How good can it be, if it isn’t HD?

There is a lot of negativity around 3D and I feel like I’m defending it at every corner. Well my friend Mari won’t let me forget about this snarky email I sent her on March 25th of 2009 in response to a pitch for a 3D story she did on MediaExperiencestogo.com — this was after I saw the 3D presentation of the National Championship game, but before I saw Avatar and other 3D demos from Panasonic, etc.

The day they launch Engadget3D is the day I quit. Honestly there aren’t any Engadget HD editors who like 3D and it shows in our content. If you go through all our 3D related posts, you’d be hard pressed to find one that wasn’t negative. I think the most positive one was at CES when I said it wasn’t nearly as lame as I thought it would be.

As you can see, the perspective on 3D of the other Engadget HD editors and I has changed quite a bit in the past 9 months. And if we can change you can change. We can all change. It really does grow on you, I’m telling you, this 3D thing is going to be big.

Last April I told you about how I canceled cable and was living on over-the-air HD and Blu-ray Discs for my families HD needs. At the time my plan was to add cable in time for football season. It was a great plan and it kind of worked, but I did fail to consider one thing; at Engadget I write about cable related technologies. My first clue was actually not long after my post here about my first 90 days of success when Digeo sent me a Moxi HD DVR for review. At that point my plan was to add the service back in order to do the review and then to cancel it again, but that turned out to be too much of a pain since Verizon requires I send the CableCARD back when I cancel, which of course means another truck roll the next time I need service. But despite this I was still prepared to call and cancel right after CES, but by the time I got back I realized that in the next six months there would be at least three or four new CableCARD devices I’d like to review, so I decided to give up on the idea.

The bottom line is that I love me some football in HD, so I can’t ever see myself going without cable year round, and with the hassle involved in canceling and signing back up, the $327 a year ($62 for 7 months minus $110 savings for signing a contract) I’d save just isn’t worth it — not to mention I plan to expense the majority of the cost to offset my blogging income. I suspect for many it just isn’t worth it either. Sure there is lots of content out there available via other legal means, but the bottom line is that when it comes down to it, cable really isn’t that bad of a deal considering all the HD viewing options you get for the price.

I’m working on a newer version of my automatic MKV to DVR-MS process and found myself needing to do these conversions automatically. So I figured I’d share them so people could use them until my entire process is done.

The main uses from my perspective is to make various video files Media Center compatible, but since MPG and AC3 are pretty much the most standard codecs in the industry, there are plenty of other uses. Both of them require the latest version of DVRMSToolBox, written by my good from Andy. In fact it is what makes the entire process automatic. For both profiles, the DTB temp directory is used to create the files and then the final file is moved back to the location of the original file (in the case of the MKV AC3 files, the name is changed for obvious reasons). Until I release the rest of my process, you can create a simple “process conditioner” to automatically convert these files, or you can run them on demand with DVRMStoMPEGGUI (or queue them up manually).

The first is a very simple VOB to MPG converter. All it does is use ffmpeg to repackage the MPG and AC3 streams into an MPG container. The best way to create a vob to convert is to use something like DVDShrink to rip only the main feature and the main AC3 audio to a single vob. You can use DTS, but as you might know, in the case of Media Center DTS is not supported nativly and thus doesn’t work on extenders. To use this drop “Convert vob into mpg – ffmpeg.dpc” into “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Profiles” and put ffmpeg.conf into “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Applications\ConvertFfmpeg”

The second one was actually very difficult to get right and I’d still like to do some more testing. What it does is extract a DTS stream from an MKV file, then convert it to AC3 with eac3to, then finally remuxes it back to an MKV with AC3. It only retains the original video and audio streams and in fact doesn’t touch the video stream. To use it you’ll need to download eac3to and MKVtoolnix (both free). First extract the eac3to archive to “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Applications\eac3to” and install MKVtoolnix with the isntall path of “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Applications\MKVtoolnix\” And of course you’ll have to copy the “Convert MKV with DTS to MKV with AC3.dpc” to “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Profiles”

Please let me know if these work for you or not, I’m really hoping to get these throughly tested before my final project is complete.

**Update** Already had to update the DTS to AC3 profile, this one should work better. Thanks Rich. 

**UPdate2** Had to update it once again because the AC3 bit rate was too high for dvr-ms files, it is now set to 448 instead of 640.

I’ve loved my HDHomeRun for as long as the product has been on the market, but never really used it heavily until I switched to Media Center about a year ago. Well ever since, from time to time I’ve experienced network issues that have caused less than perfect picture quality — drop outs, blocking, breakups etc. I’ve spent countless hours troubleshooting this and most of the time it ended up being the driver for my Intel 82566DC-2 network adapter. At one point I even spent some money to replace my switch since the NIC refused to auto-negotiate to 100/full with the 16 port Netgear switch I was using. Well for whatever reason the issues came back over the weekend and I finally threw in the towel and did what I should’ve done a long time a go.

The simple solution
I went down to CompUSA — yes they still have them in Tampa — and picked up a $14 NIC. I threw it into a spare PCI slot (you can use a USB NIC if you want) and plugged the HDHR directly into it. The cool thing is that I didn’t even need a crossover cable, in fact all I had to do was rerun the HDHR setup utility to rediscover the location of the device. And thanks to the beauty of APIPA — you know that 169.254.x.x address — I didn’t even have to set an IP on the NIC or configure an IP for the HDHR. 

Now my picture quality is back to the perfect and my only regret is that I didn’t just break down and do this earlier. So if you are having problems with your HDHomeRun, I wouldn’t hesitate to throw an extra NIC in your PC and at the very least isolate the problem.

Just ran across this post today at one of my favorite sites, The Digital Lifesyle, and at first I was thrilled to see somoene appreciate the hard work Warren, Andy, and I put into automatically converting mkv files to dvr-ms. But then after reading through the entire post I noticed that nor my name or Engadget’s was anywhere to be found. Now maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, but it seems like too much of a coincidence for this not to be a derivative work. Now I’m accustomed to being ripped off online, but usually it is some hack site and not a reputable place like Ian’s site.

**UPDATE**

Ian was very responsive to my concerns and has pulled the post — but yet the link still works. Never the less,  the original author has added credit to his post on his blog, but in a way that seems half-hearted to me. But perhaps that is because the intent of his comment was lost in the British to American translation.

I can’t believe I actually did it, but I canceled cable (FiOS TV actually), but not for the reasons you think. I have to say it feels weird and I fill a little disconnected, which is very odd since I really didn’t watch it much. But there is something comforting about knowing there are 100 HD channels at my service if I get bored. But then again, that comfort isn’t worth $60 a month.

As for the why, no it isn’t because I’m going to get my content from the internet. Because unlike college kids, the nicest display I own isn’t on my laptop and once you are accustomed to HD, it’s hard to go back.

I canceled because I realized that without Football, all I watch is broadcast TV and movies. So I can get all the OTA HD I want for free on my Vista Media Center with an antenna, and all the HD movies I can watch for $21/mo from Netflix.

Now that’s not to say I’m never going to watch Netflix watch instantly on my new LG BD300, or that I won’t download anything else via other means. But after selling my two CableCARD tuners (thanks Robert) and not paying $60 a month to Verizon for the next eight months, the $880 I saved was more than enough to pick up a new Pioneer VSX-91TXH AV Receiver which features both TrueHD and DTS-HD decoding.

So today is the first day of my life without cable TV — and counting.

When I realized how much money I was wasting on pay TV, I decided to cancel FiOS after football season and go all OTA and Blu-ray via Netflix. And although I plan to add it back when football season comes around again, because technology changes so fast I’m going to go ahead and sell the tuners now and just buy ‘em again when needed — assuming something better doesn’t come out by then.

So I have two like-new ATI Digital Cable Tuners that I’d like $200 for, each. I was just going to put them on eBay but figured someone I know might want them and prefer to buy them from someone they know. I have all the original accessories and box which I will of course include. It goes without saying that these will only work with an OEM Digital Cable Ready PC, but if you want to figure out how to hack the firmware, I’ll let you try the product key that came with my XPS 420 (not for sale).

UPDATE, I sold both of these already.

What is it about Christmas that makes you want to watch the same movie over and over again? Whatever it is, it hit the wife and I over the weekend and we watched one of our Christmas favorites, The Family Man.

The thing is that it has been so long since I watched one of the 100 DVDs I own, that I forgot how bad they look. I truly found it distracting how dull the colors were and how bad the contrast was. I tried to ignore it, but my obsessive compulsive nature just couldn’t let it go.

The funny thing is that when I think back over two and half years when I reviewed the first HD DVD player, I don’t remember being that impressed. In fact I said, “my biggest fear is that some people won’t be able to tell the difference.”

It really is funny how once you get accustomed to a certain level of quality, how difficult it can be to go back to what used to be the reference.

If there is one thing I’ve learned about DirecTV over the past three years of blogging is that the PR department has no problem “stretching” the truth in an attempt to improve the image of its company — big surprise, I know. This was never more true then during the DirecTV press conference at CES 2007 where the “100 HD channel” announcement was born. We all know now that this promise was never realized during 2007 and that in some ways it can be argued that it isn’t even true today.

Then there was the entire “HD Lite” fiasco where we at Engdaget got our friend Rômulo Pontual on the record as saying DirecTV had the best quality HD — this was pre-MPEG4 mind you — and that anyone who said different wasn’t actually judging the quality with their own eyes, ha!

So with this in mind it should be no surprise that I don’t believe the recent official suspension announcement about the unofficial HDPC-20 project (also attributed to Romulu). I’m not saying that DirecTV never suspended the project, I’m just saying that it was probably suspended for a half a day while the developers went home early for Thanksgiving. I mean if it was really canceled then why not say canceled? Why say it was suspended with no window of how long. This really just continues the trend of the lack of communication between DirecTV and its customers when it comes to this project.

I predict that there is no real suspension at all, and that in fact the HDPC-20 will be released right along side Windows 7 during 2009, an that the only reason for this “official” communication is to reduce the expectations of the community after the recent eHome labs tour debacle. I believe this is nothing more than damage control from that incident, and a very poor attempt at that.

Recently I wrote a letter to the editor in response to an editorial in Home Media Magazine. To my delight they decided to publish it, so click through to the digital edition.