Television

So, on Saturday, Jessi and I went to the Solomon Pond Mall to go to the Wheelmobile Wheel of Fortune tryouts. Basically, they would pick random people from the audience to introduce themselves and play a mini-game on stage, and they would eventually invite people that they liked to the actual auditions in Boston a couple months.

The web site for the event said that there was no reason to show up hours in advance. As far as I can tell, this was a complete lie. The picture in the paper doesn’t begin to do the line justice. The games were scheduled to occur at 1:00, 2:30, and 4:00. We arrived in the parking lot at 12:15, and finally found a place to park and got inside at about 12:30. The line at that point went through the twisty back-and-forth area they had set up, and then stretched entirely down one side of the mall, and about a quarter of the way back by the time we got in line. That was the line for the 2:30 event. I think that the line quickly kept on forming all the way back to the other end of the mall, and I have no idea where they put people after that.

• To adopt Raymond Chen’s terminology, this entry is some macro-tweeting.
• Jessi and I are heading to the Wheelmobile event in Marlborough tomorrow to have some Wheel of Fortune fun and maybe even have an outside chance of getting invited to a real audition for a taping in Boston.
• There are 50 judges (including me) scheduled to work at GP Boston.
• Hannah has improved in her walking skills immensely over the past couple weeks. We now enjoy playing Roll The Ball, which typically turns into Degenerate Catch.
• I now have peter.cooper@townofcharlton.net set up for official Town-related emails.
• While I’m not a big fan of “reality” shows, I personally know one of the contestants on the current season of I Survived a Japanese Game Show.
• We’re planning a trip out to see Jessi’s extended family in upstate New York in July.

Charter apparently just added WSBK-DT (channel 38, in digital form) to their wires, meaning that I can now view high-definition Jeopardy without needing to add a UHF antenna as big as a cell tower to my house. It’s not on the lineup on their web site or on TV listings services yet, but it’s on the wire at clear-QAM 114-10. Presumably their cable boxes will map that to 788, but since I don’t use a cable box, I care about the actual frequency that the digital stream is on.

My wife’s computer (which is now our DVR system) has a (Dell OEM version of the) Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, which includes a port labeled “Digital Out”. I wanted to connect it to the surround sound system I have, which only has a single digital input, labeled “Digital Coax”. I thought that I might need to get the Digital I/O Module and a digital coax cable, but I wasn’t sure that would work, since the sound card model isn’t explicitly listed there, although I suspect that it would. The digital out itself is kind of odd, since it’s really three separate stereo SPDIF outputs, to get 6 channels out, and the sound card didn’t support the normal AC3 encoding over one output to a receiver, although it could pass through an original AC3 source (like a DVD, or, I hoped, a HD recording) on one channel.

Saturday, I went to the Eventide prerelease. My lack of preparation wasn’t really an issue, as I was primarily a money-taker again. However, for Shards of Alara, I’ll be up in New Hampshire in charge of a new prerelease location.

Sunday, my brother (who deals with video processing for a living) and I fixed my home digital recording setup that I was having issues with. One of the other things I’d added to my cable system was a distribution amplifier. The amplifier improved the signal for my other digital devices (cable modem, and direct to the HDTV), as well as the devices reading the analog channels, but apparently it was too much signal for the digital tuner on the HVR-1600. We stuck another splitter on just the input to the digital tuner on the card, to reduce the signal by another 7dB, and that apparently attenuated the signal enough for it to work correctly. Rather odd, since the signal level it was getting before should have been pretty close to the level that enters the house, but everything seems to be working for now.

Last night, I managed to use the DVR (now on my wife’s computer) to record and play back HD digital programs, with wonderful quality. This makes me very happy, since doing that was one of the reasons I went with a computer DVR system in the first place.

But, it seems that it has trouble locking onto or getting some (or all) of the digital channels, some of the time. It seems to not work long enough to do a channel scan, or possibly the problem is worse with the channels on higher frequencies. It’s quite odd, and makes little (if any) sense. Sometimes the problem can be resolved temporarily by disconnecting the coax cable and plugging it back in, which seems really odd, since that doesn’t seem like something that should do much with coax cable. (And it took quite a while to figure that out, since I was thinking that my changing the coax cable, changing the ports on the cable splitter, and changing the cable splitter was actually doing something for a while, and then it’d stop working again. Where in fact, I think for some (or all) of my changes, it was merely the act of unplugging the coax and plugging it back in that make it start working again briefly.) It seems that the signal is okay, since my TV plugged into the same splitter can find the digital channels just fine, and I’m pretty sure that this all used to work when it was in my computer (I just couldn’t get acceptable playback of HD content). So, I’m a bit baffled for the moment.

• We recently changed the living-room-DVR computer from mine to my wife’s, since it’s more powerful, and she wanted to be able to play her games while sitting on the couch. We also recently purchased some new hardware for DVR purposes as well, including a 500 GB drive. I remember when 500 KB was a lot. Now, I’m not sure 500 GB will be enough. We also got some additional RAM, but one of the memory modules was bad, so I’ve shipped it back and am awaiting a replacement.
• This weekend, I’ll be working at the TJ Collectibles Hartford Eventide Prerelease. This could be interesting, since my only experience with Shadowmoor was a store release event, and I really haven’t judged since then. I’m looking forward to it
• Yesterday, I received a notice that I have jury duty again. I suppose the last time was more than 3 years ago, but I don’t think it could be much more than that. I found the last time rather interesting (probably because I actually served on a jury), so hopefully this time will be interesting as well. (Update: Last time was 2/10/2005. I thought I would have blogged about it.)

So, currently I get Internet and television from Charter. We’re on the most basic television plan, which really meets our minimal TV-viewing desires. However, Charter only has the digital signals from a few local channels, and for those that it does have, they’re additionally compressed and have the PSIP data stripped out. (Possibly some of that is in violation of FCC rules, or will be in violation starting in Feb. 2009. But I’m not sure, and I don’t think Charter cares.)

I just ordered the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600, which seems to be one of the more popular TV tuning cards, and it has hardware encoding of analog signals and can tune QAM digital signals with the right software. (I also ordered a DVI-to-HDMI cable so that I can hook the PC up to the TV.) I’m going to start by trying out the software that comes with it and free software like GB-PVR or Yahoo! Go.

We got a large-screen TV for Christmas, and now we seem to do more TV watching. I’ve been timeshifting stuff with a VCR, but I’ve been thinking that I want something with a bit better quality. Also, eventually I hope Charter will start carrying WSBK-DT so that we can watch our Jeopardy in high-def, and VCRs don’t really deal with that.

So, I’ve been looking into DVR-like technologies, and there seems to be quite a mix of possibilities. I don’t want to spend too much, since we don’t watch TV that often. While a small recurring fee isn’t completely out of the question, something like TiVo or Charter’s $13–$15/mo. is much more than I’m willing to commit at this time. (Charter’s plan would also require us to get their Digital Cable package, which may be nice, but would also add significantly to the cost.)