Rusty's Blog

Well? Are you?

There are several ‘ways’ to be ‘ready for DTV.

If you currently get your TV from a Cable TV provider, or a Satelite TV provider (Dish, DirecTV, or the like) you’re covered as long as you maintain that service. That doesn’t mean that you won’t find some advantage to getting some off the air equiopment, but we will get to that later on.

It’s been my impression lately that most people are not buying VCR’s any more. Tivos, Replay TV, Windows Media Center platforms, and a few other solutions exist these days that take care of the video capture and playback options have taken over for those people who are looking for that type of a feature. For the moment I’m not going to go any further into these options either, but if you have ever hooked up a VCR, you have more than 90% of the experience needed to switch how you receive Broadcast TV from Analog to Digital.

There are two basic solutions to converting to Digital TV. You can get a TV (or TV system) that has an included Digital TV Tuner. Or you can get a converter box that plugs in between your antenna and your TV, and that provides you with a signal on one of your TV channels (often 3 or 4, sometime others) that allows you to watch the digital tv broadcast.

If you go the first route, and buy a TV with a digital tuner, or you did so in the past couple of years, you do not need to buy any additional hardware. Ok a possible extra purchase may be neccessary. That would be a better antenna. If you already have an antenna on the roof, in the attic, or you get really good reception on a pair of rabbit ears on the top of the TV, you probably don’t need to get anything else. Those antennas will continue to work. On the other hand if you live in a marginal area, you may find that an improved, amplified, or outside antenna may help reception significantly.

So let’s see about that TV. For the past few years the FCC has mandated that any TV receiving device being sold in the US that was not capable of receiving ATSC (the standard for digital TV) be clearely marked as having problems with the near future. So it is likely that you have avoided buying one of those sets, or will be buying a TV with a digital TV receiver. If you have the TV delivered by the people you buy it from, and have them set it up for you, then you probably don’t need to worry about anything either. Most installers will configure your TV for the best reception they can get, and most of the time that will be with the Digital TV channels that are already being transmitted.

If you set it up, you will very likely find that there is an option that you get to configure in a setup menu that allows you to select your receiver variety. This will usually be the same general location as where you would select whether you are watching off the air, or cable TV. Some TVs have automatically sensed what type of service you have, and most of them will automatically pick up that Digital TV is available, and set up those channels for you.

If you run into serious problems, you may need to check with the support people at the location you bought your TV from to resolve the issue.

That leaves converter boxes. This will often look like the old cable converter set top boxes. They run about $60 or $70 at many electronics retailer sites. For some time you can request a voucher from the FCC that will discount the price of the converter box at the store. Do a serch for ‘fcc.gov DTV Vouchers’ at your favorite search engine, and you will find more details.

Depending upon the box, you very likely will get a remote control that allows you to select the channel and sub-channel that you are going to watch.

Sub-Channel?

Yes. Most of the major networks will be broacasting multiple programs on their channel. In most cases this means that you may see an HDTV channel on sub channel 1, and on sub channel 2 either a lower resolution version of the same program, or possibly something else entirely. Many (I don’t know if all is correct) NBC affiliates broadcast a weather channel on the second sub-channel. The local ABC affiliate here repeats their news programming throughout the day. The CBS affiliate only does their HDTV broadcast, and the PBS affiliate(s) run several different programs. Fox, and CW both broadcast their high def program in standared or improved definitian, and there are a couple of other channels around with their own schemes.

If you are watching through a converter box, about the only difference I would expect you to see between the HD sub-channel and the lower res channel is that you will get bars across the top and bottom of the screen, on the HD channel, and the lower res channel will clip off the sides. Where the HD comes into it’s own will be with newer TVs that are HD capable.

Note that you do not need to have an HD capable TV to watch that content. The tunner will re-encode the content to fit on whatever screen you are using. You will loose detail, but not ‘content.’

If you are using a OTA tuner through your DirecTV box or Dish box, you may have to do some fine tuning of your setup to watch TV. For the most part you will simply put your converter box ahead of the satellite receiver, and pass that content through just as you do for OTA content now. No that won’t make a difference if you get your local channels from your satellite provider, but it can be helpful if you went with the ‘mount an outside antenna at the dish’ route.

As for me, I don’t actually own a TV, won’t be buying a converter box, and already watch digital TV off the air. My solution is a bit complex for a blog entry, but I’ll see about putting together an explanation in the next few months.

Have fun, and stay entertained. (It’s a lot more fun for you than being the local entertinment for not being aware of the changes comming down the pipe.)

I’m about half way through my collection of CD’s at the moment in ripping them to .ogg. Though to tell the truth, that’s my ‘music’ cd collection for the most part. If I consider adding my language CDs, I may have a long way to go. I have more music variety, but some of the language collections are 10 or more CDs.

I haven’t quite decided how to treat the lauguage CDs. Since they are primarily voice, I suspect that I could get away with ripping them to Speex rather than ogg vorbis, but I don’t know if I would end up missing any of the inflection and other characteristics that are good to have in language study. It’s something I have to think about a bit.

I’ve used a variety of CD ripping software over the years. Some do just about everything for you, some take a bit more work. Part of the problem with rippers that ‘do everything for you’ is that they relly upon the correctness of the information they find in the CDDB sources they use. Where this becomes an issue is when your collection contains multiple CDs from the same artists or a CD from an independent with a small distribution.

In the case of the former, the big problem is that how you think something should be entered is not necesarily how I think it should be entered, or someone else for that matter. As an example, I have about 8 CDs from The Steve Miller Band. Some of the CDDB entries for the CDs list the artist as ‘Steve Miller,’  some as ‘Steve Miller Band, The,’ and a few as ‘The Steve Miller Band.’ If you let the ripper created all the various sub-directories for the each CD, you end up with 3 (or more) directories for the same artist.

I suppose I should explain that I do directory structure as ‘MyMusic/ArtistName/AlbumName/’ with each song it’s own file within that structure. Multi-disk collections usually end up with a folder per disk. In theory I could also catagorize things by genra either before or after the album, however I’ve found that letting the music player I want to use handle genera sorting tends to work out best. Some artists have moved across genra’s over the years. ZZ Top for example can be considered Hard Rock, Country, Blues, and a few other possible genera’s depending upon what disk you are looking at. Likewise Jewel has Folk, Folk Rock, and poetry CDs out. If your ripper does not handle ‘folk rock’ you may end up with either folk, rock, or misc as the genra.

The latter problem (independents or small distributions not being indexed) means that I have to enter all the information myself. That’s OK for the rather small collection of these CDs that I have, but since I am not interested in maintaining an account to enter data into the CDDB servers for these small number of disks, I end up with the prospect of running into the other problem later on when the CD does get indexed by someone else. I’m pretty sure that I’ve run into this issue already.

There is one other problem. CD’s do not have an ‘information’ track where the information regarding the content of the disk. As a result the various CDDB servers use information regarding track starting locations, counts, and lenghth of each track to determine what CD you are working with. Over the wide variety of CDs that have been entered this leads to some situations where multiple CDs have the same indexing information. For most CD’s this does not present a significant issue, however I actually have one or two CDs that not only have collisions in index information, they also have collisions within the genera they work within. Worse is that the song titles have ended up being ‘mostly’ right, though there was other information that was wrong.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I’ve already ripped almost everything I have at some point in the past. As a result, for the vast majority of my music, there’s already a folder for each CD. I would prefer to maintain using those folders for a number of reasons, not the least of which is to give myself some idea of where I stand on on the conversion process. This also means that I pretty much need to do this all on one system. If I were ripping enverything for the first time, I could distribute the load across multiple computers. Then I would just drop CDs into open trays, pick out CDs that had been ripped, and when everything was done merge all of the files into one directory structure that then gets copied, shared, etc. to the various systems I want the music on.

If I was willing to wait a couple of weeks to get everything done, and I was taking the fully ‘automated’ route, I would just stack a part of the collection of disks next to the computer, and every time the computer kicked out one disk, I would just drop another in it’s place, and let it grind away. However I am using a multi-core computer, and it can handle ripping more than one disk at a time. I’ve got an Internal cd-drive, and several external cd-drives that I can work from. Actually they are dvd+/-rw drives, but that’s not really all that important. It turns out however that even when ripping through different bus interfaces for USB, that I can effectively rip from only 2 sources at a time. Ripping time goes from about half the play time for a disk on the first two drives to more than the play time for the three disks if I add a third disk to the mix. In other words when I rip from 2 drives at a time, I can rip about 6 one hour disks in 3 hours. Add a third drive, and I can rip 3 disks in 3 hours. (What I was ripping at the time of the testing was disks with about an hour of music on them.)

While I am about half way through my collection, by count I am only about a third of the way through. That’s because the first ‘half’ of my collection consists largely of classical music and a few one or two piece collections, such as radio shows, or ambient sounds. (Hard to call that music in reality.) When the average lenght of a piece of music in the collection that has already been ripped is 10 min, and the average for the remaining part of the collection is 4 min., you end up with some disproportion in the counts…

About the only thing more tedius than riping CDs is doing laundry. Of course it sounds like a good thing to do at the same time. Once or twice.

More snow on the way it sounds like, so now would be a good time to make a quick run to the grocery store before the roads get bad again.