I hate Cable!!!!! and dish and everything else!

QAM = "Quadrature Amplitude Modulation"

It's a type of data transmission in which information is carried by modulating the amplitude of two different waves that are 90 degrees out of phase with each other.











































What?

Depending on your cable box, I'm sure you filter out BET so that you don't have to look at black people while flipping through the channels.

You may have missed the other posts where it's mentioned that some cable companies encrypt their signals. Also just because it's a digital TV, it doesn't mean it can decrypt the cable channels by itself. It means that it can receive the over-the-air digital channels once it all switches over in 2009.

Also, why did you waste your money on several DVD recorders when you could have instead purchased/leased a DVR?

And as Bobcat has already mentioned, it would be helpful if you told us not only what Comcast plan you are on, but the makes and models of your TVs and DVD recorders. Simply saying "The DVD players are all around 2 years old and don't say digital" isn't helpful. For instance, my computer doesn't say it's digital, but I'm certain that it is.

DVD recorder? What is this, 2002?

Get Dish network with a DVR, honey. You'll never go back.

What I hate about cable, Dish and DirecTV is how they pump the volume when they cut to "local" spots.

I fucking hate that!

I don't understand what you mean by that exactly, but I also hate when commercials are 10 times louder than the TV shows.

That's exactly what he means. The stations ramp up the volume of the commercials being sent to you. They don't mess with your TV what they do is adjust the signal to make it more powerful and the volume louder. Drives me crazy too.

You don't even need cable, Dish or DirecTV to experience it. I've seen it on analog TVs as well.

So what you're telling me is, that it's possible to selectively determine what content is delivered to people's houses in the form of a la carte premium services (HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, etc), but the amount of data necessary to determine a la carte services for other channels would make it too expensive.

On top of that, you're telling me that you don't pump all the channels to everyone to save bandwidth, but a la carte would be expensive. It would seem to me you could save a lot of bandwidth if, say, an entire neighborhood doesn't want the discovery channel, but that's just me, I could be completely wrong.

Because I don't want to be told I can only record 4 programs at a time.
There are nights when there are 6 to 8 shows that I am recording that are across from each other.

Next suggestion?

Yeah, stop watching so much damn tv.

Buy a HTPC from Japan with 10 tuners and 6TB of storage space.

All stations do it to some degree, but what I'm talking about is when the local cable company or satellite provider insert their own spots during a commercial break. Say you're watching The History Channel when the go to commercial break. The volume is at a certain level for all of the commercials until they run the spot for the local car dealer (if you're on cable) or for a pay per view event (if you're on satellite). Most of the time, the volume for those "local spots" is way louder than the volume for the rest of the commercials in the break.

I've also seen it where those "local" commercials are actually at a lower volume than the rest of the spots, but it's almost always the other way around.

If you get two DVRs, you could record double the shows. In fact just get a DVR for every TV in the house if you watch that much TV.

It's hard to believe that 8 good shows are ever on at the same time though. Do you just record every local broadcast channel every night or something?

No, I don't have that many TVs in the house. I have the DVDs to record the shows and then I watch them on my nights off.
And no I don't watch that much TV (viewing had dropped a lot lately with the derth of what I consider good shows). But there are times that the networks decide to put one show across from a show on the other networks (and the same is true the the cable networks) and I refuse to be denied the right to see both shows. And when you work nights, you can't record one and watch the other.
Some nights there are 6 shows that I want to see on 6 different networks; other nights there are maybe 3 shows. Period.
But I don't want to be shackled hamstrung or stopped from watching the shows I want to (that I can get to that is).

FWIW, the TiVo on my DirecTV can record two shows at the same time.

If you aren't behind a cable box, you are only limited by the number of tuners that your DVR has. With enough tuners, you could record every channel at once.

The tech is slowly changing though. Some channels (And VOD) are not simply broadcast to everyone on different frequencies, they are only sent selectively when they are "requested". In that case, you are likely to be limited by however many programs the cable/satellite providers is willing to (or has the ability to) send you at a given time.

I STILL hate Cable!!!!! and dish and everything else!

Okay, I know that Ike messed up a lot of stuff - including Comcast. But it's been 10 days since Ike has come and gone and I STILL don't have my cable back. You'd think, since the electric company managed to get their collective body in gear (though not as well as they do it in Florida) and get electricity back on a schedule that Comcast could do the same thing. Do they? Have they?

HELL NO!!!!!!!

I may go out and get a digital portable TV so I can at least catch the network stuff - can't get the UHF channels very well on the analog (except for the Spanish channels). Depends.....

Re: I STILL hate Cable!!!!! and dish and everything else!

I've heard that Comcast sucks even worse than Slime Warner, and SW is bad.

This thread seems so quaint now.