Wayne D's Blog

Yahoo 360 is getting a reprieve, I looked at the default Wordpress blog format that my website hosting company offers and I decided I wanted to tweak the look a bit so it may be a while before I switch over. This is yesterday's lost posting recreated to the best of my recollection. I may lose this one too, my router keeps power cycling because someone jammed the cable leading from the power brick to the router around the edge of the computer desk and it's probably got an intermittent power connection now.

Yesterday on my Saturday chore trip I stopped in at FutureShop to see what CD's they had on sale. While I was there I dropped by the TV department to look at the new big LCD screens they had on display. They had two big HD displays going one with a movie and the other with a Bluray demo disk. I was disappointed with the picture quality, the pictures looked sharp but there was a noticeable amount of noise in the background. There were also noticeable compression artifacts visible around the text on the Bluray demo screen. This was a new 1080p set with a digital connection to the Bluray player. At times the picture looked no better than I get on my video iPod. I did a quick search on the Internet and found that what I was seeing was not unique. High Definition blog has a good article on HDTV artifacts. The sorry state of HD television also discusses how the promise of HDTV isn't always evident in the implementation. If you want to be snowed under with numbers DTV bandwidths explains why these problems occur. The crux if the matter is that all of the digital TV and HD formats use compression. The idea behind compression is that you can reduce the size of a digital file by removing things that people can't see. The MP3 format is an example of comrepssion used on music files, jpg files are also compressed to reduce their size. The problem with compression is that it's more of an art than a science. The amount of compression you can get away without people noticing depends on the content of the image. Unfortunately the pipe for HDTV and high definition DVD's is only so big so sometimes it may be necessary to compress to fit the pipe irrespective of the quality.

Compression means that 7-12 regular definition digital channels can be squeezed in the same space as one regular analog channel. That's why the cable companies are so interested in getting us all to switch over to digital cable.

The upshot is that before you plunk down big bucks for a monster HDTV and HD DVD or Bluray player take a good look at the picture and make sure that your expectations haven't been skewed too much by the hype.

The question now is whether I should explain the Kristin Chenoweth website reference in yesterdays posting. A the time I was writing the blog entry I was listening to Prairie Home Companion and Kristin Chenoweth was singing. I recognized her name from her time on The West Wing but I didn't know she was a singer. It turns out that she it a Tony Award winning stage actress with classical voice training. I would post a picture of her but I've been getting complaints that 4 pictures of women in 57 blog postings is too much. The insinuation was that I did it to increase my traffic. The truth is that the blog posting that offer solutions to Linux problems I encounter are the ones that really drive traffic to my blog.

I think I spoke too soon, my router just reset itself again, I better save this posting before it craps out entirely.