A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Danny Glasser: The Road to HD: QAM to the rescue? — Danny is concocting the most complicated Rube Golbergian system possible to try to watch HD. Good luck! I might suggest just buying a TivoHD box and slipping a cablecard in it, you will have immediate HD football goodness.

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – Long Term Viability of AppleTV — I wonder about this too.  It seems like there are a kajillion boxes (for instance XStreamHD) and offerings (for instance Amazon Unbox) in this space. My gut tells me that this kind of service is going to get rolled into every settop box, dvd player, game console, just like DVR capability is getting rolled in. The need for a separate box is not apparent to me. I think this dynamic is going to kill off DVD players and their hidef ilk as well.

To my eyes, the game was actually painful to watch in HD — I was watching Q13 FOX on Comcast. You could detect noticeable interframe jitter, it was particularly noticeable when the camera panned down the field, the white yard stripes would show a lot of jumping. I don’t notice this on most ESPN football broadcasts — is this because ESPN is 720p whereas Fox is 1080i? I don’t know for sure but it was painful, and not just because the Buckeyes were stumbling.

The last time I tried to get a cablecard installed was a disaster — A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way: Comcast Cablecard Install. Things have gotten a lot better. I recently installed two cablecards from Comcast in two different Tivo3s and while it was crazy arcane, it could all be done over the phone and it worked. You have to record all kinds of goofy numbers and tell them to a Comcast rep over the phone, and then wait while they do some mysterious network authentication task, but then things work. Finally got rid of that disaster Microsoft TV box.

Apparently I am not the only person rediscovering the cablecard. And as noted, the cool thing about current cablecards is the multistream capability so that I can record two channels at once. You can’t get Comcast PPV/Ondemand content, but you can get Amazon Unbox.

Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection: TiVo Nirvana Has Arrived, Series 3 TiVo Available Now $799 — I’d be all over this if it wasn’t the middle of football season. I can’t upset my HD setup right now because I am dependent on it for my football fix. And I suspect getting two cablecards provisioned and working will be a long affair, based on my past experience with Comcast.

Cleaned out all my old Tivo season passes over the weekend and set up my new plan for this fall. Here’s the lineup:

• Monday: Prison Break, Medium, Weeds. Medium is a holdover from last year. Prison Break is a marginal new add — we don’t think it has found itself yet but we are hoping. Weeds is hilarious.
• Tuesday: House, Law&Order SVU. We love the House character, and well SVU is an old favorite.
• Wednesday: Lost. We didn’t get into this last year but will try this year.
• Thursday: Alias, Without a Trace. Alias an old favorite, and the characters in Without a Trace have grown on us.
• Friday: nothing. DVD night!
• Saturdays: NCAA Football.
• Sunday: Desparate Housewives. Total brain candy.

We’ll sample My Name is Earl, Everybody Hates Chris, The Apprentice:Martha Stewart based on the buzz for the first two, and well we are just curious about the reinvention of Martha.

Later in the season we’ll pick up 24 and The Sopranos.

Shows that didn’t make the list: numb3rs (we sampled last year but the pseudo-math babble annoys us), other law and order shows (we just don’t like the characters as much), malcolm ( a long time favorite but you can’t see it all), the apprentice (we’re tired of the donald), entourage (boring), cold case (we just never got hooked), smallville (we used to love this show but last season was a disaster).

Even with Tivo time compression, we watch way too much TV.

• Flickr viewer for XBOX media center
• Tivo annunces developer challenge winners.

Still a young market, but it seems like over the next 2-3 years every TV is going to have some sort of platform box attached, and there is going to be a great market for TV apps.

How can Dancing With The Stars be the #1 show on TV??? I can’t even identify the stars. I clearly am out of step with most of the country.

• The rise of developer communities targetting the hometheater experience is interesting, something I’m fascinated by. For example, this itunes plugin for tivo. Tivo2 and Windows Media Center Edition are fighting neck and neck for plugins and addons; the Mac Mini is the dark horse. There will be some real breakthrough products and companies here.
• Meanwhile the cable industry is trying its best to screw up the experience — good posts here on their reticence around cablecards. my personal experience with cablecard is terrible, in fact it has quit working at my house. Getting HD content into the Mac Mini and PC is critical for the success of these platforms.
• Hilarious post from Evslin on TV usability — “…A true geek, of course, can play a coffee table full of remotes like a xylophone…”

• Very excited about centerstage as the media center UI for my mac mini. One of the missing components that this machine needs to be the perfect hometheater pc.
• Rich wonders why people aren’t using notebooks as hometheater pcs. It’s a fine point. Price, styling are probably partial blockers.

So after a week of playing with my new mac mini as my hometheater pc, i am mostly happy. I’ve configured it to grab downloaded AVIs (via bittorrent) off my windows file server — the mac connected pretty easily to windows, in some ways it is easier than connecting two xp machines. Per this guide, i installed vlc to play the downloaded avis — works great.  (Wow I had forgotten how easy it is to install apps on the mac).

Still looking for two things to complete the experience:

• a great 10 foot ui for playing avis and dvds. Myth is overkill, i don’t want all the pvr functionality, i just want the 10 foot UI.
• a wireless remote. I have the bluetooth kb and mouse but I want a remote.  Maybe this griffin airclick tho it doesn’t seem to be shipping yet?

So just a few more pieces and it will be perfect. And for once the mac is the price leader — compare with windows-based systems that people are building. And of course the mac is the style leader — compare with this ugly brute.

Hey rich has been having trouble getting the new microsoft/moto dvr box from comcast — rich here is my blog entry on that.

Also I ordered a cablecard from comcast today for my new sharp lcdtv — also impossible to find on the comcast website — call the same number as above and ask for a cablecard. they’ll try to talk you out of it but eventually they will cave.

Other random tv links while I’m thinking about:

• Palm sized DLP projector — cool!
• Extremetech’s guide to building your own media center pc
• Steve’s thoughts on the ideal tv-attached box — I’ve personally been sucked into the mac mini mania and have ordered one for this application.