One of the most amazing things about the SETI project is that there may be any hope at all of understanding alien transmissions that are anything beyond prime numbers blipped out the long way. After all, we can barely get our TVs to talk to each other. NTSC vs PAL, cable\/HDMI\/DVI\/VGA\/S-video\/and two different types of RCA-like connections (composite and this newfangled Y\/Pr\/Pb component stuff). Who knows what sort of format an alien signal may arrive in?<\/p>\n
Anyhow, as you can probably tell we’re having some issues with our new HDTV over here. The whole thing really makes me think that the technology was released to the market prematurely; couldn’t take an extra few months to hammer out a standard? Or a few years to develop the technology enough to have a single resolution for “HD” rather than this crazy hodgepodge of incremental improvements?. Or get some better widescreen vs. not detection or broadcasting so I’m not staring at grey bars on the side of the TV to square it off to 4:3, then black bars within that because the TV station is broadcasting its “widescreen” format with the black bars as part of the content, leaving me watching a 27″ picture on a 42″ screen…<\/p>\n
The first issue is a matter of a defective box: our Scientific Atlanta 8300HD box has a wonky Pb out channel, which means that when we use the component input to the TV, every now and then the picture turns pink (since the only colour channel left is the red one). It can stay this way for a really long time… I wasn’t home when this happened, but my parents did call someone in to fix it. Their solution was to change to using the HDMI connection, which worked rather well… for a time. Then if the TV is turned off, the cable box will turn itself off (which loses the channel you were just on). Fortunately, there is a (rather deeply hidden) setting to get the box to remember which channel you were last on and restart to that one, but it’s still a bit of a pain. However, for some reason with that connector the cable box thinks that my parents’ brand new 1080i TV is only capable of standard definition (over an HD<\/b>MI connection no less!). We can force it to go back into 1080i (i.e. HD) mode by going back to the initial setup menu, but the bloody thing forgets that setting every time it turns off — which is every time the TV turns off! It’s so frustrating. Even if I could figure a way to make the cable box stay on past the TV’s power-down, I noticed that it has an automatic sleep-mode “feature” so it would turn off an hour after I left it alone anyway.<\/p>\n
I’m freaking loving<\/i> analog cable back in London at the moment.<\/p>\n
Anyhow, tomorrow is Christmas Eve and a Sunday to boot, so I don’t know if we can do much at the moment, but I think sometime next week we’ll be trading this puppy in for a replacement.<\/p>\n
Update:<\/b> Well, we called Rogers and they told me that the HDMI signals are buggy that way and that they don’t support them on many of their HD boxes. After power cycling the tuner\/DVR a few times the component input went back to showing colours, and I’ll just have to call back later if it goes on the fritz again. For now though, it looks pretty good!<\/p>\n
Update 2:<\/b> The display went pink again. A hard power cycle seems to fix it for a short while, but nevertheless, we’ll be exchanging the HD tuner at a Rogers store in a few days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the most amazing things about the SETI project is that there may be any hope at all of understanding alien transmissions that are anything beyond prime numbers blipped out the long way. After all, we can barely get our TVs to talk to each other. NTSC vs PAL, cable\/HDMI\/DVI\/VGA\/S-video\/and two different types of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}