this is even more true if you happened to grow up near places that were filmed a lot. For instance, at least one episode of Dukes of Hazzard involving a racetrack was filmed at the Saugus Speedway–which, of course, reminds me of the weekend swapmeets held there, which we used to attend occasionally. Lots of the back road driving on that show reminds me vaguely of the Santa Clarita valley in the mid 80’s, as well (and not at all of the year we lived in the southeast, oddly enough). Always makes me think of how neat it was in the SCV and the surrounding area then–still relatively empty, lots of hills, scrub, onion fields, and not so developed. Very different from how it seemed last time I visited in ‘99, and I’m sure even moreso from how it looks now.

ET, while not specifically shot anywhere I knew, took place in a neighborhood that looked very much like the ones I grew up in. Don’t know where that corn field and pine forest came from, though; certainly not behind my house nor within biking distance.
Then, there is the mother lode of things shot near Vasquez Rocks…old Star Treks, old Battlestar Galacticas, commercials…just reminds me of all the hours I used to spend with my mom in nearby dry streambeds cracking open rocks looking for agate. Also it reminds me of the time my dad worked a night shoot for the TV show Benson and took me along to watch them tape. Very long night, while they sat near a “downed” helicopter and had to stop shooting every time a plane flew over. I remember arriving home cold (got pretty chilly overnight) and falling into bed exhausted.

Since my dad worked in TV (video engineer), a lot of TV shows trigger memories of where we were living at those times…Too Close for Comfort, It’s a Living, Golden Girls…got to go to the set for that last once. The movie The Color Purple reminds me of the time my dad worked on a short video shoot involving Whoopi Goldberg, whom I got to meet (she signed my VHS copy of the movie). Blah blah blah namedropping blah. Reruns of Night Court, along with a signed script (from one of the Hurricane episodes with Brent Spiner as a hick), remind me of my parents’ friend Jeff who had a few different jobs on the show, from what I recall.

Pump up the Volume, while done a couple of years after I left, was shot at my high school.
I’m not sure where this post came from. I fairly often get nostalgic about stuff, but I really wouldn’t want to be living out there now. For one, I’m glad we’ll be paying off our house within my lifetime, and I prefer the near-solitude here to the postage stamp yards I remember from those years. For another, I never got through a winter there without wishing it had snowed (I’m just about feeling that way this year here!) But it’s pretty nice remembering how it was then.

I’ve updated my annual (semi-annual?) spreadsheet comparing pay TV services in the Rochester NY area. It compares the Fingerlakes Time Warner Cable, Dish Network, and DirecTV lineups. It may or may not be useful to you, especially the color coding for what channels matter to me.

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Open Office 1 format
Open Office 2 format

Sorry, MS weenies, you’re totally out of luck.