Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Matt over at PVRBlog sheds some light for those of us who use TiVo, DirecTV Satellite, and TiVo. Basically, there’s no easy way to have all three. When I bought my HDTV almost a year ago, I considered buying a satellite receiver that was both a DVR as well as an HD receiver. The only such one at the time had just come out and was selling for $1000. This was not that much less than my TV, which was already was taking some real financial courage (or stupidity) to buy. I had to hold off. A year later, that hasn’t really changed. You would have thought the prices for such items would come down, as they have for HDTV’s themselves, but this isn’t the case.

Another issue that I’ve had is with receiving local channels. If I want to get local channels in HD, I have to use an antenna. I called DirecTV about this last year and they said that I could petition for a waver. They did this for me and I got a note in my mail 6 weeks later saying all but Fox had denied my waver. The problem with this is that I have to switch the TV off of the satellite and use an antennae, and guess what, the antennae, despite being one that gets some extra power from AC, and has lots of ways to adjust it’s position, doesn’t work very well. In fact, the only network I’ve been able to receive is CBS, but it’s really a crapshoot whether I will be able to receive it on any given day. Occasionally I will be able to receive PBS signals, but like CBS, it’s a crapshoot. NBC, ABC, and Fox, forget about it. Meanwhile these channels are available in HD from local cable channels. As much as I hate the cable conglomerate that serves my area, if watching network shows in HD were critical to me, I would have to go with them as my only option.

Then again, I can’t get a Cable DVR that records in HD, so what’s the point? I would basically have to create my own DVR, which while fun, but probably wouldn’t cost all that much less than DirecTV’s $1000 unit.

Then there’s the issue of content portability. Even if there was an HD DVR available through DirecTV, Dish, or a cable provider, it wouldn’t provide content portability. What I mean by this is the ability to take the content that you are recording and archive it to DVD or transfer it to another device like your computer or personal media player. These companies are very nervous about letting the consumer have this kind of power because they are afraid that it will enable them to share recordings just as music recordings have been shared over the internet.

I’m often amazed at the ease my own solution has allowed for content portability, albeit not one that allows me to record in HD. The TiVo I own is a Humax DRT-800 which I reviewed a couple of months ago. It is one of the few out there that allow you to burn your TiVo recordings to DVD. By doing so, you can then take the DVD’s and create any open form of media file using one of the many encoding tools out there, like Dr. Divx. I did this as a test for a half-hour show which I was able to load onto a memory card on my Treo 650 phone. Because of the small screen size I was able to shrink the file size down to a puny (for video) 90MB and watch the whole show wherever I went. While it took me a while to get this working, I would guess that once I got the hang of it, I could do it in about 30-45 minutes – most of that time just being the encoding/decoding/burning processes during which I can do other things.

HD content is still something that I think most people don’t care about – besides us early adopters. Add to this the much larger bandwidth required and the ability for content providers to gum up the works by tricking legislators into thinking that HD is somehow different from other media types and so deserves some special protections. What you get is an environment that is killing the enthusiasm for HD by the very people (early adopters) who would trumpet it and encourage all their friends to become the next generation adopters. But the way that HD has been doled out as some precious commodity has only made people balk at the price they have to pay for a technology that while certain eye-catching, is simply not worth the hassle in many cases because it doesn’t offer the flexibility that standard definition does…

When Terra Server went online way back in 1996 I believe it was amazing to be able to look up satellite imagery of your old hometown or favorite vacation spots. Of course back then the images were from the early nineties or even older, so the level of detail was pretty low. Over the years I guess the U.S. government has gotten less paranoid about the stuff, even with 9/11.

When Google put out there online mapping site not too long ago, I found it to have one of the best interfaces, allowing you to seamlessly scroll around extremely easily. It didn’t have some of the bells and whistles that would have made it more powerful, and I did find that with slower computers and slower connections it wasn’t nearly as fluid, but it was still better than the alternatives.

Just the other day Google added a nice feature to Google Maps – satellite imagery. Anywhere in the US, anyway, you can switch between the regular graphical map or the actual satellite photo. The same interface is present on both, so you can click and drag around the satellite photos just as you can with the graphical version. You can view the photos from multiple zoom levels, but here is where the only limitation comes in. It appears that you can’t get nearly as close up as you can with the graphical interface, so while you can make out individual houses, distinguishing a car, for example, cars are so small as to be mere specks. Terra Server allows me to zoom in many more times so that, for example, I can distinguish car windows, even the lines on tennis and basketball courts! I hope that Google increases their resolution.

Of course this feature is mainly a kind of eye-candy thing. It’s neat to be able to look at a photo of any place in the U.S. at the push of a button, albeit one that is fairly low res. And while I think it will be great when we can distinguish license plate numbers, the real usefulness for the vast majority of people won’t come until you can pull up either a live moving image, or even a static image taken with the last minute of a given area – for example to check that your house is still there while on vacation or more realistically what kind of traffic is up ahead so that you can reroute.

Google maps still lack a lot of the flexibility that can be found in true mapping software that allow you to dynamically label individual points of interest, create your own sets of directions, etc. These things are way beyond other such online mapping tools, but at least one thing I’d like to see on Google which I don’t think would be at all hard to implement for them is just a simple legend that tells people how large the distances are at a given zoom level. It is just very convenient to eyeball how far a couple of items are on a map by such a legend rather than the much more time-consuming task of trying to plug the addresses in to get directions from one to another…