Wirewize

If you need help setting up your home theater game console or other electronics check out Wirewize.

They have helpful guides for many consumer electronics that can show you which cables go where and how to connect it all together.

(Not that our readers would need any help, you’re all smart enough to figure it out )

Retailers giving vinyl records another spin

Retailers giving vinyl records another spin.

And they said we were crazy.

I’m old enough to have owned records when that’s all there was and I don’t remember them being that great.  There have always been audio “purists” who feel that the analog sound is superior to today’s digital audio.  The absurd thing about records today is that I have to believe 99.9% of them are recorded, mixed and mastered as digital audio.  Only in the last step are they molded into analog records.  Anyone who is going to claim to hear the “more natural” sound in those recordings is fooling themselves.

The MPAA Doesn’t Want You Recording That Movie

The MPAA is at it again.  Now they want to prevent consumers from recording HD movies during the time period between when a movie is released in the theaters and it is available on disc.  They are petitioning the FCC to change the current restrictions on the use of technologies that restrict home recording.

In a very real sense, it is the studios’ content and they can do with it as they please.  As consumers we are also free to not purchase their product.  But in this case their ideas seem to do nothing except annoy people.  According to the article, they only want to block the recordings during the roughly 2 month period between when a program begins to be available in these other mediums and when it is available on disc.

This is a case where the MPAA is going to generate a huge amount of consumer ire for very little actual benefit.

Metered Pricing

Like it or not, metered Internet access pricing is coming your way (if you don’t already have it where you are). The days of downloading torrents all day long for $30/month are going to be over soon.

Like many other ISPs, Comcast is experimenting with traffic shaping/bandwidth caps or whatever you want to call it.

ISPs have allowed their infrastructure to lag and now with HD video, VOIP and other bandwidth hungry applications, their networks can’t provide the speeds and services people want. They tried to get the content providers to pay for needed upgrades, but the whole net neutrality issue nixed that idea. The only other person they could get to pay for it is the consumer (they’re certainly NOT going to pay for it out of their profits).

ISP often quote a figure that about 5% of their users consume 80% of the bandwidth.  These are the people who download music, movies, and other large files all day long.  They do a lot of file sharing so there is constantly data moving over their part of the network.  Contrast this with someone who checks their email a few times a week and goes to Yahoo.com for some news and you can see that it really isn’t fair for both users to be paying the same monthly fee.  The heavy users consume more resources and require the ISP to spend money to upgrade the network to provide a stated level of service for everyone.  All your other utilities are billed in a “pay for what you use” manner so why not Internet access?

By setting the limits high enough where only those 5% of the users will be affected, they can provide good service for everyone while inconveniencing only a small number of people.

However, all this only delays the inevitable.  If you want to deliver high-bandwidth, low latency services over your network, you need to spend the money on upgrades and infrastructure improvements.  At some point in the future those people who were just checking their email a few times a week are going to be streaming music and movies all day long.  The switch to IPv6 and even more connected devices will only place greater demand on networks and ISPs.

So what does all this have to do with video and DVDs?  Well, some people who are delivering content on physical media are looking to electronic delivery to save money and time in distribution.  For now, that might work since I can download your content basically for free as part of my $30/month ISP charge.  But when metered pricing kicks in and I have to “pay” for each bit and consider the value of your content compared to other content, I may think twice about whether I really want to view your content.  The cost of consuming the content has been pushed from the seller to the consumer.  A physical disc returns the economic cost to the seller.

I have no doubt that in the LONG run electronic distribution will be the norm.  Network infrastructure improvements will be made, storage will get cheaper and bandwidth caps and traffic shaping will affect only a small percentage of heavy users.  It’s hard to say when that will be, but until that all happens, there is going to be some pain for both content providers and consumers.

Wilmington, N.C., to test mandatory switch to digital TV

With the switch to digital broadcasting coming in less than a year, your days of analog TV watching are numbered. But if you live in Wilmington, North Carolina, your number is even less.

Wilmington is going to be the first city to test the conversion when the local broadcasters shut off their analog signals on September 8, 2008.

The Federal Communications Commission plans to make the greater Wilmington area a digital-TV test market to work out any bugs before the entire nation goes all digital on Feb. 17.

All four commercial broadcasters in the Wilmington region — with a population of about 400,000 — have agreed to turn off their analog signals and broadcast in digital only starting Sept. 8. The switch will be preceded by an intensive consumer-education campaign, including TV and radio ads.

“This will help us understand what we need to do to prepare the rest of the country,” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin says.

You gotta applaud the government for doing a test first. Usually they make changes and worry about cleaning up the mess later. I wonder if they did this because they realize how important TV is to everyone?

What were they thinking?

JVC has just released a combination VHS/DVD/Hard Drive player/recorder.  Yes, you read that right, VHS.  Hard to imagine what they were thinking or who would buy such a device.

Our video recorders are equipped with HDD (500GB or 250GB), a VHS player, DVD player/burner,a digital/analog TV tuner, HDMI, D4, S-Video, and composite outputs. They both support Dolby Digital and DTS format.