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Alex · March 4th, 2009, 01:23 AM

I was just scanning through the off-topic section, and realized that we haven't had a real television thread yet. What self-respecting internet forum doesn't have a television thread? We need to fix that!

I'll make this a two-parter; first how we like to watch TV, then what we watch. Any and all TV topics are fair game here, and we can always split things off to separate threads if it becomes necessary at some point.

First, Annie and I are tech-weenies. Me perhaps more so, but she'll admit to it as well, to a point.

When DVR's were first starting to make news back in '98, we started thinking that there was a way out of our carefully constructed VCR taping schedule. I traveled quite a bit, so a lot of this fell on Annie to replace the tapes, and it could not have been clunkier. We weren't even into that many shows, but we hated missing the ones we liked, so we were pretty good about the system. As clunky as it was. (one tape per day, labelled by day, replaced each morning so the programmed recordings for each night would have enough space, the better shows recorded at LP instead of EP, all that crap).

So a DVR sounded great! But hard drives were still expensive, and initially Tivo wanted $999 for a 14-hr DVR (with a 15-GB drive in it). Neat toy, but too expensive for the benefits it provided. That 14-hrs was at the worst picture quality as well, at best picture quality it was more like 1/3 of that. But technology moved, as it always does, and by the middle of 1999, Tivo dropped the price on their 30-hr unit from $999 to $399, and that was the time we jumped on it. Friends at work were also into it, and within a few weeks I had upgraded it to a 60-hr unit (with a 2nd 30-GB drive, which probably went for $200 or so). Annie and I loved it! We were able to record much more than we could on the VCR, never had to switch tapes, but most importantly, we could watch whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted! (As long as we had enough storage). It was only a short while after that when we added a 2nd Tivo, so we could record 2 shows at once. That truly freed us from every needing to watch live TV; and we haven't since. It's been 10 years at this point. Sometime around 2001 we switched to a pair of DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes, and I also upgraded both of them to their max supported capacity at the time, and each of those had 2 tuners of their own, so we had 4 tuners to record, along with enough drive space that we could go for months without watching things if we wanted. Those boxes were nice as well because they record everything at the exact same quality of the original DirecTV signal; there's no re-encoding or compressing. Basically it just writes out to disk what it would be sending to your screen anyway, so there was zero picture quality difference from live to recorded, for the first time. (Because even at the highest quality on the analog tivos, the picture quality wasn't as good as live. Much better than a VCR, but still not picture-perfect). At that time we started recording shows during the year, saved up entire seasons, and then watched them in summer when nothing else was on. It was convenient, and also even better for some serial-type shows, where we could watch 2 or 3 in a row if we were in the mood, rather than having to wait until the next week for a cliffhanger.

The only problem with all of the above was that none of these devices were HD. HD is one of those things that really sucks. Because if you don't have it, you don't know what you're missing and you're perfectly content. But then you see it, and you realize "oh crap". I used to like this SD picture. I used to be perfectly happy with this SD picture. But now I know it's crap.

The issue was that when we started realizing this in 2005, there was still no viable way to record HD in a way that would allow Annie and me to continue to never worry about live TV, and catch up weeks or months later whenever we had the time. At that time the HD DVR's from DirecTV were a joke, with way too little capacity, and even hacked and upgraded, that version of the HD DirecTV signal (mpeg2) was quite large, and it would be prohibitively expensive to have enough drive capacity. HD programs would take about 7 times the amount of storage that the SD DirecTV programs need, which is quite a multiple. So I hemmed and hawed and didn't do anything. We were going to wait until a solution presented itself. Our TV, one of those high-end Sony Wegas, 36", 200+ lbs, wasn't HD and we weren't in any rush to get rid of it, even though it was already approaching 7 years old at the time. It even broke on us, and we had a couple circuit boards replaced in it for a decent chunk of change. Not because I was so enamored with keeping it, but since I still didn't have a viable option to move to HD, so we punted again.

But by the fall of 2006, things started to come together, and I realized it was then time to make the switch. I had a couple weeks off that December, and was able to get everything up and running in a way that would keep us able to do everything we were already enjoying with the existing setup. First we needed the large TV, and we ended up with a 50" 1080p DLP from Samsung. Next I configured a reasonably capable new PC that would sit in our rack right next to the TV to record HD. I put two HD-tuner cards in it, and I set up Windows Media Center. The tuner cards were hooked up to a new HD antenna just sitting on our roof, and they worked great! Perfect quality HD from all the major networks (and some minor ones) for free. Just like the DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes, these HD-tuner cards had no encoder, they would just write the incoming signal right out to disk, so once again there was zero penalty from watching something recorded or live, the picture quality was absolutely identical. And was now in HD! I set up a new remote so everything could be controlled from a single remote, and also networked the computer so it could use extra drive space on other pc's in the house as overflow if the space got low on its internal drives. And we kept the 2 DirecTivo's hooked up to the new TV as well. Everything on the networks we recorded on the media center PC, and the few things remaining on cable (HBO, Speedchannel, ESPN, etc), we recorded on the DirecTivos, with the caveat that none of those on the Tivos were in HD, as those were still just SD devices hooked up to an HD TV. Turned out that most of what we recorded was on the networks, so it wasn't that big a deal to not have HD for a small portion of our shows.

And that's about it! In the last 2 or 3 years we've made some upgrades, but they were minor in the scheme of things. The media center PC is now running Vista media center, which despite its poor public reception had some nice new features for the media center capabilities which we appreciate. Also on the backend all of the video is now piped to a 3 TB home NAS in our office, rather than being stored locally on the PC itself. I also replaced the tivos with a pair of DirecTV HD-DVR's, now that they've become more reliable and more economical. We still record most things on the PC, but the DVR's give us overflow on both tuners and space. The second DVR is pretty much dedicated for motorcycle and car racing. All of them are still controlled with just 1 remote, which makes using the whole system easier than it would ever be otherwise. We have a slingbox connected to the system that was useful when I was travelling; when we wanted to I could watch the same thing that Annie was watching while I was several time zones away, and we could be on the phone at the same time talking about it as if we were still in the same room. Neat gadget, but since we both stopped traveling as much, it hasn't gotten much use in awhile.

So I guess that's how we watch TV. We absolutely never watch anything live, even if we're watching something the same day it's on we'll start it late enough that we can zap the commercials without catching up to live. We always have hundreds of hours more stuff stored up than we'd ever be able to watch, and our problem is always just finding the time, rather than not being able to record what we want initially.

March 4th, 2009, 01:23 AM	#1
Alex ninjette.org dude Name: 1 guess :-) Location: SF Bay Area Join Date: Jun 2008 Motorcycle(s): '13 Ninja 300 (white, the fastest color!), '13 R1200RT, '14 CRF250L, '12 TT-R125LE Posts: Too much. Blog Entries: 7	The Television Thread! I was just scanning through the off-topic section, and realized that we haven't had a real television thread yet. What self-respecting internet forum doesn't have a television thread? We need to fix that! I'll make this a two-parter; first how we like to watch TV, then what we watch. Any and all TV topics are fair game here, and we can always split things off to separate threads if it becomes necessary at some point. First, Annie and I are tech-weenies. Me perhaps more so, but she'll admit to it as well, to a point. When DVR's were first starting to make news back in '98, we started thinking that there was a way out of our carefully constructed VCR taping schedule. I traveled quite a bit, so a lot of this fell on Annie to replace the tapes, and it could not have been clunkier. We weren't even into that many shows, but we hated missing the ones we liked, so we were pretty good about the system. As clunky as it was. (one tape per day, labelled by day, replaced each morning so the programmed recordings for each night would have enough space, the better shows recorded at LP instead of EP, all that crap). So a DVR sounded great! But hard drives were still expensive, and initially Tivo wanted $999 for a 14-hr DVR (with a 15-GB drive in it). Neat toy, but too expensive for the benefits it provided. That 14-hrs was at the worst picture quality as well, at best picture quality it was more like 1/3 of that. But technology moved, as it always does, and by the middle of 1999, Tivo dropped the price on their 30-hr unit from $999 to $399, and that was the time we jumped on it. Friends at work were also into it, and within a few weeks I had upgraded it to a 60-hr unit (with a 2nd 30-GB drive, which probably went for $200 or so). Annie and I loved it! We were able to record much more than we could on the VCR, never had to switch tapes, but most importantly, we could watch whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted! (As long as we had enough storage). It was only a short while after that when we added a 2nd Tivo, so we could record 2 shows at once. That truly freed us from every needing to watch live TV; and we haven't since. It's been 10 years at this point. Sometime around 2001 we switched to a pair of DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes, and I also upgraded both of them to their max supported capacity at the time, and each of those had 2 tuners of their own, so we had 4 tuners to record, along with enough drive space that we could go for months without watching things if we wanted. Those boxes were nice as well because they record everything at the exact same quality of the original DirecTV signal; there's no re-encoding or compressing. Basically it just writes out to disk what it would be sending to your screen anyway, so there was zero picture quality difference from live to recorded, for the first time. (Because even at the highest quality on the analog tivos, the picture quality wasn't as good as live. Much better than a VCR, but still not picture-perfect). At that time we started recording shows during the year, saved up entire seasons, and then watched them in summer when nothing else was on. It was convenient, and also even better for some serial-type shows, where we could watch 2 or 3 in a row if we were in the mood, rather than having to wait until the next week for a cliffhanger. The only problem with all of the above was that none of these devices were HD. HD is one of those things that really sucks. Because if you don't have it, you don't know what you're missing and you're perfectly content. But then you see it, and you realize "oh crap". I used to like this SD picture. I used to be perfectly happy with this SD picture. But now I know it's crap. The issue was that when we started realizing this in 2005, there was still no viable way to record HD in a way that would allow Annie and me to continue to never worry about live TV, and catch up weeks or months later whenever we had the time. At that time the HD DVR's from DirecTV were a joke, with way too little capacity, and even hacked and upgraded, that version of the HD DirecTV signal (mpeg2) was quite large, and it would be prohibitively expensive to have enough drive capacity. HD programs would take about 7 times the amount of storage that the SD DirecTV programs need, which is quite a multiple. So I hemmed and hawed and didn't do anything. We were going to wait until a solution presented itself. Our TV, one of those high-end Sony Wegas, 36", 200+ lbs, wasn't HD and we weren't in any rush to get rid of it, even though it was already approaching 7 years old at the time. It even broke on us, and we had a couple circuit boards replaced in it for a decent chunk of change. Not because I was so enamored with keeping it, but since I still didn't have a viable option to move to HD, so we punted again. But by the fall of 2006, things started to come together, and I realized it was then time to make the switch. I had a couple weeks off that December, and was able to get everything up and running in a way that would keep us able to do everything we were already enjoying with the existing setup. First we needed the large TV, and we ended up with a 50" 1080p DLP from Samsung. Next I configured a reasonably capable new PC that would sit in our rack right next to the TV to record HD. I put two HD-tuner cards in it, and I set up Windows Media Center. The tuner cards were hooked up to a new HD antenna just sitting on our roof, and they worked great! Perfect quality HD from all the major networks (and some minor ones) for free. Just like the DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes, these HD-tuner cards had no encoder, they would just write the incoming signal right out to disk, so once again there was zero penalty from watching something recorded or live, the picture quality was absolutely identical. And was now in HD! I set up a new remote so everything could be controlled from a single remote, and also networked the computer so it could use extra drive space on other pc's in the house as overflow if the space got low on its internal drives. And we kept the 2 DirecTivo's hooked up to the new TV as well. Everything on the networks we recorded on the media center PC, and the few things remaining on cable (HBO, Speedchannel, ESPN, etc), we recorded on the DirecTivos, with the caveat that none of those on the Tivos were in HD, as those were still just SD devices hooked up to an HD TV. Turned out that most of what we recorded was on the networks, so it wasn't that big a deal to not have HD for a small portion of our shows. And that's about it! In the last 2 or 3 years we've made some upgrades, but they were minor in the scheme of things. The media center PC is now running Vista media center, which despite its poor public reception had some nice new features for the media center capabilities which we appreciate. Also on the backend all of the video is now piped to a 3 TB home NAS in our office, rather than being stored locally on the PC itself. I also replaced the tivos with a pair of DirecTV HD-DVR's, now that they've become more reliable and more economical. We still record most things on the PC, but the DVR's give us overflow on both tuners and space. The second DVR is pretty much dedicated for motorcycle and car racing. All of them are still controlled with just 1 remote, which makes using the whole system easier than it would ever be otherwise. We have a slingbox connected to the system that was useful when I was travelling; when we wanted to I could watch the same thing that Annie was watching while I was several time zones away, and we could be on the phone at the same time talking about it as if we were still in the same room. Neat gadget, but since we both stopped traveling as much, it hasn't gotten much use in awhile. So I guess that's how we watch TV. We absolutely never watch anything live, even if we're watching something the same day it's on we'll start it late enough that we can zap the commercials without catching up to live. We always have hundreds of hours more stuff stored up than we'd ever be able to watch, and our problem is always just finding the time, rather than not being able to record what we want initially. __________________________________________________ Montgomery Street Motorcycle Club / cal24.com / crf250l.org / ninjette.org ninjette.org Terms of Service Shopping for motorcycle parts or equipment? Come here first. The friendliest Ninja 250R/300/400 forum on the internet! (especially Unregistered)