How Dish's 1080p is going to work...

[Hall]

Most people seem to like Blue Jean Cable, unlike Monster, so what does Blue Jean say ? This page,
Component Video Cables from Blue Jeans Cable

, claims their component cables are tested to carry "over 100x the bandwidth required for 1080i". I suspect 1080p doesn't need 100x the bandwidth that 1080i does.

[Jim5506]

Isn't 1080p24 part of the ATSC standard, and therefore all ATSC tuners must accept and decode it. Perhaps it's just that certain displays upconvert it to 1080p60 or down convert it to 1080i30 or whatever.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin - 1080p60!

[hazydave]

And HDCP is all about how to force more $$$$ out of consumers.

Not so much... it's really just the end result of the "Ready! Fire! Aim!" introduction of HDTV. I mean, they spent how long grousing about the specs, finally creating the Grand Alliance and ATSC, but didn't think about digital links or security? Or more likely, just blew it off.

Right from the same quality HDMI cables that sell for $49.95 at B/B or $39.95 at Wal-Mart being available for only $11.95 at Monoprice to eventually having to pay for each and every viewing of HD program and probably archiving fees to keep them on external HDDs.

Well, HDMI is a quality issue... it's not usually the HD-preservation issue it was supposed to be.. most media don't set the down-rez flag. But there's no reason to expect clear digital bitstreams in any modern system. For example, this is strictly forbidden in the DVB spec upon which Dish's SD stuff is based.

As for the cables... did you really find an HDMI cable at Best Buy for only $50? They usually run in excess of $100 or more. This is one of those things they sell to pad their bottom line on HDTV sales.. they have to be more or less competitive on HDTV price (I paid a bit more for my 71" Samsung at Best Buy than I would have at B&H Photo/Video, but the shipping would have made B&H ultimately more), but rape you on accessories... what does Joe Average Consumer know about HDMI? And if you buy the $15-$20 cables at Monoprice, they're actually better than the $100+ cables at B/B.

Trust me, you'll eventually even loose some of the DVR features we've come to enjoy with HD programming.

It's not in Dish's best interest... if it happens, it's political... in other words, we're doing it to ourselves, or perhaps, doing nothing while the Copyright Extension Nazis like Disney do Bahas all over the notion of Fair Use. Thing is, it's has NEVER been in their long term rational self-interest to get medieval about Fair Use... if Hollywood had had its way, VCRs would have been rendered useless, and they'd have ultimately lost their best long-term revenue stream.

PVRs are generally of the nature of time-shifters, and given that I have no desire to permanently steal media (if I want a TV series or film to keep, I'll buy the BD), I have zero problem with making these things relatively temporary. Shut that down, and there will simply be less things viewed, and maybe I'll cut out some of my Premium channels... there are only so many of value in realtime. This would ultimately be bad for Dish and bad for Hollywood. And if you really need to steal the content for a permanent home-made collection, you're better off ripping the BD.

This didn't happen overnight but people haven't really cared about it much because they've been so distracted by all the new HD available, cheaper hardware and recently the ability to create personal HD libraries on ext HDDs.

All that's a good thing, but Fair Use in its best representation (and we don't have that in the USA today... there is no consumer media bill of rights) was never intended to allow you make permanent collections of other folks works for free. That's the sort of attitude that's going to have Hollywood, Inc. and their billions getting Congress to overreact and shut it all down.

That's already starting to change as some HD sources already disallow archiving and it's only a matter of time before others follow suit. Once the ability to (legally) create your own library is gone, you can trust that the price of purchased media will go up (or at least no longer keep coming down). Don't forget, there's no longer an alternate source to compete.

The ability to create a permanent archive of high quality video for free or nearly free has been around since DVD John cracked CSS... your Dish Network HDD archives are such a tiny factor, no one's really considering them yet in any political moves. Most of the pushes by big media really had nothing to actually do with piracy, since even with the internet it's been relatively small, particularly in video... and the largest pirates are pressing glass mastered DVD copies in the Far East, they're not any of us. Big media would really like to resell you the same video in each new digital format -- that was the big reason to push for copy protection. And they may even be seeing the flaw in that (eg, practically no one will pay twice for the same film, and if they do, only for some marked improvement... the reason you get "Film Release", then "Two Disc Director's Cut with Bonus Features" three or four months later.

And unlike the music industry, Hollywood, Inc. really has found that their best defense against piracy has been reasonable prices. Your time has to be all but worthless today to download and burn a craptastic downrezzed DiVX or whatever to DVD, rather than just buy the original for $10-15 at Wal-Mart. There are only about 14 million Dish subscribers, and a tiny fraction of us have HD DVRs with external HDD capability, and only a small fraction of those paid the $40 to be able to use it, and only a small fraction of those folks are using external HDDs for "permanent" archival rather than simple time shifting. So this is simply below the noise floor in the various battles going on. They may well set copy protect tokens at some point, but that doesn't automatically prevent recording (external or internal), and it has no significant effect on media sales.

We could be heading right back to the days when new release VHS movies sold for over $100 the first year they were out.

No, it'll never happen. It can't.

For one, the original $100 prices were set because Hollywood, Inc. didn't think you were going to buy tapes for home use, they thought fairly early on that rentals would dominate, and so they set prices accordingly. Tapes dropped significantly once it because clear that individuals would buy tapes (well, those without any concern for aesthetic quality... I waited for DVD), and it's been carried through with DVD and now Blu-Ray.

The other issues they have are the same ones that have actually been killing the music industry (or, more correctly, the Big Four "Record" companies... at least, in as much as they haven't been killing themselves, which, well, they have)... there are dozens of choices for your media dollar today. You can buy a DVD movie or Blu-Ray, or rent it, or download from iTunes or Amazon, or rent on-line, etc. Or buy a Video Game... the reason the video game industry has been making more profit than the film industry is simple: an experienced player gets 20-50+ hours of play time out of a $40-$60 video game, versus 2-3 hours of entertainment from a $10-$20 video disc.

Oh eventually, maybe when they're broadcast on network channels with commercials your "fair use" rights will allow you to make a 480i copy for your own use.

"Fair Use" never even remotely was intended or should apply to making a permanent archival copy of something that's broadcast. That isn't fair use, period.. that's no different than ripping you buddy's DVD or Blu-Ray and burning your own copy. And part of the problem with protecting consumers' Fair Use rights is that many people on either side don't have a basic understanding of the word "Fair"... you want to build a permanent media library for free, and they want as much payment for as little content as possible. The problem is, Hollywood Inc. billions to spend, and the average consumer, not so much. So the laws are currently skewed in Hollywood's favor, even if the ability to clone is strongly skewed our way at the moment. However, if enough people think Fair Use means unlimited access to any and all content for free, Hollywood is perfectly capable of screwing us all in ways even I (as an involved party since the 80s) can't imagine. And in their usual haste, it'll screw us both.

-Dave

[hazydave]

The Dish 1080/24p announcement is about 95% marketing hype. Only those with HDTVs that support true 24fps will be able to take advantage of it.

That's correct, and unfortunate. Most HDTVs that can accept a 1080p signal are looking for 1080/60p, which is quite often the actual native resolution of the display -- most digital technologies like DLP or LCD simply can't do real interlaced video, they always upconvert lesser signals to 1080p. But for whatever reasons, 1080/24p on input is less likely to be supported.

And this is only for PPV, eh? They're trying to give you a reason to buy HD PPV rather than run out to BlockBuster or wait for Netflix to get your Blu-Ray rental of the same film. And of course, they always need to one-up the DirecTV folks, even if the thing they're hyping is of relatively little use.

And in fact, most people these days probably won't read the fine print, and they'll believe they're getting 1080p on many HD broadcasts. And in fact, if it's a film and broadcast in 3:2 pulldown, many HDTV upconverters these days can detect the pulldown and run an inverse telecine along with the 1080p upconversion I just mentioned. So progressive video may not even be all THAT much of an issue on a modern HDTV with Dish... and certainly not as annoying as the lower resolutions and higher compression rates most Dish content will have versus Blu-Ray.

And even at that, most consumers have HDTVs that are too small for the viewing distance to allow the average human eye to fully resolve full 1080p. So many aren't going to notice even the resolution drop.

Bigger questions are: 1) will dish display 1080/24p at full 1080 x 1920 resolution? (unlikely since Dish carries no 1080i at full 1080 x 1920 resolution); and 2) what will be the maximum bit rate?

Both very good questions... they'd have to dedicate a whole transponder to delivering something truly Blu-Ray quality in realtime, versus the multiple HD channels (about three, depending on the compression and downrezzing) per slot. Or they could deliver the higher quality stuff video download, non-realtime.

I've seen peak rates on Blu-ray of 45Mbps, and Blu-ray also has the ability to use VC-1 (a more efficient video codec than MPEG-4), so the claim by Dish that their 1080p service will be of Blu-ray quality is total nonsense.

You're a bit confused there... VC-1 (aka Windows Video 9) is slightly more efficient than the old MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile (aka, MPEG-4 Part 2, aka H.263, aka DivX, aka XviD, etc), but it was designed for full HD playback on computers and other hardware that'll be driven screaming to their knees trying to manage the MPEG-4 AVC (aka MPEG-4 Part 10, aka H.264, aka ISO/IEC 14496-10, etc) video that's used on Dish and one of the three supported formats on Blu-Ray.

Of course, Sony nearly screwed the pooch on Blu-Ray by using MPEG-2 on early 25GB-only Blu-Rays, while Toshiba was cranking out 30GB HD-DVDs with VC-1, leading some folks to question most if not all of Blu-Ray's claims, including the whole AVC issue (despite the fact AVC worked on both). The reason was that Sony didn't have an acceptable AVC encoder yet, while the older and simple VC-1 encoders have largely met the quality produced by the well established MPEG-2 encoders. But there's no serious doubt that AVC in the long term has the highest coding efficiency of the three, and the encoders of today (well, some of them) are quite good.

[BuddyBoy]

"hazy" + "dave" + sound grasp of technical and business issues of marketing consumer electronics sounds like Dave Haynie of Amiga fame. Welcome to the forum Dave.

[JimK2]

Isn't 1080p24 part of the ATSC standard, and therefore all ATSC tuners must accept and decode it. Perhaps it's just that certain displays upconvert it to 1080p60 or down convert it to 1080i30 or whatever.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin - 1080p60!

Seems to me 1080p24 would have a 20% bandwidth savings over 1080i60. Let the set-top-box do the 3-2 pull-up to 1080p30.

[gmcgown]

I have been talking to TSR's for three days now trying to get Channel 501. It does not appear on my guide when set on "All Channels" and will not come up by entering 501 on my remote. Has anyone out there been successful downloading a 1080p movie at Channel 501?

[8bitbytes]

I have been talking to TSR's for three days now trying to get Channel 501. It does not appear on my guide when set on "All Channels" and will not come up by entering 501 on my remote. Has anyone out there been successful downloading a 1080p movie at Channel 501?

Do you have version 6.10 software on your receiver?

[gmcgown]

During a conversation with a TSR, I was asked to go to the software screen and after I read him the numbers he pronounced it the latest. However, he may have been mistaken. Has anyone acutally seen 501 on their guide?

[gmcgown]

I have System Info One up on my screen and it is showing "Software:L512". There is another screen with a longer software designation but I can't seem to find it....