|
||
|
|
|
              |
|
 |
 |
||||||||||||||
|
 |
|
||||||||||||
By William Van Winkle |
||||||||||||||
“The digital home.” Has the computer industry ever wanted something so badly and failed in so many ways to make it happen? Intel’s Viiv and AMD’s LIVE ! platforms look great on paper but haven’t exactly transformed the modern living room experience. Apple TV, which supposedly costs about $237 to manufacture, according to iSupply, has been selling so well that photos of product receipts showing sub-$160 price tags are floating around the Web. Digital Media Adapters, or DMAs, have struggled for years. Meanwhile, digital cable and satellite still rule, and CableCARD might as well be a way of making sweaters. What’s a channel reseller to do? |
||||||||||||||
|
We still believe that the media center and digital home concepts have not reached maturity...but they’re getting close. In retrospect, we may look back and say, “Yeah, it took 10 years for the market to sort all that media garbage out.” The truth is that it might be closer to 20 years. One could argue that the home theater PC (HTPC) movement dates back to the time of Turtle Beach cards in the early ‘90s. Microsoft announced its Tiger software for interactive TV devices in 1994. WinAmp arrived in 1997 following the public debut of the MP3 format in 1994. RealNetworks (then called Progressive Networks) streamed the first live baseball game over the ‘Net in 1995. Panasonic showed the first PCI card with a digital TV tuner and MPEG-2 decoder in 1998. But hey, Tandy and Microsoft came out with the Multimedia PC (MPC) spec in 1990 to define computers capable of combining video, animation, audio, and graphics. Clearly, the digital home concept has been on the burner, if only in bits and pieces, for a long time. Just like you, we here at RAM have spent years dabbling with and arguing over these digital home bits and pieces. One mistake we made early on was thinking that the focus of the digital home was the living room. That’s a flawed paradigm in an age of increasing mobility and network ubiquity. Home is where your head is-—especially your eyes and ears. Sure, people spend a lot of hours in front of their TVs, but it’s not always the biggest panel that matters. Sometimes you want to enjoy content on the bedroom or den TV, on the airplane, in the hospital, from the car’s back seat, or even in the palm of your hand. The digital home has no boundaries; the name itself is misleading. This diversity of “consumption” location is why it’s important not to let yourself get locked into thinking that this or that usage model is right or wrong. But without a usage model to guide you, how can you hope to form a strategy on how to tackle the media center market for 2008? Because there are plenty of opportunities, after all. According to an early 2007 JupiterResearch statement, 50% of U.S. homes now have multiple PCs. Storage of multimedia on those PCs is rising. High-definition television (HDTV) and other forms of HD content are propagating like wildfire. As of last August, you can even build H.264-based HD video into Adobe Flash files. Take the whole scene into view and you end up with two dominant forces pushing media center technologies forward: the rise of HD content and the seamless reformatting and ubiquity of personal media. With a firm understanding of these concepts in mind, system builders and VARs have a starting point from which to move forward and find profit in this seeming chaos of multimedia convergence.
HD, TV, AND PC It’s probably fair to say that TV-on-PC alone is not a compelling market driver. Vendors such as ATI and Hauppauge have been making analog TV tuner add-in cards for PCs since the early- to mid-‘90s, and although such products maintained small enthusiast fan bases, they never broke into mainstream awareness or usage. Double proof of this came with Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE 2005). Despite being the third generation of MCE and the first to deliver a truly compelling 10-foot experience, MCE 2005 gained almost no traction in the market...until Microsoft dropped the platform requirement for a TV tuner and lowered the cost of the OEM operating system. This put it on par with regular Windows XP, essentially making MCE the de facto OS for consumers. But that was then, back when analog TV was the rule. In the Americas, NTSC (National Television System Committee) is the analog broadcast standard. The format mandates 525 scan lines, of which 486 are visible. (The remaining bandwidth can carry closed captioning text, synchronization codes, and other data.) The 525-line standard was based on a limitation of the vacuum tube technology present in early televisions of the 1930s. The first color television set was demonstrated by Bell Labs in 1929, and color broadcasts for public enjoyment didn’t follow until 1950. There was a bitter format war throughout the 1950s—-no, VHS and Betamax was not the first—-and color broadcasting actually diminished before resurging into prime time in the mid 1960s. Color TV sales didn’t overtake black and white until 1972. Lest you think that the HD transition has been slow and haphazard, realize that we’re actually clipping along fairly quickly by history’s standards.
ABOUT RESOLUTION HDTV standards and systems, as defined by the International Telecommunication Union, didn’t become widely accepted until the late 1990s. In the earlier part of this decade, while panel manufacturers were still working out the quality and cost considerations of panel yields, a resolution of 1366x768 was common for many plasma and LCD screens. In general, one million pixels (1MP) is considered the entry point for high definition. This 1MP point is well-suited to the technical confines of video memory chipsets and how they handle data. To oversimplify things, 1MP is a handy size for today’s hardware to handle per frame, and 1366x768 gives you a 16:9 viewing area of 1,049,088 pixels. Now, here’s the catch. As you probably know, there’s no such thing in the HD world as 768 resolution. It’s either 720p (progressive scanning, as with LCD displays) or 1080i (interlaced scanning, as with CRTs). There are no full-screen, native 720p displays. Either the monitor has a 720 resolution mode that crops the sides or, much more commonly, you rely on the image processing hardware and firmware within the display to interpolate the image up to 768p. As you’ve seen when dabbling with photo editing, there’s good interpolation and garbage interpolation. The results depend in large part on the quality of the algorithm doing the work. When this author lost his mind in 2004 and bought a $10,000 (before discount) 50-inch Fujitsu Plasmavision, he did it because it was the single best display on the market at the time. The reason for that quality statement was because Fujitsu had the best scaling hardware. The set produces rich, authentic colors and does an excellent job of preserving sharpness despite the old school 720 resolution.
If you’re going to become a multimedia counselor to your customers, you can’t ignore the difference in scaling quality between vendors and even monitor models. Scaling quality may be the single most important element of a home theater. Perhaps you noticed this already with the widely varying quality of a favorite DVD (480p) played on different HDTV sets. You can find LG’s decent, Flash-based explanation of its own scaling and post-processing approach at www.lge.com/products/tv/XDEngine/index.htm. Just as HD monitors must scale 720p signals up, a 1366x768 monitor must also scale a 1080i image down. While there’s a lot of heavy processor lifting that goes into this procedure, it is easier to scale a 2MP (1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels) down into a sharp 1MP image than it is to interpolate in pixels that never existed to begin with. This is also why many video professionals will tell you that it’s possible for a good 720 HDTV set to outperform a poor 1080 HDTV set with both 720p and 1080i content. DIGGING THE DTV A quick scan of the $1,500 to $2,000 price category for flat panel TVs at Best Buy shows that 1080p sets dominate this mainstream segment, although you still see a smattering of 1080i and 720p sets. The 720p format doesn’t dominate until we drop under $1,000. And here’s where things can get infuriating. Even if your customer goes out and drops $5,000 on a new HDTV, that doesn’t mean he’ll always be getting 1080 resolution from his content sources. True enough, CBS, NBC, PBS, Showtime, HBO, TNT, Discovery HD Theater, and others currently broadcast in 1080i, but ABC, Fox, and ESPN only broadcast their HD content at 720p. Moreover, most Internet-distributed HD video is 720p. (Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace sells HD content at 720p, and Apple’s iTunes is still mired at the “near-DVD” resolution of 640x480.) Given that 720p entails having 30 complete 1MP frames versus 1080i having 60 2MP half-frames every second, the bandwidth is similar. But progressive scanning tends to handle rapid action better. This is why 720p makes sense for ESPN, which broadcasts a lot of fast-moving content.
The issue of 720p versus 1080i is pretty cut and dry if we’re talking about over-the-air digital HD broadcasts, commonly called ATSC. (This actually stands for Advanced Television Systems Committee, although the group and the technology it promotes have become synonymous.) ATSC terrestrial broadcasts can use any standard resolution up to 1920x1080, accommodate square on non-square pixels, and provide for interlaced or progressive images. Because of the benefits of digital video compression and transmission, one 6 MHz ATSC channel can contain up to six standard-definition sub-channels, or “virtual channels.” This is also called multicasting, and it can deliver functionality impossible to replicate on analog broadcasts, such as rich text-style captioning or even animated overlays. But the important issue is that ATSC broadcasts are native quality. What you see is what the network produced. With cable and satellite transmissions, this is not the case. “If you’re dealing with Comcast, for example, you’re not getting the full bandwidth and resolution that the station is transmitting,” says Larry Bloomfield, an editor/publisher (tech-notes.tv), nationwide lecturer, and certified engineer in the field of broadcast video. “Because they do compress it down. They reduce the amount of bandwidth, which will reduce the picture quality. If you want the best picture quality going, you want satellite or over-the-air, especially over-the-air. It’s always the best. Also, Comcast and the other cable companies strip off some secondary programming material as well.” One thing you’re also not likely to hear much about from Comcast and other providers is Clear QAM support. QAM (pronounced “quom”) stands for quadrature amplitude modulation, and it’s the method used to encode and transmit digital cable channels. The “Clear” denotes a QAM channel that is not encrypted. One example from Pennsylvania (http://home.comcast.net/~cypherx/freeqam.htm), updated last summer, shows over 100 Clear QAM stations, including many music channels. High-def channels can also be broadcast via Clear QAM, but these seem far less common. Note that Clear QAM channel selections can vary widely between cable providers.
“Anything that’s digital and not encrypted through your cable is a Clear QAM channel,” says Mark Little, product specialist with Pinnacle Systems. “Encrypted channels will just be blank, black. With Comcast now, you’re going to get about 360 digital channels, of which about 320 are probably encrypted. Clear QAM channels will be the ones where you see the channel name and the data for that channel. Basically, it’s the networks and the local broadcasters that are in the Clear QAM and HD streams. There will be several standard Clear QAM channels, as well, that are just part of the cable and are not encrypted.” If one has a “basic cable” subscription and opts not to pay for a set-top box, a Clear QAM tuner may be the cheapest, best-quality way to get a decent selection of TV programming, especially if it’s a mobile tuner that can be packed for use on the road. Just keep in mind that the cable company doesn’t go out of its way to educate users about these often unlabeled channels and can shift their position (channel number) at will. The set-top box and guide data that accompanies a “premium” cable subscription makes Clear QAM transparent and more user-friendly, but in no way are these added costs required. For channel resellers, the best story behind Clear QAM may be as an adjunct to the high-def proposition. If the goal is to make television more enjoyable for PC users, Clear QAM is one extremely low-cost way to make that happen while also pursuing the main goal of HD media enjoyment. If you can get HD Clear QAM in the process, consider it a bonus.
In fact, hybrid and combination tuners are emerging as one of the hot spots in mainstream custom system builds. A hybrid tuner blends digital and analog channel tuning, often with support for FM radio. A combo tuner plants two tuners on a single card so the user can tune/record two signals simultaneously. This obviously comes in handy when watching a show while recording another or recording two shows in the same time slot. ...more |
||||||||||||||
 Back to top
|
||||||||||||||
Copyright © 2007 RAM Magazine. All rights reserved.
Do not duplicate or redistribute in any form. |
||||||||||||||
