Posts by Paul Campbell
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I think we'd rather have clean sewerage than a new stadium (we already have a perfectly good Carisbrook we've been shoveling money into for years, what we need is a good team, not a good stadium)
so don't forget public meeting against the stadium in the town hall tonight (Sun) 7pm
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and probably 'Coney Island white fish' too ....
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here in Dunedin where we've basically just pumped everything out to sea - meaning that the main swimming beaches regularly get closed - we've 'solved' the problem, at great cost, by basically building a longer pipe.
This month they're actually going to start to 'treat' the sewage by dumping some chlorine in the pipe - some years for now (not yet budgeted for, and competing with the stupid stadium for financing), is actual treatment - sometime next decade
Meanwhile, despo\ite the longer pipe, the surfees are arguing about what the brown sludge they are swimming in is ....
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fair enough - you're still dependent on a different way to get your EPG than the rest of Freeview - if you're going to do some form of extended EPG then we all benefit if it's broadcast to everyone, if you're not then there's no point (other than hardware lock in to make money for the EPG provider)
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The other nerdery related note, will be interesting to see if the tivo box is capable of recording just the H.264 stream. Currently, it seems with PCs recording freeview, its preserved in the transport stream (which includes some error correction), and makes for pretty big files (~5GB/hour). I'm buying a second terabyte hard drive, because the first one is full!
transport streams are what almost everyone records - the on-air streams are wrapped in FEC (error correction) but that's taken off before the actual data is recorded - you don't store the whole multiplex, just the audio/video pids you need - the actual TS overhead is ~1-2% (3-4 bytes/188 byte packet)
What you don't want to do is any sort of recoding, it requires enormous amounts of CPU and tends to produce crappy results. HD streams are BIG - (1920x1080)/(720x480) is 6X SD just from screen pixels alone, and hopefully they don't screw the compression down as much as you have for SD (to analog colour/quality)
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It also means that if TVNZ tires of Tivo the
box you paid $500 for wont continue to work
with the freeview on-air feed.what do you mean by this paul?
well standard DVB EPG is something used the world over, freeview use their own non-standard format, Tivos get their own EPG feeds over the internet (which is why in the US f you don't plug them into the net, or a phone, and pay your Tivo monthly fee it stops being useful)
My point is that the box is only as good as long as someone at TVNZ is pulling together the EPG data for ALL the freeview channels and sending it to your box - if 10 years from now your box is one of the few still working in the country and TVNZ decides that having some guy make you a weekly EPG just for you they'll probably shut you off
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when are they turning analog off? Prime will have to jump eventually
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the problem with selling a " 'can't fast forward through ads on programmes you have recorded your own self'" box for freeview is that you have to tell the box which part of the video is ads .... and if you do that someone else can sell a box that will automatically FF through the ads for you ..... you can only pull that off if you own the entire platform in the way Sky does (or the way DVD players are encumbered by their licensing) usually there's some sort of DRM involved (and why we all like the 'free' part of freeview)
There's no reason a PVR shouldn't have that most useful "what did he say" button (15 secs or so back) - it doesn't affect ad revenue - but it does make the customer ask where the complementary 30 sec forward button is (ad skip) - a question that the media-vendor would rather not come up (for the record the boxes I've been building for the past few years have both buttons, but when the box is actually owned by a cable company they can choose to disable one or the other)
You can of course sort of add both buttons yourself by using a universal remote.
I am a bit worried that there will be yet another private-format EPG feed from TVNZ - I'm sure there will be some pressure to make the Tivo one provide useful info that's not available to other freeview customers - it also means that if TVNZ tires of Tivo the box you paid $500 for wont continue to work with the freeview on-air feed.
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sorry that http://www.mythtv.org link seems broken
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well I already did my rant here on MySky a day or so ago - and Tivo's been a major competitor of mine for a decade or so (but no longer!), so I'm slightly biased there ....
But I'd like to make a more general comment - when you watch TV you should be in control, not the TV station - that's the whole point about PVRs: you get to take control over when you watch TV, if you own the box you should be in control of 'how' and 'where' too
Fortunately there are open source/free alternatives - buy a dvb-t card for that old PC you were going to throw away, load up mythTV and away you go - much prettier than MySky too - it's not yet an easy hack for non-geeks but I bet someone will do a NZ specific standalone CD installer