VUDU vs Satellite

[redwein]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

The DirecTivo units were not dogs. I had both the original DirecTivo and the later HD version. Both of them were way better than the DirecTV DVR. I had friends who had the DirecTV version and switched to the Tivo and never looked back. They were not unusably slow. The performane of their UI is on par with the performance of the series 3 today. How do I know? I still have an HD DirecTivo reciever that is becoming obsoleted, but navigating through the guides, etc. seems just about the same on that as it does on my series 3. In both cases it was better than the Direct TV DVRs that I have seen and the Comcast DVR that my father had before I bought him a series 3 as a gift.

You are right, however, that they never even got the DirecTivo to series 2 capability. That was a sore point with me and I never understood it. I'm hoping that with a new parent company, which seems to be the catalyst for the hint of change wrt Tivo, they will address that as well.

[jleavens]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

The DirecTivo units were not dogs. I had both the original DirecTivo and the later HD version. Both of them were way better than the DirecTV DVR. I had friends who had the DirecTV version and switched to the Tivo and never looked back. They were not unusably slow. The performane of their UI is on par with the performance of the series 3 today. How do I know? I still have an HD DirecTivo reciever that is becoming obsoleted, but navigating through the guides, etc. seems just about the same on that as it does on my series 3. In both cases it was better than the Direct TV DVRs that I have seen and the Comcast DVR that my father had before I bought him a series 3 as a gift.

You are right, however, that they never even got the DirecTivo to series 2 capability. That was a sore point with me and I never understood it. I'm hoping that with a new parent company, which seems to be the catalyst for the hint of change wrt Tivo, they will address that as well.

I had the original DirecTiVo unit, and would have to sit there and painfully wait for all the little slots in the guide to update. One by one. You can't tell me that thing wasn't slow. Moving forward and backward a day at a time was grueling.

PS- As a former ReplayTV fanatic, it took me a long time to get used to the HR20-700 from DirecTV. But I'm a (mostly) happy customer now, and like that they are continually updating the product.

[redwein]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

I had the original DirecTiVo unit, and would have to sit there and painfully wait for all the little slots in the guide to update. One by one. You can't tell me that thing wasn't slow. Moving forward and backward a day at a time was grueling.

Maybe one of the early units with an early rev of software. I couldn't say about that. But you said that the DirecTivo units were "always dogs". I do beg to differ on that point. Since I still have one, I feel pretty confident about that. The speed of the DirecTV DVRs and Comcast DVRs pale in comparison and the speed of the series 3 is comparable.

BTW, why would you want to scroll ahead a day, ever? There are much better ways to search for programs than by scanning the guide like that. That would be like complaining that scrolling through an unfiltered list of movies in Vudu was painful because you chose not to use any of its search and filtering capabilities.

[HeadHodge]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

So maybe if they're making progress on that front, they might build a receiver that could be plugged into a TiVo.

Well I think that's a great thought.

Instead of trying to get Directv to provide and support TIVO boxes, it seems much more reasonable to get TIVO to support Directv content on their own boxes. That might be cool.

I'm even now thinking about DirectVudu!!! All VUDU would have to do is add a little coax connector on the back of the box.

I've heard about the PC Directv receiver card, but don't know if and when it's going to be a reality.

[redwein]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

Instead of trying to get Directv to provide and support TIVO boxes, it seems much more reasonable to get TIVO to support Directv content on their own boxes. That might be cool.

I wouldn't want to plug a DirecTV box into a Tivo box. I want something that is as integrated as either the DirecTivo or the current series 3 with cable card support. Maybe they can make the equivalent of cable cards for DirecTV.

[HeadHodge]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

I wouldn't want to plug a DirecTV box into a Tivo box. I want something that is as integrated as either the DirecTivo or the current series 3 with cable card support. Maybe they can make the equivalent of cable cards for DirecTV.

Well that's what I meant too. Take their PC card they are developing and incorporate into the TIVO box (and VUDU box too).

No Directv receiver required.

[NA9D]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

I wouldn't want to plug a DirecTV box into a Tivo box. I want something that is as integrated as either the DirecTivo or the current series 3 with cable card support. Maybe they can make the equivalent of cable cards for DirecTV.

Not so easy. All the cable card does is provide the decryption key for the scrambled channels. It doesn't actually have the receiver in it. The satellite receiver is a whole 'nother ball of wax. The dish on the roof receives the signal around 12 GHz, then block downconverts to something like 300 to 900 MHz. Then the receiver box receives that and then outputs to the TV.

Now, I wish they would basically make a block converted satellite receiver that could just then feed into the antenna jack on your TiVo, TV, Replay, etc. and then use the built in tuner on the viewing device. That would be cool and would eliminate the need to have a separate satellite receiver in every room, etc...

Leave the Vudu to viewing content over the net...Please don't integrate it...

[HeadHodge]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

Not so easy. All the cable card does is provide the decryption key for the scrambled channels. It doesn't actually have the receiver in it. The satellite receiver is a whole 'nother ball of wax. The dish on the roof receives the signal around 12 GHz, then block downconverts to something like 300 to 900 MHz. Then the receiver box receives that and then outputs to the TV.

Now, I wish they would basically make a block converted satellite receiver that could just then feed into the antenna jack on your TiVo, TV, Replay, etc. and then use the built in tuner on the viewing device. That would be cool and would eliminate the need to have a separate satellite receiver in every room, etc...

Leave the Vudu to viewing content over the net...Please don't integrate it...

What does block converted mean?

The Sat to CATV idea is a good one though.

At our little Campground/Marina we own in Oregon (at KozyKove.com, [a shameless plug]), I built a 12 channel CATV head-in for our campsites using DishNetwork. It works great for the campers, they don't need a box or anything to watch the 12 channels I provide them. I even have the power to put on whatever content I want to feed them (like the 24-hour Hypno-Toad channel )

It works great, but the downside is that I had to purchase 12 DishNetwork receivers to feed the Head-In (1 for each channel). Dishnetwork has a great multi-unit view program and it only costs me $7/month total for their service. But the up front hardware cost was pretty spendy.

The campers are happy though, since there's zero OTA programming in the Siuslaw National Forest.

So it might be feasable to do what you suggest, but with my current understanding of how things work, I can't envision how it would be done?? I'm definintely interested in knowing how, if there's a way to do that.

[aaronwt]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

The DirecTivo units were not dogs. I had both the original DirecTivo and the later HD version. Both of them were way better than the DirecTV DVR. I had friends who had the DirecTV version and switched to the Tivo and never looked back. They were not unusably slow. The performane of their UI is on par with the performance of the series 3 today. How do I know? I still have an HD DirecTivo reciever that is becoming obsoleted, but navigating through the guides, etc. seems just about the same on that as it does on my series 3. In both cases it was better than the Direct TV DVRs that I have seen and the Comcast DVR that my father had before I bought him a series 3 as a gift.

You are right, however, that they never even got the DirecTivo to series 2 capability. That was a sore point with me and I never understood it. I'm hoping that with a new parent company, which seems to be the catalyst for the hint of change wrt Tivo, they will address that as well.

That reminds me. I still have 3 of the DirecTV HDTiVos that meant to sell last Summer, but then I waited and they started all their mpeg 4 HD and the value went down. I wonder if I can still get any thing for them? I got them when they first came out and thought they were the best thing. Since from 2001 to 2004 I had to record my HD content with basically a digital VCR with a couple of HD tuner cards in PCs.
Those DirecTV HDTiVos were very expensive. I guess if I get enough money for all 3 I can purchase another VUDU box.

[NA9D]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

What does block converted mean?

Block conversion means a whole block of frequencies is converted to another block of frequencies.

The DBS satellites transmit around 12 GHz. Because 12 GHz signals would attenuate very rapidly in a piece of RG-6 coax, the 12 GHz signals are converted to UHF frequencies roughly in the range of 400 MHz to 1 GHz (these frequencies attenuate much less in RG-6). That's what I mean by block conversion. An entire block of frequencies is converted to another block of frequencies. It's not that difficult to do, really.

Now what your satellite receiver in your house does is take and convert a selected channel in that 400 MHz to 1 GHz range down to channel 3 which is somewhere around 65 MHz (give or take - I forget the exact frequency and am too lazy to look it up).

Now, a block converting satellite receiver would take each the channels spread across that 400 MHz to 1 GHz range and put those into actual TV channel frequencies like 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. This sort of box is certainly possible from a technical standpoint but it would be much more complicated and expensive than the boxes they have. But it would be nice. To my knowledge, there is no consumer based satellite receivers that do this.

[HeadHodge]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

Pretty interesting stuff. Thanks!!!

I sorta had the conception that a higher freq. meant a higher bandwidth signal of of info. But now that I that about it, I guess it's really dependent on the actuall source of the info, independent of the freq. i..e. I could see a 20 khz audio signal being upconverted to one freq. then later downconverted to a lower freq. (above 20kHz) without loss.

But I don't think you could successfully downconvert an audio signal to send to a submarine with an ultra low freq. without some sort of compression.

Am I on the right track of understanding Master or just whacko?

[Nded]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

....snip .... Am I on the right track of understanding Master or just whacko?

You don't have to pitch underhanded to us...

[HeadHodge]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

You don't have to pitch underhanded to us...

I'll pitch any way you want if you catch!

My real question is if you take an angstrom stream of yellow light waves and downconvert to the blue light wave freq, is it still yellow light or now blue light????

[NA9D]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

Obviously, the higher you go in frequency, the more bandwidth you have to work with. So for example, TV signals have a bandwidth of about 6 MHz. Well, if you tried to transmit a 6 MHz signal at a frequency of 10 MHz, you'd take up a high percentage of the spectrum that low in frequency.

But at 500 MHz, 6 MHz is a fairly small percentage bandwidth of the frequency.

Still, frequency conversion goes on all the time. That's the basic principle of radio receivers. You receive at one frequency and this is at the end, down converted to audio or video signals. The idea of a radio receiver in general is to take a specific signal out of a chunk of signals at a high frequency, filter it and convert it down to a lower frequency where it is more easily dealt with and converted to another format (ie: audio, video or data).

In my example of the satellite, system, where it would break down with the block converter is that some of the UHF television channels overlap with the down converted signals coming from the satellite dish. You'd probably have to change the entire architecture of the system to do it the way I wish it could be done, but it would be great but yet a lot more expensive.

And to answer your question about conversion of yellow light to blue light, that would not be a down conversion but an up conversion. The light spectrum goes from lowest frequency to highest frequency:

Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Indigo
Violet

So if you did up-convert yellow to blue, yes, it would be blue. And yes, this sort of thing can be done and is done.

[HeadHodge]

Re: VUDU vs Satellite

Obviously, the higher you go in frequency, the more bandwidth you have to work with. So for example, TV signals have a bandwidth of about 6 MHz. Well, if you tried to transmit a 6 MHz signal at a frequency of 10 MHz, you'd take up a high percentage of the spectrum that low in frequency.

But at 500 MHz, 6 MHz is a fairly small percentage bandwidth of the frequency.

Still, frequency conversion goes on all the time. That's the basic principle of radio receivers. You receive at one frequency and this is at the end, down converted to audio or video signals. The idea of a radio receiver in general is to take a specific signal out of a chunk of signals at a high frequency, filter it and convert it down to a lower frequency where it is more easily dealt with and converted to another format (ie: audio, video or data).

In my example of the satellite, system, where it would break down with the block converter is that some of the UHF television channels overlap with the down converted signals coming from the satellite dish. You'd probably have to change the entire architecture of the system to do it the way I wish it could be done, but it would be great but yet a lot more expensive.

And to answer your question about conversion of yellow light to blue light, that would not be a down conversion but an up conversion. The light spectrum goes from lowest frequency to highest frequency:

Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Indigo
Violet

So if you did up-convert yellow to blue, yes, it would be blue. And yes, this sort of thing can be done and is done.

Wow!! That's cool stuff. Thanks!!!

Now I know I why I have no need for Google or Wikepedia.

But you didn't answer the submarine question. i.e. traveling waves through a denser medium via very low freq transmission and content preservation. I'm guessing that you could send a HD VUDU movie to a sub via downconversion but it would take the sub about a week to get the whole content.

Also you didn't address pink grapefruit. Is it really pink or is it yellow??