Video Asylum

Posted by Larry S. on November 28, 2000 at 17:34:44:

In Reply to: Is DSS worth it? posted by Mike Bates on November 16, 2000 at 19:13:19:

A few months ago I fell for the ads my CTV provider was sending (Charter Communications in LA) and "upgraded" to digital cable tv.

What a mistake. In theory a digital tv signal should be better than an analogue one, but the cable tv companies have instead used the capability to provide extra capacity; i.e., more sales for them (just like the cell phone companies took a single analogue frequency and split it up into hundreds of digital signals - - trading quality for capacity).

The picture quality is worse than the old analogue box, and I've had many days where the thing locks up! I now know to reach around behind the box and pull out the power cord, then restore power and wait 30 minutes for the programming to down load. Very much like the old three fingered salute (control/alt/delete) we had to resort to with Windows all the time.

Lots of pixilation (sp?), and you can literally see the motion slow down on screen when there is too much data to process (generally in action films). It's like watching a movie in 7/8ths speed.

The on screen program guide is kind of neat, but it is set to display programs two hours later. I don't know about you, but when I need the programming guide, it's usually to see what's showing right now, not two hours later.

I've asked if I can go back to the analogue box. Of course, the answer is no. They want us to get off those old boxes so they can fight piracy, and so they can replace a single analogue signal with multiple digital ones (same way digital cell phones have crappy sound in comparison to older analogue ones).

I plan to go with DSS shortly, once the TiVO DirectTV units are shipping in volume. I have not heard if DISH will have a similar all in one unit.