HDTV and Home Theater Podcast

Wow! This new site is beautiful. Job very well done.

I wonder if Comcast's new ESPN 360 counts towards the 250GB/month download cap. The "promised" bandwidth meter has yet to show up!

Love the new site.

Your show is one of the best HT podcasts I've listened to. Keep up the great work. The site looks great but really needs some forums!

P.S. Ara thanks for the advice on the HDMI cables. You saved me from buying a $99 one at a big box store.

Very nice web site. mush easy to read. keep up the good work

Loving the new site...keep up the good work HT Guys!!

Braden, you often provide amusing left-field digressions, but the Vicodin-enhancment took things to another level. Of course, it is an unhealthy long-term application. Instead, since it's summer, I suggest both of you imbibe one margarita prior to hitting that "record" button.

Site looks good and made an initial Amazon order to inaugurate the link.

Had a couple issues with the new pages and some of my text barely visible (white on yellow).

js banks-
Ara is a master audio editor. He stitches my random nonsense together to make me sound somewhat coherent. I'm just lucky the show isn't live - or maybe we all are.

For those of you, who like me, just blindly click on the DIY links above - only to go, "Huh?" - here are the corrected links:

http://www.hometheatershack.com/forums/diy-subwoofer
http://www.diysubwoofers.org/
http://diyaudioprojects.com/index.htm

D'oh! - ignore the first link. It is broken because of a misplaced letter. Here's the Home Theater Shack subwoofer link:
http://www.hometheatershack.com/forums/diy-subwoofers/

I listened to the podcast today with interest and I'm trying to get encoding to Apple TV format down on my Mac Mini. You guys should try the Elgato Turbo 64 for encoding to H.264 Apple TV or iPhone,etc. It's typical Mac - slick, refined works great but expensive with limited options. For example I can't get it to encode the captions which are essential for foreign language stuff like my beloved Samurai movies. When it works the picture is better than same file size results with Handbrake but it doesn't always work and I'm still trying to figure out why. You can get Turbo 64s pretty cheap on eBay if you want to check it out.

Tom in Albuquerque

You asked about DVD ripping software. I can't believe you didn't mentioin ANY DVD from Slysoft.com. This will rip to an iso file, the complete VIDEO_TS folder and at the same time remove the annoying trailers & advertisements prior to the main menu. It also rips HDDVD and BluRay. This coupled with their CloneDVD will also allow you to rip just the movie content for home theater application, or individual videos, and remove content you don't want to see. It does not convert the video to another format, you get the full fidelity of the original content with out the irritation stuff. This is a free download with (I think) a 30 trial period. This is a great product. I have been using it for 4 years now with NO complaint. They frequently update the product, 1 to 3 times a month to stay ahead of the restrictions that try to prevent you from ripping your DVD, HDDVD, BLU RAY. The downside, this is only available for Windows OS. I have used it on XP, Vista, and Win7. No problems.

AnyDVD is a great program, I agree.
The problem the last caller is having might be in the playback process. Advise the caller to use a different program to play the backed up DVD like The KMPlayer of VideoLAN's VLC player.
Ara complaining about the encoding process is complete bs, unless he was just exaggerating. Okay, so, either you have a slow pc or you're encoding from the dvd without ripping it first.
I have a cheap $279 Core i7 and it encodes a 3 hour movie in about a hour and around 3 hours if I enable all the advanced x264 features.
I use AnyDVD, and DVD Shrink to rip and MeGUI to encode. megui has the best de-interlace tools especially for animated stuff, and it's always up to date.

A little note about the odd size play back after RIP question from the listener. If he is using a standard DVD player to watch it then looks at it off a HTPC then I bet the issue is in the video res on the HTPC. I have the same issue with my setup. My older JVC TV gets odd sizes to my MAC mini. None of which is anything close to standard 16:9 or 4:3. Maybe have him try playing the DVD on the HTPC and see if it still looks odd. I bet the rip and everything is fine he just has to change the res on the HTPC to make it more 16:9 like.

Just my 2 cents.

Wow, the "Displaymate's LCD Plasma Shootout article" could not be more timely. I was just looking at picking up a LG55LH90. Its a new LCD tv with LED backliight and local dimming. After reading the shootout I can't help but wonder if I should be focused on a 58" samsung plasma. Could someone here comment on the scathing criticism that LCDs take in the shootout?

Love the podcast.

The color scheme is great. The new site is great. Having comments is a great idea for you and us for feedback. Thanks for all your efforts on the site and in the show.

Love
The
Show!!!

The new site looks great as well!!!

I'll second AnyDVDHD. That couples with Ripbot264, can make small h.264 movies that stream perfectly to my PS3. I also just learned that Ripbot264 can shrink DVD's down to 700mb with no 'noticeable" loss in quality and keep the original audio stream.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/RipBot264

To Steve Hoggarth,

There are basically two ways to think about TVs:

1) You can just look at it with your eyes and decide whether or not you like what you see, or...

2) You can use measurement equipment to test how closely the TV comes to the industry calibration standards.

Looking at a TV with just your eyes, it is essentially impossible to tell if it has truly accurate colour, greyscale, colour decoding or video processing. But it is entirely possible to fully enjoy the image, even if it is not accurate to industry calibration standards. Indeed, most people have never actually seen an accurate image, so most people are just going by what they like.

At the moment, good plasmas simply measure better than LCDs. That doesn't mean that some LCDs don't look very, very good to the naked eye. It's just that if you are actually concerned with accuracy, good plasmas will get you closer.

There are some aspects of the picture quality that are obvious to the naked eye though. If the colours shift or the contrast lowers or the black level rises as you move off axis (either far to either side or stand up or lie down), then that can easily be seen with the naked eye. Plasmas have extremely wide viewing angles over which there is virtually no shift in the image. LCDs, on the other hand, tend to rather obviously shift as you view them off axis. Another facet is glare or reflections off of the screen surface. All plasmas use a glass screen, so it naturally has glare and reflections. Samsung's plasmas, for example, are quite reflective. But Panasonic and Pioneer use anti-reflective coatings on their glass. Pioneer's is the most effective and really reduces any glare or reflections. Panasonic's is good, but not as good as Pioneer's. Some LCDs use matte finish plastic screens. Sony and LG, for example, use matte finish screens that show virtually no glare or reflections at all! But not all LCDs are this way. Samsung seems to be very fond of using extremely glossy screens that are worse with glare and reflections than any plasma that I have ever seen!

I am a fan of plasma. I prefer the nearly perfect off axis viewing, the deeper black levels, the lack of motion blur and the smoother-looking overall image. So long as the plasma has a good anti-reflective coating and accurate colours, IMO, it cannot be beat! Thus, the Pioneer Elite Kuro TVs are my absolute top choice. The regular Pioneer Kuro plasmas are not quite as accurate in colour, but to the naked eye, you'll likely never notice. Panasonic's V10 Series plasmas come next and they also have other advantages like lower price and lower power consumption. The V10 black levels are not quite as deep as the Pioneer Kuro, the screen is not quite as good with reducing glare and reflections and with bright lights (or sunlight) the V10's image washes out a bit more than the Pioneer Kuro, but all of these small weaknesses are offset by the lower price and lower power consumption, IMO. To my eye, there isn't a single LCD out there that can equal the Kuro or V10 performance. That doesn't mean that LCD will NEVER equal plasma, but at the moment, if you want a TV that looks great AND measures great, plasma is the way to go.

+1 for www.hometheatershack.com I built my own DIY subwoofer and this site helped out a lot. Also +1 to Anydvd, it's the best prog around for what it does and it has bluray capabilities.

I heard you guys mention "Fast & Furious" new to Blu-Ray, and wanted to clarify that this is not the original "The Fast & The Furious" that came to Blu-Ray earlier this year. This is a new movie with the original cast, and I watched it last night. The original was fun. This one, not quite so much.

Hey Guys... you ANSWERED MY QUESTION! THANKS!!!

Your answer was perfect. It really helped. My follow-up comment is that all DVD players are NOT created equally. I have two different DVD players, one connected optically to my Denon AVR5800 receiver and the other connected by Coax. Both DVD players are set up correctly. And, as you advised, the AVR is set to automatic and THX theater mode. But the sound from the DVD player connected via coax sounds TOTALLY better - fuller - on the same DVD. I believe its not the coax optical connection which makes a difference, but there IS some difference in the DVD player. Hard to believe, but true.

one NEW question ... One of the DVD players is connected by Component VIDEO (RGB). If I do not set that player to "progressive" output, the image has substantial video ghosting. But when set to progressive, the image looks fine. Do you think this might be a problem with the player, or is this a natural artifact of component connections??? BTW... Maybe you could explain (probably for the hundredth time) the difference between regular and progressive scan? And, where one is more beneficial over the other. And, if one is connected by composite and the other via Component, which can benefit from progressive.

OH... and WHY have almost all manufactures moved AWAY from S-Video connections and left composite and the default, common video connection method?

Great show! I look forward to it each week.

Hey guys,
You mentioned remote buddy in the podcast and were asking about a similar product for windows. Though I have not used it, I think that Event Ghost will handle processing remote signals for any application, but it is not easy to set up. I know that some XBMC users on the Windows platform use it, and there are HOW-TO posts at xbmc.org. And Linux has the lirc package, which is easy to set up for someone reasonably comfortable with Linux, but well, let's face it, that is a relatively small group.

Love the new site, but the "Author" fields in the comment system show up as white text on a yellow background for me, and are nearly impossible to see. I am using Firefox 3.5