BlogCadre - high definition

MythTV & High Definition...minimum requirements

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 23:13:05 -0600

Why have you forsaken me?

My MythTV box has been chugging along nicely, playing DVDs and recording two shows off of a 2-tuner standard definition hardware MPEG encoder card (doing all at once). Just before Thanksgiving, I purchased a projector that can do 720p and had been enjoying the finer detail of my DVDs at full resolution. However, standard definition material really looks like crap when displayed on a 69" screen. Enter: High Definition. I bought a HDTV tuner card, thinking that I had prepared myself for this moment. According to the MythTV documentation, the minimum recommended processor speed for recording and playing off of one HD Tuner card is about 2.4GHz. So I built my box with an Athlon XP 2800+ (2083MHz clock speed) thinking it would be up to the task. Think again...

When Marketing Goes Bad

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:50:29 -0600

I was watching the television today, and I saw the most idiotic commercial ever. The commercial was for a pair of HD Sunglasses. Let's look at that acronymn HD for a second: H=high, D=definition.

Now, why is this stupid? Maybe only someone with knowledge of what the term HD really means would think this is ridiculous. What is HD? High definition is a term associated to television or video broadcasts or files that are of a resolution higher than that of NTSC or PAL standards. Since real life optics have no pixel-by-pixel resolution, this makes no sense.

HD Sunglasses

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:49:10 -0600

A pair of HD Sunglasses, as the company calls them. Worthless crap is what I call them.