24

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 27 Apr 2005 17:25:49 GMT

I watched the first two seasons of 24 weekly, but I just couldn’t cope with the third season–it was too slow and too irritating. Halfway through the season, we had a power outage and my TiVo missed an episode. I stopped watching it after that–I just didn’t care anymore. The general consensus is that I didn’t miss much.

I couldn’t completely give up on the series, though, so I started stockpiling the episodes for the current season when they started. I figured that I’d give it a few months and then get feedback from friends. If it was good, then I’d catch up and watch it, if it was as bad as season 3, then I’d delete them all and forget about the show.

The season’s almost done now, and everyone seems to be happy with it, so I started watching it last week. I think I screwed up–the show’s too addictive, and I’ve been burning through episodes too fast. I’ve managed to watch 17 of the 19 episodes that have aired so far; I’m going to be stuck waiting through each week’s cliffhanger for the last 4 episodes. Darn them.

On the other hand, it did give me something to do yesterday when I was home sick in bed.

In general, the show’s deeply addictive, but I’m kind of amazed by how willing the “good guys” have been to resort to torture this season. I remember it happening a couple times during the first two seasons, but it was always a shock. Now it seems to be their standard method of interrogation. I’m not sure if this is supposed to say something about our society, or if it’s just a ratings vehicle.

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Battlestar Galactica and the future of TV

Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:44:33 GMT

A couple very interesting thing have been happening with the SciFi Network’s new Battlestar Galactica series. I enjoyed the original when I was young, but that was back when I thought that The Dukes of Hazard was cool, so I don’t trust my judgment on shows from the late 70’s anymore.

I haven’t really had time to watch much of the new show (I’m somewhere in the middle of episode #2 right now), but it seems promising. I’m not sure which way they’re going–will it end up being pretentious navel-gazing, a halfway-decent space opera, a philosophy lesson set in space, a hard sci-fi war story, or what?–but it hadn’t scared me off yet.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the show is its producers aren’t treating it like a traditional TV show on a traditional network. Instead, they’re taking a number of steps to interact with their audience that are largely unprecedented. First, the SciFi Network has made the first episode available online. This is something that I was speculating about late last year, but I’m surprised to see SciFi actually making the first episode available.

Second, the show’s executive producer has started releasing show commentary as a podcast, also available from SciFi’s website. This isn’t very different from the director’s commentary that a lot of special-edition DVDs and LaserDiscs have had for years, but this is the first TV series that I’ve ever seen with a commentary track.

The producers of Battlestar Galactica seem to be making a concerted effort to interact with their fans, rather then hiding behind the usual corporate facade. Battlestar Galactica is probably the perfect show for this sort of treatment–it’s a high-publicity show from a small-ish cable channel, it’s one of the few science fiction shows on TV today, and science fiction fans are about as vocal and well-connected as any group you’re likely to find. Witness the fan-funded attempts to continue Farscape and Star Trek: Enterprise after they were cancelled. So anything that the SciFi network can do to draw more viewers and build a community around Galactica will probably pay off handsomely for them over time.

I’m surprised that there isn’t a Battlestar Galactica blog yet. Oh, wait–there is.

If the show does well, we’ll probably see similar efforts from other studios over the next few years–downloadable episodes, actual commentary from producers and directors, and honest attempts to interact with fans. We’ll also get more cynical attempts to cash in on the concept and canned publicity stunts that are supposed to look fashionably cutting-edge, but will largely just be embarrassing for everyone involved.

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De-TiVoing myself

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 03 Jan 2005 17:42:10 GMT

After all of the effort that I’ve went through over the years to try to sell the things to friends and family, it feels odd to be unplugging my TiVo. Now that we’ve turned off our satellite TV service, though, there’s no new content flowing onto the TiVo, which makes it a lot less interesting. All we’re left with is 75 GB of old stuff that we’d like to get around to watching sooner or later.

Fortunately, TiVo hacking has continued to move on since I first added a bigger hard drive to my first TiVo over 4 years ago. Using the tools discussed on the dealdatabase.com TiVo hacking forums, I’m currently extracting all 75 GB worth of programming from an old TiVo and putting it onto a 120 GB drive that I had sitting around. Then, once that’s done, I’ll use mencoder to re-encode them into something a bit more modern then MPEG-2, probably XviD. This will make it trivial to play things back using MythTV, which is really the point of the whole exercise. While MythTV has its problems, it’s pretty good at playing back pre-encoded video, so I won’t miss that aspect of the TiVo experience.

Once that’s done, I’ll probably put the old TiVo up on ebay. I’ll be sad to see it go, but time and technology move on.

I guess I find it kind of ironic that I’m doing this on the same day that TiVo finally officially announces their TiVoToGo service. So, if my Series 2 TiVo was still working, then I could use it to stream DRM-ified video to a small number of Windows systems. If I had any Windows systems. So, instead of doing it to official way, I guess I’m just cutting out the middleman and doing it myself. As usual.

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InFocus X1a projector review

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 30 Dec 2004 02:44:05 GMT

As mentioned earlier, we bought an InFocus X1a projector last month. Here are the basic specs on the X1a:

  • DLP with 2x color wheel
  • 800x600 resolution
  • 37 dB
  • 6.8 lbs
  • 1100 ANSI lumens
  • 2000:1 contrast ratio
  • 3 inputs: composite video, SVGA video, VGA. VGA supports HDTV component input via adapter cable
  • Supports computer resolutions up to 1024x768 and HDTV up to 1080i, downscaling as needed

There are two common flavors of projectors; DLP projectors and LCD projectors. In general, LCD projectors are a bit cheaper and have a bit better color, while DLP projectors have darker blacks and last longer. The X1a is a DLP projector, but I’ve been very impressed with the colors that it produces. The one downside to it is that it only uses a 2x color wheel–DLP projectors work by bouncing light from a lamp off of a “DLP” array, which consists of thousands of micromirrors that can be moved to create a picture. The DLP array doesn’t contain any color information; instead the projector uses a spinning color wheel to display red, green, and blue information in sequence. High-end DLP projectors use up to 6x wheels, which display each color repeatedly for each frame of video. Cheaper projectors, like the X1a, use 2x wheels. Some people’s eyes can see color fringing from slower wheels; I can sometimes catch it out of the corner of my eyes, but I don’t find it annoying.

The X1a is a cheaper version of the popular InFocus X1; it trades slightly longer lamp life for the X1’s Faroudja deinterlacing chip. Since we’re planning on feeding it progressive-scan video directly from a PC, the fancy deinterlacer doesn’t do us a whole lot of good. Since the X1a ended up being about $65 cheaper, it seems like a better deal.

Right now, the projector is hanging from the ceiling in our bedroom, projecting its image onto the wall at the foot of the bed. We haven’t done anything to the wall–it’s just a normal textured white wall. The projector is about 10’ from the wall, and it projects a 7’ image. For comparison, the biggest rear-projection TV that I could find is Sony’s 70” XBR Grand WEGA. I’m sure the Sony has much better image quality, but it costs $7,000, while my $740 projector produces an image that’s over a foot wider.

When used in a dark room, the X1a produces wonderful images. I’m very impressed with its color reproduction and brightness. It looks stunning. As the room gets brighter, the image quality starts to fade. Our bedroom doesn’t have particularly dark shades, but the projector is still usable in full December sunlight. It’s hard to pick details out of dark scenes, though. I’m not sure how well it’ll work in summer–we’ll probably need to pick up some black-out shades.

The X1a’s native resolution is 800x600; when projecting a 84” diagonal image, that gives us roughly 12 pixels per inch. As you’d expect, each pixel is clearly visible from close up, centered in a black “screen door” pattern. At normal viewing distances, I don’t find the screen door objectionable at all, and you get dampen it a bit by defocusing the projector slightly if it really bothers you.

Like most modern projectors, the X1a has a “keystone” adjustment, so you can project rectangular images even when the projector isn’t perfectly perpendicular to the screen. Architectural photographers face the same type of problem when taking pictures of buildings–if the camera isn’t perfectly level, the buildings don’t appear square in the image. Photographers know there are two ways to fix this sort of distortion–you can either get a lens that you can shift to control the distortion, or you can fix it in Photoshop afterwords. Generally, using the right lens produces a better image, but Photoshop is cheaper and faster. The X1 takes the “Photoshop” route, and rescales the image in software to correct for keystoning. This is very noticeable when you’re feeding it an 800x600 image from a computer–some scan lines go fuzzy, when they should all be perfectly sharp. To fix this, you need to either align the projector correctly and then disable the keystone correction or live with a crooked image. I assume that high-end projectors have shiftable lenses, but the X1a clearly doesn’t reach into that price range.

All in all, I’m really happy with the projector. My only real complaint is that it doesn’t ship with a remote control, so I’m forced to use the power switch on the side of it to turn it off and on. Since it’s hanging from our ceiling, that’s a pain. I suppose I could pay them the $60 they want for a remote (with presentation keys and laser pointer), but I’m currently too cheap for that; I’ll shop for a universal remote that can drive their projectors instead.

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Turning off the TV, 2005-style

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 30 Dec 2004 01:44:42 GMT

I finally called today to disconnect our Dish Network service. It only took 15 minutes on hold to get through to them, which wasn’t quite as bad as I’d feared. Still, the process raised the age-old question again: does hiding the “cancel my service” option really keep people from canceling?

This seems to be a phase that everyone with small kids goes through–“we’re going to stop watching so much TV and just turn the darned thing off.” My parents tried it once or twice, as have friends, siblings, and in-laws. Inevitably, people seem to turn it back on after a year or so, but they never seem to really regret it.

Watching less random TV is good, but mostly we’re trying to avoid paying $50/month when all we really watch are movies and things that are available on broadcast TV. So, the plan is to pick up a PCI HDTV tuner and use it to grab just the handful of shows that we care to see. I already have MythTV running at home, so adding a HD card to the existing setup shouldn’t be that hard (heh–everything with MythTV is harder then you’d expect), and I expect that watching HD resized to fit an 800x600 projector will look vastly better then the SD Satellite→Analog→TiVo→Analog→Projector video that we’re used to now.

Anyway, we’ll see. We’re sitting on at least 2 months worth of DVDs that we’ve never seen, plus a ton of subtitled anime, and I’d like to have more time to read, anyways.

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TV Pilots via BitTorrent?

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 21 Dec 2004 16:40:49 GMT

I’ve noticed over the past few weeks that most popular TV shows are available via BitTorrent. They’re generally edited to remove commercials. They’re frequently downscaled from HDTV sources, which means that their quality is fantastic. Modern video codecs can compress a 45 minute show into around 350 MB, which BitTorrent can download in the background in a matter of hours. Better yet, the very nature of BitTorrent means that the more users downloading a given file, the better the available bandwidth, because each downloaded copy is also available for upload; it’s not uncommon to see BitTorrent clients start sharing pieces of downloaded files within seconds of the download starting. This means that large files can be widely shared without a massive investment in download bandwidth.

According to the news this week, Hollywood has finally noticed BitTorrent and is moving to stop the rampant sharing of their property. I’m amazed that it’s taken them so long to get involved.

However, in the midst of their attack, I think they may have missed an opportunity. Hollywood and the TV networks produce a lot of content annually, and quite a bit of that is really just advertising. Hollywood trailers are really just ads for the full-length movie. Most TV show pilots are ads for the rest of the series. They’re teasers, intended to hook viewers and get them to pay (either in movie tickets or eyeball time) for the full product. In both cases, the media companies have produced copyrighted works that they really want people to watch, even if they aren’t directly compensated for the experience. The more widely they’re distributed, the more effective they are. This should lead directly to profits on the “real” product–the movie or TV series involved.

So, logically, media companies could come out ahead by producing sharable versions of their trailers and pilots, and then going ahead and sharing them themselves. With BitTorrent, they’d even have decent download statistics–they’d know how many people had downloaded things.

Of course, I don’t see this happening anytime soon. First, the last thing that the media companies want to do is to tell people “go install a BitTorrent client.” Actually, that’s the second-to-last thing–the last thing they want to do is to legitimize P2P filesharing. Even if they can get past those two issues, and get over the conceptual hurdles that follow them (”Download TV? That’s what pirates do, not media companies. We don’t do that.”), they’d still be left with a relatively small market–I doubt that there are more then a million people out there downloading and watching TV shows.

It’s an interesting opportunity for someone, though. First, the first company to do this will get an enormous PR boost. Second, there’s no real limit on how many different versions of a show they can distribute–they could do full HDTV, 640x480, and smaller sizes, all the way down to versions for mobile devices. The mobile aspect is another PR opportunity, and possibly even a VC opportunity.

So, while I don’t see this happening soon, and I certainly don’t see widespread adoption of this sort of thing by Hollywood, I’d be amazed if someone doesn’t take it up within the next couple years, even if it’s just for the PR burst.

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Torrentocracy

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 18 Aug 2004 04:32:44 GMT

One of these days, I’m going to get around to setting up a MythTV box at home. I love my TiVos, but I lost another hard drive on the living room box last week, and there are so many things that they Just Can’t Do. Like rip all of the kids’ DVDs so I can put them in storage, next to the CDs, so the kids can’t scratch them anymore. Like burning programs onto DVDs. Like playing AAC-encoded audio. Like sharing video between units in a reasonable manner.

I found another thing to add to the list today: TiVos can’t download programs via BitTorrent, either. Go check out Torrentocracy–it’s a MythTV plugin that lets you download content directly onto your TV. Deeply cool concept, but I don’t have any way to test the execution yet. Give me a few more months, and I’ll report back.

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TiVo repair

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 19 Apr 2004 02:43:01 GMT

I’ve finally had it with my downstairs TiVo. As I mentioned before, it’s been crashing with increasing regularity. I’ve been avoiding dealing with it for a few reasons; mostly, I’ve been too busy with other things, but I also hate debugging problems with black boxes, and my TiVo is definitely a black box, even if it does run Linux.

Unfortunately, my inaction hasn’t made the problem go away. If anything, it’s happening even more often now then it was a month or two ago. But, in the meantime, I’ve been able to watch a couple crashes and gleaned a bit of information:

  1. It doesn’t just stop–when playing back recordings, it skips a couple times first, with long pauses, then a few frames, then another long pause. This repeats for a couple cycles, and then it finally crashes.
  2. When it’s working right, the TiVo’s front-panel LEDs blink brightly when I press buttons on the remote. When it’s dead, the front panel LEDS still blink, but only slightly. It looks like there are two LEDs that blink, one driven by hardware and the other by software. When it’s dead, the software one doesn’t respond. But, when the box has just crashed, the software LED still works. It takes a while for it to die.

If I saw the same symptoms on a server, I’d be thinking “bad hard drive”–we’re seeing processes lock up in the ‘D’ state here, followed by a congestive collapse of the whole system, as every system process that touches the disk (or talks to a process that talks to the disk, like syslog) slowly crawls to a halt. Bad motherboards or power supplies don’t usually leave parts of the OS working right for a few minutes.

So, I pulled the drive out of the box and I’m currently cloning it onto a new, larger drive. There are decent tools and directions online for this, so it’s not a big pain rounding up all of the pieces. Plus, when it’s done, I should have twice as much disk space.

As a plus, the original drive started spitting out unrecoverable drive errors around 2% of the way into the copy. Hopefully that was in the data area of the drive, not in the middle of important program code. Hmm–I wonder if it’s in the swap area? That’d really kill the box, but it’d leave it working fine after a reboot, until it got busy enough to swap. Yeah, that’s probably what happened.

Update (Apr 20, 2004): It seems to have worked. The TiVo has made it two days without crashing; that hasn’t happened in weeks. It seems slightly faster, and it now holds 146 hours, up from 60 hours.

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