I thought it was a pretty innovative conference format. Of course 5 minutes isn’t enough to go in-depth on a topic, but it provided an overview that will inspire you to dig more into it if you’re interested. All this provided you can get passed the high-on-java-compulsively-twittering-on-their-iPhone crowd

They promise to be back quarterly now. I think it’s definitely worth checking out! I’ll post a link to their videos/slide decks if/when I find them.

Today I got rid of my Comcast DVR. For a couple of reasons:

- I got a bill for $105 for TV alone this month, as my “introductory promotions” ran out. And NO, I did NOT order any porn channels or anything like that, that’s what torrents are for Generally, I watch TV rather infrequently, just catching up on my DVR’d series, like House, Heroes, The Office, Better off Ted, The Big Bang Theory, and a few others, local news, and CBUT (Vancouver’s CBC station) which Comcast distributes at a very poor quality for some reason. Does that justify me paying over $50 + $15 a month for the DVR when the Comcast CEO just took home an obscene $24.7 million last year? I believe not!

- The DVR is really a stupid fucking piece of shit. Granted, at least it’s easy to use, but beyond that, there’s not much to it. Accessing menu functions is slow as hell, the thing crashes all the time, it’s ridiculous! To add insult to injury, they gave me an old box without HDMI output, so I had to resort to analog component or DVI-to-HDMI. But, my main gripe with it is the tiny hard disk in the days of 1.5 TB hard disks being cheap and widely available. And, there’s no practical way to export recorded shows. The only possible way to do it would be to stream it through Firewire, which means that you have to “play” the show as there is no way of copying the contents of the hard disk directly, and even then, only local broadcast channels are decrypted.

- There are plenty of free options today to watch TV shows and movies, both legally and illegally, like Bittorrent, Hulu, Netflix (nice use of Silverlight!), with minimal to no advertisements, making TV-watching more efficient, and you don’t have to sit and watch irritating, screaming idiots trying to make you waste money on stupid useless shit. The quality is very decent too in comparison to cable or broadcast. In spite of all the “full HD” claims cable operators like to make, the audio and video on their services is still very highly compressed with fully visible compression artifacts, as there is still no cost-effective way of transmitting uncompressed full high definition content further than the HDMI cable run between devices.

So, now that I got an HTPC all set up, time to enjoy it! I decided to keep the “basic limited” TV service, as it only amounts to $5 a month over what I currently pay for Internet, with the “multiple service discount”, otherwise, I’d just get one of those HDTV antennae, which should give me good results since there arent many reception obstacles in my area, and if I get the urge to watch CNN, MTV, or any of this crap, there’s always the clubroom and gym in my condo.

One of the things I wanted to do with that TV was hook up an eventual media center PC. Now all I have on it is my Macbook Pro

So, First thing I tried hooking it up through VGA with an old monitor cable which wasn’t great, until my Monoprice order arrived. In it was a VGA+Audio cable along with a DVI-to-HDMI cable. Great, let’s try HDMI. I was expecting a crystal-clear picture, but that’s not what I got. The picture had a reduced color depth, super high contrast and the text was bleeding. So, I tried different things, including disabling ClearType which made it worse, so here’s what worked.

Display settings

Set resolution to 1920×1080 at 59Hz. You might have to click the Force button on the ATI settings dialog. The 59Hz part Intrigues me. If I pick 60Hz on HDMI, the TV says “Invalid Format” and on VGA it shrinks the picture to 4:3 aspect ratio, even if 1920×1080 is widescreen.

Set the overscan to MAX. If you don’t, you won’t get 1:1 pixel ratio, which means the image will be resized. You DON’T want that.

TV

Selecting overscan will hide the edges. Set the aspect ratio to Just Scan. Just Scan is just fancy terminology for 1:1.

Disable the variety of picture enhancements. They mess around with the color depth. Video looks good, but your desktop won’t. I do leave the intelligent sensor ON.

This improved the picture quite a bit, although it’s still not to my liking.

The vertical lines seem OK, the horizontal ones, not so much…

The “info” bar and input list:

The I/O Panel

My biggest complaint is the lack of analog audio out, it only has digital RCA and optical audio out. I don’t have a surround system yet, just a bookshelf stereo system, and I don’t care much for them.

So, I had to get this thing from GefenTV. Cost me around $70. The only problem is that it won’t decode dolby, just LPCM. They just came out with this guy that will do Dolby. I might just get it eventually.

And here’s my stuck pixel, located around the center of the screen. As you see, the green pixel is black (always ON), so the effect of this is that the pixel is magenta. I’ll try running one of the tools that displays white snow. I’m a hesitant about using a pencil or eraser on it. I don’t want a dent on the surface.

And here’s how the logo looks It’s quite nice actually, but if the LEDs annoy you there’s an on-screen option to turn it off. In case you are wonering, it is totally transparent, behind is the wall (you can see the texture on the wall).