For Sale: two ATI Digital Cable Tuners (CableCARD)

December 23rd, 2008

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.

Posted in HDTV, Media Center, Personal | 8 Comments »

I forgot about bad DVDs look

December 23rd, 2008

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.

Posted in HDTV, Personal | 2 Comments »

I don’t believe a word that DirecTV says

December 12th, 2008

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.

Posted in Engadget, HDTV, Media Center | 8 Comments »

Netflix’s motive for its download model

November 21st, 2008

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.

Posted in HDTV, Personal | Comments Closed

The TV Pack has made my Media Center enviroment very unstable

November 12th, 2008

I know, I know, it isn’t meant for consumer consumption, but I’d content that it isn’t ready for any consumption. I’ve been told by many beta testers that it is so buggy none of them use it, and now after about 90 days of it being in the wild, it seems that just about everyone at the The Green Button has also given up. Evidently I’m the only idiot still using it, but a day doesn’t go by when I don’t think about going back. Honestly if I didn’t love the hetero’ tuners feature so much I’d have gone back a long time ago. At this point I’m thinking Windows 7 pre-beta is more stable, so maybe I’ll try that. Either way, here is the list of problems I’m having.

  1. It crashes all the time! How much you ask? Well, luckily Vista makes it easy to go and see how often an app crashes. All in all, in the past 60 days, I’ve experienced about 58 crashes. Of that, Media Center (ehshell.exe) has crashed 20 times, the host module 9 times, store update 27 times, and finally the receiver service twice.
  2. I’ve have to unplug my extender in my one room about every other week because it is locked up.
  3. My Extenders report network issues, but I have the same network as I did before I installed the TV Pack, yet it never had problems before. Not to mention the network test always says I have 100% of what I need to do HD.
  4. I’ve missed a few recordings, to which the Media Center says were “canceled by another component.”
  5. I’ve had to reconfigure the EPG four times, which takes over an hour to re-enter my 70+ series recordings, not to mention remap all my channels.
  6. Experienced the mysterious blue bar, about 4 times.

And this doesn’t even take into account the weird bugs like the info and mini guide bug, the scrub bar and worst of all the Media center has to change the channel to record even though there is another tuner that is idle. There are more documented at The Green Button, but I personally havent’ seen them.

At this point I’m convinced that I’m the only one left using the TV Pack and that the Nievies and S1 Digitals of the world are smart enough to skip it until Windows 7.

Posted in Home Automation, Uncategorized, Windows | 5 Comments »

10 reasons for a geek to be optimistic about the new president

November 7th, 2008

Sure Obama might make Iraq and the economy worse — assuming it’s even possible — but there are plenty of reasons why a geek should be optimistic about his presidency.

  1. Joe Biden won’t be able to vote for the DMCA again — unless there’s a tie in the Senate.
  2. There could be presidential addresses via Twitter.
  3. We may not ever have to fill out another form at a doctor’s office.
  4. He wants a playoff system in College Football, like any football geek would.
  5. Our pipes should stay free thanks to his support for Net Neutrality.
  6. Our kids might be saved thanks to Stem Cell research.
  7. The broadband speeds should increase thanks to his communications infrastructure plans.
  8. His plan to reform the patent system could lead to more innovation.
  9. He may save our life — or the life of a loved one — by modernizing the Public Safety Network.
  10. He’s sure to use the web to run the country, the way he did for his campaign.

So if my new president will stick to this and at the same time leave my guns alone, leave my money in my pocket — yeah I know, fat chance — then we’ll get along just fine.

Posted in Personal, Polictical | Comments Closed

Why Netflix is such a great deal for the movie watcher.

November 6th, 2008

On a recent podcast, a guest made a very interesting point. Jon said that Vudu is a better deal for him because some months he doesn’t have time to watch movies. So in other words, the pay as you go plan works best for him. I started to wonder about my own usage, as I’ve been known to go a month without watching a movie. So I decided to take a look at my usage history on the Netflix’s site.

To my surprise I’d watched 76 movies in the past 12 month. Now don’t ask me where I found the time to watch that many movies in 12 months, because I just don’t know. It feels like I watch one a month, but the numbers don’t lie and although I rent the occasional movie for my wife and daughter, not very many. But just to put it into perspective, that is over 6 movies a month or 1.5 movies a week.

Now the reason I say that Netflix is such a great deal for me is because even with the new $1 Blu-ray tax, I’m still only spending $252 a year. If I was using Vudu or Apple TV, I’d be spending almost twice that at $455 a year.

But if I really want to get into rip-offs, then I’ll look at my FiOS TV bill. Sure it offers some great quality and at about 100 HD channels, a great selection of HD, but my bill is about $800 a year. So if I don’t count all the time I spend watching OTA HD programming for free, the amount of time I actually spend watching FiOS TV is way less than the 3 hours a week I spend watching Netflix Movies. So yeah, I’m wasting my money.

The bottom line is as soon as football season is over — gotta have ESPN and the NFL Network for the games after all — I’m dropping FiOS TV, but not to do the trendy downloads thing, I’m going strickly OTA HD and Blu-ray via Netflix.

Posted in HDTV, Personal | 8 Comments »

I finally passed Kevin Tofel!

October 8th, 2008

It only took me two years and nine months, but today I finally passed Kevin C Tofel’s post count (1073) on Engadget HD. Sure, it took me almost three years to do something he managed in nine months, but hey, I actually want to keep my full time job! This makes me the number four poster of all time on Engadget HD, with about four months to go — at this pace — to pass Matt Burns. Honestly I’ll probably never pass Richard and you could add my posts to Richard’s and I still wouldn’t match Darren’s.

Posted in Engadget | 2 Comments »

Personal accountability

September 30th, 2008

This is a philosophical post that pretty much explains where I stand on the economic crisis. I believe that while in many scenarios more than one person is truly responsible, ultimately we are all responsible for our own actions.

So for example, a drug addict is to blame for their drug problem and not the dealer. A student is usually to blame for bad grades and not the teacher. The person who pulled the trigger is guilty of murder, not the seller of the weapon or ammo.

So understanding this about me, it should make it obvious that I blame we Americans for the mortgage crisis in our country right now. I blame myself because too, I have an ARM on my rental property and I didn’t put down 20% on my home.

I am part of the problem, and refuse to blame Wall Street — or Washington for that matter. Sure, without the banks willing to give us bad loans, it couldn’t have ever happened; but ultimately it is our crisis to bail ourselves out of and in a way the biggest mistake Wall Street made was to trust that we would all pay our loans back. Now personally I’ve never missed a payment on any of my mortgages, but I made the same mistakes that others have, it’s just that up until now, my mistakes haven’t caught up with me. The good news is that like many others, I learn from my mistakes and honestly believe that while this important lesson is going to hurt for now, in the long run it is going help us.

Posted in Personal, Philosophy | 9 Comments »

Anyone know what this blue bar is, on Vista Media Center?

September 18th, 2008

Vista Media Center Blu-ray

About two times since I’ve installed the TV Pack, this blue bar has showed up on every TV (including extenders) and causes weird issues. For one, I can’t figure out how to get it to go away without restarting VMC and it seems to make the extenders lock up all together. Unfortunately it has never showed up while I was using my media center, only while others have used it, so I have no idea if anything was accidentally selected or a button hit to bring it up.

Posted in Media Center | 4 Comments »

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