CableCARD impressions
- I have no idea why CableCARD has such weird capitalization.
- It’s surprising how CableCARDs—solid state PCMCIA devices—seemingly can have such a defect rate. Most people I know who’ve tried to set up a CableCARD have had to exchange them at least once. Also, since CableCARDs must be paired with the device they’re connected to, it’s hard for Comcast to test them beforehand, and it’s easy for them to shift blame to the device manufacturer.
- I think it’s funny that the Fremont Comcast office has a wall of televisions in its customer service lobby, but they’re all standard-definition CRTs. There’s not a single high-definition television in sight.
- Comcast’s website is really confusing, and they do an awful job of explaining the differences between different plans.
- The non-local HD channels that Comcast carries seemingly are from Eastern feeds and aren’t time-delayed for Pacific time. What the heck? On one hand, I guess it (sort of) increases the available choices of what to watch when, but on the other, I think it’s confusing. It’s not like this is the Central time zone, which is accustomed to being the Eastern time zone’s gimp.
- It’s annoying that the TiVo HD lists hundreds of channels I don’t actually get; can’t the CableCARD figure that out? Or maybe Comcast intentionally wants to show people all the channels they could be getting if they signed up for a more expensive plan.
- TBS’s stretch-o-vision is lame. I don’t know how people stand it. Their argument about not confusing viewers with pillarboxing would hold more water if every HD channel did the same thing, but luckily most channels aren’t that stupid. So instead people end up with a mixture of pillarboxed 4:3 content on some channels and distorted 4:3 content on others, which is more confusing. If they want to avoid complaints about black bars, they could do what ESPN sometimes does and show big station logos on the sides. I’d even prefer (non-animated) banner ads.
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Eastern feeds are not so bad. I used to have a satellite dish growing up and it was nice to be able to see a show now, or three hours later.
But seriously you could’ve seen some parts of the olympics live instead of tape delayed like we did in Pacific and Mountain Time.
— David @ September 22, 2008, 12:49 am (PT)
Not sure how I feel about stretch-o-vision. So we inherited a newish hd tv with the apartment. And when auto stretch is turned on, it does a good enough job that I don’t really notice it. But when I turn it off, the image does look much better, but then I feel I am wasting all that tv-real estate. So I haven’t settled on a standard yet.
Yeah, the nice thing about being on the east coast is that the timing seems to work better. SNL is actually broadcast live and all that.
— ben @ September 22, 2008, 9:25 am (PT)
I think trying to maximize television real estate at the expense of distorting the picture is kind of silly. When you watched DVDs on 4:3 televisions, did you watch them in pan-and-scan or in widescreen? Or worse, vertically stretched to fill the screen?
And really, the networks shouldn’t be deciding people’s preferences for them. If some people want autostretch, fine, let them enable it on their own televisions. If people have old HD televisions that don’t support stretching, they’ve already been accustomed to living without it for years. (Plus, they’re probably all early-adopting A/V-philes who don’t want distorted pictures anyway.)
— James @ September 22, 2008, 11:49 am (PT)