TV

From PBS's Bob Cringely, NerdTV episode 1 is here! The site describes it as "Charlie Rose for geeks." You can download it online in one of many formats.

Episode 1 downloading now...

Back in October, Jon Stewart (host of Comedy Central's Daily Show) appeared on CNN's Crossfire, and called for the show's cancelation. To quote a comment on Slashdot:

I did watch the show yesterday thought and it was awe inspiring, especially because it was live and they kept coming back from the commercial breaks for another beating. I especially liked it when they were in Rapidfire and Stewart ignored the gong until they gave up on it.

So anyway, Stewart's main point was that merely repeating talking points and analyzing how things "play" -- rather than statements themselves -- is actually a disservice to the public. I would add that obsessive coverage of the trail du jour -- OJ, Peterson, whatever -- is just as silly.

It seems that the new head of CNN US listened. Phil Rosenthal has this little quote in the Chicago Sun-Times:

On Wednesday, CNN's Klein told the AP, "I guess I come down more firmly in the Jon Stewart camp" and would prefer a more substantive discussion of current events and controversies.

"I doubt that when the president sits down with his advisers they scream at him to bring him up to date on all of the issues," Klein said. "I don't know why we don't treat the audience with the same respect."

You really don't think the president's Cabinet meetings come with an audience ready to cheer, boo, applaud or hoot when prodded?

Apparently Klein wants to re-brand CNN as the hard-news, in-depth alternative to Fox and MSNBC.

I hope he does, because America really needs one of those. It's sad to have to resort to BBC for in-depth coverage.

Slate has an article about last night's coverage of the race. Among others, they made this observation:

7:52 p.m., CBS: I can't wait till Dan Rather starts to get tired. As I remember from 2000, fatigue makes him folksy. I still remember him at around 1 a.m. that night, when the vote flipped back to Gore again, saying something like, "Well, I'll be a coon on a red-hot skillet!" He's nowhere near that point yet, but he did just tell Bob Schieffer, "Don't taunt the alligator until after you cross the creek."

The first time or two I hear one of these little Ratherisms, I chuckle a little. After that, I want to say "Shut Up, Dan!". About the fourth time, the channel gets changed, or the TV gets shut off and I go back to the BBC. Because half of his "folksy sayings" make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Especially when he's tired.

One of my favorite actors, Alan Alda of M*A*S*H, will be joining West Wing as a Republican senator. He seems to do a good job at whatever he does, so I'm looking forward to it.

Now that we have a HDTV unit and MythTV, it occured to me that there had to be a better way to get video to the HDTV than the standard S-Video cable I'd been using. And sure enough, there is.

Our TV has a HDMI input, which is pin-compatible with a digital DVI output on standard PC video cards. Slick. So, with the aid of a Gefen DVI to HDMI cable and a Radeon 9600 card stolen from my main PC, I got a pure digital picture on the TV. Wow. It's nice. Beats S-Video cables handily.

Moreover, the TV supports EDID, the technology that lets PC monitors tell the PC what video modes they support. My TV reported 1920x540, 720x480, and 640x480 modes. Again, nice. And the ATI fglrx driver reports all the information you need to generate the appropriate ModeLine for it. Even slicker.

I'm going to buy a Radeon 9200 card for the MythTV unit so I can get the 9600 back for my desktop.

The only problem: the display is now so sharp that MPEG compression artifacts are more noticable and annoying than before. Guess I'll have to bump up my bitrates in MythTV. Sigh.

Here are some links I found useful:

• Modeline generation for HDTV (detailed)


• Google search for modeline info

I've been talking a lot about MythTV lately, and here's a tangential topic: we bought our first HDTV unit last weekend. It's a widescreen 30" CRT Philips 30PW8402 unit. We don't yet have hi-def video sources (save for DVD), but I've still gotta say: wow. The picture is so much better than our Sony TV (and not just because that Sony's picture tube was dying, either!). There's some stuff in 16:9 even in standard def, and that can be zoomed in upon. Very slick.

And DVDs are stunning on this thing. We're very happy with it all and are glad we opted for a HDTV instead of a standard def one.

One of my concerns was about traditional stuff -- would it all be "squashed" by the wide screen? Turns out no -- the remote has a picture size button, that alternates between 4:3, zoomed 14:9, zoomed 16:9, widescreen, and superwidescreen modes. The zoomed modes are used when the black letterboxing at the top and bottom of a standard screen are part of the signal (such as widescreen movies broadcast in standard definition). The widescreen modes are used with true widescreen signals, such as from a DVD player.

Our DVD player already had component video out, so a few cables, and a quick check of the setup menu to tell it we had a 16:9 unit, and wow -- stunning results. We're really enjoying it.

My next project is to get a DVI to HDMI cable so I can hook it up to the MythTV unit digitally. This will get us the best possible quality, and I can use a Linux-based DVD player to send a pure digital signal to the TV.