Posts by Paul Campbell
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people forget that we used to have a lot of smaller cities and boroughs - they were the norm - requirement for a city was 20,000 people or a cathedral (points for anyone who knows the only place that didn't first qualify on population - the answer was required general knowledge when I was in primary school)
I grew up in a borough of maybe 2000 people - we had a police station a school, a fire station, a post office, a part time town hall, a part time borough council, a train station, a plunket rooms, a handful of churches, 3 stores, a petrol station, a butcher - now days Ravensbourne is a tiny part of Dunedin and most of those amenities are long gone - on the other hand all the roads are sealed now and there's a sewerage system
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Joanna: actually it's on the particularly crappy TVs (without really fancy comb filters) where S-video and component, which ever the TV and settop both support help the most.
The thing they particularly fix are the thin vertical 1-pixel lines or edges (or small characters) that seem to 'crawl'.
The tacky way that PAL (and NTSC) added colour to their black and white signals is the reason for this - it resulted in a change in fashion - TV stopped showing people dressed in things that aggravated it - stuff with fine detail: plaid or herringbone suits, checked ties, paisley (OK maybe that went away by itself), stripes - and replaced them with people wearing things with large solid colours - it's not that people weren't wearing stuff like that - they just weren't doing that on TV
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Mark - are you just getting "current and next" programming (which is always in-band) or week at a time programming? (which I believe in NZ Freeview uses a non-standard format that Windows may not know about)
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(puts on old worn out PVR designer's hat ...) skip forward and back is an issue of who really owns the PVR - the network (ie Sky or maybe freeview as an arm of the broadcasters) or the customer - I paid up full for my MySky, I ought to be able to choose how my PVR behaves. Freeview ought to be, well, free.
Back when I was a PVR designer (for the US market) we added both types of skip (ff and real skip) and enabled them depending on who we were selling to - some cable companies in competition with satellite would enable add skip anyway and boast about it.
On a technical note long skips forward and shorter backwards ones seems to make UI sense - making them non integral is actually more useful (so 30 forward and 7 back or such) - there are technical issues about how well they work on different stream (you need at least 1 i-frame to get started - I haven't looked at the mp4 streams freeview is using to see how often they are sent)
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It's the same with the MySky -- the live-pause style buffer only works while you're on the same channel. The way around it is to press the record button, rather than pause of time-slip -- then you can go back to it when you want.
MySky annoys me a lot - it does this when you want to look at the guide - it has a copy of the guide on disk why should the guide care what the video is doing - I guess I've been spoiled by better things ....
One thing I'd like to see the reviewers comment on is what sort of advert/program skip is supported - MySky allows you to fast forward over ads but is missing the 30 second forward skip (and the much much more important 10 second "what did he say" back skip) that more useful PVRs provide
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On thing about those "simple red white and yellow" cords - don't use them if you possibly can - at the very least look for an "S-video" input on your TV and output from your settop/pvr/whatever (it's a round connector with pins inside that replaces the yellow cable) - the video results are much much better especially with digital video (and settop graphics) - you'll see a marked reduction in the 'crawlies'.
Even better, if your TV supports "component video" or "YPrPb" use that - look for 3 round connectors like the ones used by the old red/white/yellow but coloured red/green/blue - they also replace the yellow cabe - don't be tempted to use an old red/white/yellow cable (many, even cheap ones, have low pass filters in the red/white audio cables).
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"Prices for cables vary wildly, but there seems no need to buy expensive ones."
So true - anyone trying to sell you a 'gold' one because it gives better picture quality probably has their other hand in your wallet ....
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I'm in Taiwan this week and they use pinyin and the older romanisation interchangeably - google maps gives the old versions, the subway signs are in pinyin .... I'm learning ....
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"My television goes up to 13 like a normal person."
In the US that just means they don't have a UHF aerial ... (or if they have cable they've got the cable/broadcast setting in their TV set wrongly)
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Well scientology (and others) would differ - I used to work with one of Erhard's daughters - IMHO it's just as creepy as Scientology - but in a more buttoned down business suit sort of way