Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TV is broken

minimalmac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 264 posts

Re: TV is broken

#211

Post by mscrivo »

It's unfortunate that windows media center hasn't caught on in a bigger way. I use it on my casual home theater and my larger more serious home theater. I have a channel master 4221 antenna that feeds into 2 HD Homerun tuners and clearQAM feeding into a couple more. This gives me the ability to record/watch 4 channels at once from any networked media center in the house. Media center has a fantastic interface that aggregates all the channels available across all tuners and hides the complexity. It allows you to easily record series and find shows across any of the tuners, all while looking beautiful. In addition to the great tv viewing experience, there is the wonderful media browser addon that beautifully indexes your digital movie collection and plugins like showanalyzer to automatically skip commercials in recordings. With TMT 5, I get a blu-ray player built right into media center too.

I honestly could not imagine a better setup. The only issue is that the initial setup is way too hard and time consuming. But the result can't be beat right now.

Re: TV is broken

#212

Post by srdev »

dpark wrote: post #132
calloc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold on ... Hulu has download limits in the middle of watching a program? I've watched Hulu from 5 AM till 5 PM almost uninterrupted, the only interruption is between shows they will say "You've been watching for 3 hours, are you sure you don't want to take a break?". That repeats every two hours or so. Yes, the commercials can be grating, and are still annoying but I think that is a small price to pay for streaming…

I really wanted to like Hulu. I even paid for Hulu Plus so I could watch it on my PS3 and get access to the larger library. But on my PS3, Hulu streaming was flakey. And then the commercials. The commercials ended it. After watching on Netflix, I just couldn't deal with Hulu's commercials. They're nearly as grating as cable TV, and for some strange reason they always seemed to be inserted 5 seconds away from where th…

I was looking at using Hulu Plus to augment my Netflix subscription, but when I found out that even the paid version had commercials I changed my mind.

At one point they were experimenting with a "Watch one long commercial at the beginning then no interruptions" thing, which was fantastic, but I guess they nixed that, because I haven't seen it the last few times I've been on Hulu.

Re: TV is broken

#213

Post by mdda »

icebraining wrote: post #123
ricardobeat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their advertising is less broken. I'd still rather pay for GMail instead of seeing ads.

I'd still rather pay for GMail instead of seeing ads. You can; it costs $50/year, though: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html

The (paid for) Google Apps for Business still has a line of Ads at the top of the email listing. No ads down the RHS, though.

Re: TV is broken

#214

Post by billforsternz »

tomjen3 wrote: post #129
awj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually like the action movies where you know that the guy gets the pretty girl once he is done blowing things up. Die Hard is "years old" (24 of them, actually) and is an awesome movie in this genre. In fact I am going to preemptively declare you to be an action movie hipster if you like them but not Die Hard. Being old doesn't make a movie bad. Being bad makes a movie bad. Sometimes that's because the times ha…

It is okay, but the CGI explosions aren't as good as in the new movies (they properly wasn't even CGI then).

Absolutely true. For example Ronin (1998) has much more awesome special effects than the average 201x CGI infested equivalent. I was surprised by the perceptiveness of a youngster who pointed this syndrome out to me, he recognises the superiority of movies half a generation older than the movies made for his generation.

Re: TV is broken

#215

Post by jswinghammer »

SiVal wrote: post #113
droithomme wrote: post #57

There are many other things that are broken too. My fancy expensive name-brand digital TV takes a full minute to boot up from a cold start, longer than it took my tube based TV from the 1950s to warm up. Once on, it takes almost a full second to change channels while it rebuffers the stream of the channel being changed to. This prevents quickly flipping through channels to see what is on. As a result I just don't bot…

Here's a question for my fellow amateur economists: What happens to the quality of broadcast television when you increase the supply of broadcast channel-hours by a factor of 50 and you don't increase the supply of viewers at all? I used to watch TV, like most people. Then, in the 1990's, the number of channels started increasing. More options, great. Twice as many channels did allow for more specialization, so maybe…

Well in terms of economics what you're talking about is more specialization and niche audiences being served. HBO made itself into the network to watch smart television during the last decade. Right now that's less true as other networks figured out that people like smart things.

I'd say if you were not watching "The Wire" or "Six Feet Under" that you're missing out on something rather interesting. "The Wire" was unique partially because it was like a very long, very good movie in terms of quality and respect for the audience.

There's so much good television now that I don't have patience for the argument that TV is worthless. I don't turn on the television except to watch something specific but when I do I find the quality seems to get better year after year even with my favorite shows ending. More shows are willing to experiment and try to reach new audiences.

I won't speak to the shows on Discovery or whatever since they sound dumb to me but the shows with actual plot and characters are better than ever.

Re: TV is broken

#216

Post by sutterbomb »

tsotha wrote: post #210
kgo wrote: post #140

I made nachos for my niece once. Put Doritos on a cookie sheet, smothered them in cheese, and put them in the broiler. She thought they were weird and broken because I didn't use the normal plain-style tortilla chips. Her mom made her a new batch the right way. Young children have a tenancy to think that the rest of the world is exactly like their home, because that home is their world. Then when they experience the…

Wait, you use Doritos to make nachos? Weirdo.

And fritos for taco salad? I'm so very confused.

Re: TV is broken

#217

Post by sfseth »

i can completely relate. it is a legit challenge to describe advertising-funded media. there was once a concept of an editorial firewall, which seems cute in an antique sense of the word, possibly believable circa 1971. advertising, for one reason or another, seems to have the effect of shaping whatever it funds towards a decreased intellectual stimulus, ie lower curiosity. there's something to think about with respect to Super Bowl ads being the most valuable on TV.

Re: TV is broken

#218

Post by rkudeshi »

VikingCoder wrote: post #36
mbreese wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed. And that is why we have a DVR. It lets you pause, rewind, watch something you missed, and the networked one in my bedroom has every episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse ever broadcast for my son to choose which one he wants. The only "live" TV that…

With a DVR, you can not watch something you missed. You can watch something that you remember ahead of time to tell your DVR to record for you, or that miraculously it thinks you might be interested in. TV has fundamental flaws, compared to other technologies that exist... It's broken.

The upcoming "Hopper" DVR from Dish Network solves this problem in an ingenious way.

They have a feature called "Primetime Anytime" that records the entirety of primetime (8-11pm) programming on the 4 major broadcast networks (NBC, Fox, ABC, CBS) for the last 8 days.

That means you can turn on your DVR and watch anything that aired in primetime in the last week.

The way they achieve this is by silently recording the networks in the background. The DVR has a 2TB hard drive, of which about 500GB is allocated to this feature, I believe.

(Note that doing it this way also absolves Dish of having to negotiate with the networks a la Hulu.)

Re: TV is broken

#219

Post by DanI-S »

DanBC wrote: post #189
DanI-S wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some validation: In the UK, the BBC has a pretty fixed budget, a pretty fixed (low) number of channels and a pretty fixed audience. They have continued to produce a high quality output of world-class educational and entertainment TV for a good chunk of the last century. They also managed to build a free streaming service superior to Hulu, and a bunch of great websites. It costs $230 per year ($19 per month). And ther…

Legally I don't need a licence but I buy one anyway.

I'm British, but I live in California, and I'm eagerly awaiting the day that I can pay monthly for BBC iPlayer (their streaming service). There are sketchy proxy services available, but it feels terrible to be paying a third party and effectively stealing the content.

Re: TV is broken

#220

Post by verisimilitude »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #155
huggyface wrote: post #73

This is akin to saying that the internet is broken because some videos are prefaced by a commercial. Or HN is broken because some of the front-page are hiring ads for YC companies. I use a PVR for all of my "TV" needs (I have two large wall-mounted screens. They are great entertainment devices. I only mention that for consistency with those proudly informing that they only old some small CRT in the corner somewhere).…

> This is akin to saying that the internet is broken because some videos are prefaced by a commercial. Youtube showing mandatory, non-skippable video commercials before the video you want to watch is the single most annoying thing that happened on the Internet in the last few years. I still haven't figured out how to get rid of them, but if I ever find out, I won't hesitate to do so.

I can help with this (if you have Safari) -- (1) http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/ (2) http://clea.nr/ First one removes the video commercials; second removes the rest of the crap. So peaceful.
Post reply on HN