Raleigh, NC - HDTV - Page 436

Normally, I am kind of critical of the weather premptions, because they typically overblow things and they tend to just interrupt the show and not the commercials, like somehow, the storm will just take a break during those 2 or 3 minutes and no longer present a danger.

However, in this case, there was an active tornado in the viewing area and while it did not end up causing massive damage, there was no way to know that at the time and things can change so rapidly, previous damage is useless to estimate what might happen 5 miles away.

They also prempted all the commercials for the entire hour from what I saw, so clearly, they were concerned about safety and not just paying lipservice to it. (heck they even kicked poor Kim Deener off the air and brought out Fishel for a while)

Now, maybe you could make an argument that they could have broken away from the storm coverage sooner as it died down or that it is possible that a corner window and or crawl would be enough, but I still find it hard to fault them too much in this case. If this had turned out slightly differently, I'm sure no one would be worried about TAR while houses were being destroyed like back in 1989. Also, if they came back to the Amazing Race at 8:40, we would have missed most of it anyway so that is not exactly great either.



Also they have announced they will re-run the Amazing race overnight tonight at 1:37 AM Tuesday. http://www.wral.com/entertainment/story/7485851/

Its also up on CBS.com.

i recorded the hour for the amazing race last night. i fast fowarded through the whole thing wondering if they were ever going to go back to the programming, and of course they didn't. i understand breaking in with the initial warning, then running a crawl, or a PIP with the radar, etc. but a whole hour showing the same radar screen, with the tiny weather cell creeping slowly across NE NC, and greg blathering about is crazy.

however, i do applaud WRAL for rebroadcasting the amazing race tuesday morning at 1:37AM (that's tonight by the way). i don't know if they plan to reair the movie or not. my wife was bitching about missing the first 30 minutes of that last night. she ended up not watching the movie because of it.

in the age of DVRs, even a crawl saying to switch to 5.2 isn't useful for catching the programming.

i would rather they run a crawl on 5.1 that says switch to 5.2 for up-to-date radar gawking and greg blathering.

The major problem with this is that 25%+ of our local viewers get their programming via DBS (Directtv / Dish). I don't know about DirectTv, but I KNOW Dish does not offer subchannels - so the only way these viewers could watch WRAL2 would be to have OTA capability - I'm equipped, but that says nothing about others.

Here is the proof of the tornado (video) as it went rhough Pilot, Zebulon

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Nice Video.

Did they also reschedule Hallmark for a late night slot?

I guess using TV for advanced warning has its merits. But what good would it be if you happened to be asleep at three am in the morning and a Tornado passes thru your area? I guess I could keep one weather eye open and tv on.

Also I guess there are no sirens that can go off locally for warning. Around the Nuclear plant there are sirens but I guess those are just for Nuc Plant issues.

Looks like "Better safe then sorry" is the credo.

That's what a weather radio is for, or WRAL's Weather Call service.

Yes, that's one thing that surprised / annoyed me about being on the coastal states - the utter lack of civil defense sirens . I grew up in Kansas where these were tested monthly and used to provide tornado warnings.

TWC has finally released the new digital channel lineup that will take effect June 16th in our area. The new lineup can be found here:

http://www.timewarnercable.com/Media...Young_Bunn.pdf

They added NESN (not the HD version) around mid-April (couple weeks back), I think it was on channel 335 or 337 at that time. Now it's no longer on there; when I called TWC on this they said it was removed cause of some contractual issue with NESN. Sounds like a bogus excuse to me!

It is possible to get just internet and phone but it makes 0 sense to do it. If you only order those two you end up paying the installation fee (can't remember what it is prob somewhere around $50) and you pay the monthly fee for that. If you order all 3 services they waive the installation fee AND give you somewhere between $250-$350 depending on the current promotion. This way you end up paying the higher monthly fee for one month but you get back more money than the difference between the monthly fees. Then you just cancel the tv service the next month since it's no contract!

Does anyone know if it's possible to request a specific box from Time Warner when setting up the install? If so which box should I request? I haven't had Time Warner for 2 years so I think the boxes are different now from when I last had it. Thanks!

I forgot to post back after my talk with the folks in the AT&T store...

I am now a U-verse internet + phone (no TV) customer.

I explained my situation in the store, and they agreed to a compromise.

The installation is going to show up on my U-Verse bill... but they are issuing me credits to counter that on my cellular bill... so in the end, I will not have to pay the installation.

It really wasn't an option for me to switch from Dish... so I'm glad they worked it out with me on the internet + phone... and I've had those now since last Thursday afternoon.

THats good to know they will work with you. I am not about to give up DirecTV, but I definitely would not mind getting faster internet (did I mentioned the crappy 3.0/384 DSL is killing me? ) and cheaper service with internet and phone than I am paying now. I just hope they get busy in Morrisville. I have seen them installing what looks to be a VRAD near me, but nothing else.

Just curious about what was involved in the install. Does the connection end up running over your standard phone lines as DSL does (cat 5 in my case) or do they actually have to run new line(s) inside the house? Since you just have internet and phone, do you just get a special uVerse modem or do you get the same box as for the TV service, just no TV?

In my case it was pretty simple... fairly new home construction (2002) and I had CAT5 in my walls already.

They did "something" outside that I don't really know what they did... and it is their equipment so I didn't really care.

Inside, in the room where I wanted the gateway/router to go, he took off my phone wallplate and replaced it with a new one that had a phone plus their connector.

It is the same main box no matter what service you get (internet, phone, tv, or any combination thereof).

The way it appears to work is the box gets its internet/tv/phone connection from that connection... and then it will "backfeed" so that the rest of your outlets in the house are normal phone outlets without need for a box.

IF I'd gotten TV, then they have a choice to feed the TV signal via coax or the CAT5... but since I didn't get TV I don't know if they would have had to do anything different.

Another cool thing is they also give you a battery backup specifically for the gateway/router. As long as you don't lose power on the AT&T junctions, you could lose power at your house and still have internet/phone for a while to at least make some emergency calls and report the outage.

Yeah.. I had 6Mbps DSL... but the 512K upload often was choking me.

I'm on the 18Mbps tier... and speedtests are proving unreliable since I don't know the other end of the connection... I've seen anywhere from 10-17 Mbps download speeds with U-Verse... but a fairly consistent 1.4Mbps upload.

That upload being 3X my old upload is really the biggest difference I think I've seen that I can put my finger on... when sending eMails or trying to multi-task different downloads/Web sites at the same time.

There had been some digging in my neighborhood a month or two ago but I didn't immediately associate with U-Verse... then one day my phone suddenly tested as "available" and that week I got an email and two snail-mailings telling me I could now sign up.

They're taking a long time here (MacArthur Park in Cary). They started digging in the Fall, stopped for the Winter, started up again a couple of months ago, are long done with my neighborhood, but still no availability. I really want that faster upload speed.

Sounds good. My house is only 5 years old and has cat 5 in all the walls also (or maybe cat 5e...I need to check). I hope they hurry up and get to my neighborhood.

For the connection to the router/gateway, you said the new wall plate had the phone jack and "their connector". Is that some special connector or just a standard RJ-45 ethernet jack?

Did you sign up at their site to be let know when it was available?

I've seen no digging in my neighborhood per se, but it is only about 140 houses and only maybe 110 on this side of Morrisville Carpenter Rd. I have seen some digging and two new boxes intalled at Church Street and M-C rd where our current DSLAM and RT equipment is. One of the new boxes looks like pictures i've seen of VRADS, so hopefully that is what is going in, but it seems like it is on the outside for distance form what I have read.

The one thing that is funky is we have fiber running along the street and then the box converts that to copper for the final run from the box to the house. So, instead of just having the little 12 inch high 4 inch sqaure boxes, we have one 3 foot high box 12 inches square every 6 -8 houses or so. Hopefully this setup is not going to keep us from getting Uverse, then again ,maybe that is why the box can be further? But since no one at ATT can tell you squat about their plans, I just have to keep hoping they want my business long term.

I have been holding out because I do not want to have to go to Time Warner for internet if I can avoid it, but I can only live with last century internet service for so long. With the 3.0/384 service, I can usually only get 2.5/312 anyway due to overhead so, I definitely have issues hosting games over XBox Live and with heavy downloading due to saturating the upload.

I never looked that closely until just now to reply to your post...

Actually both jacks on the new wallplate look like "phone" jacks... so the only RJ-45 in use by me are the actual ethernet ports connecting to my computers for the internet.

I had thought their connection was going to be RJ-45... but it is not.

Yeah, I had signed up to be contacted when it was available... so that's probably why the deluge of email/mailings started a couple of weeks ago... but I also would periodically check/test the Web site availability myself so I actually found out I qualified before they got to me.

Had I been patient... it was probably less than a week from the time I first qualified and when I got the first email/mailing.


I'm pretty sure that's the case in my neighborhood... because I know I have that big 2-3 ft box in between my and my neighbor's yard... so I'm pretty sure I am in an area that is fiber to the main junction, and then copper to the houses in the neighborhood.

I doubt they laid fiber in here 8-10 years ago when the development was first started.

Time Warner can only get you to a 512 upload, so that's not much help. They may have much faster down for you, but their upload speed still stinks.

You can get higher upload speeds with TWC business class.

A few months ago, I had a problem (could only get 3Mb/s down when I was paying for 7) which turned out to be my ancient cable modem. While diagnosing it, one of the techs monkeyed with my account, and now I have a "business class" DNS name (.biz.rr.com) and higher upload speeds. In fact, after that change, my upload speed tripled from 384Kb/s to 1Mb/s. I get 0.96Mb/s uploads regularly, measured by speedtest. I work from home, and having an almost decent uplink has made things work much better for me.

Drew

The plate probably just contains a splitter on the main cat 5 line with some filter needed for the data line (or perhaps the other way around like with the filters you got for your phones when on DSL service).

Time Warner Business Class is VERY expensive as compared to residential Road Runner basic or turbo. How much are you paying for business class?

$39.95 via my wife's Duke alumni program.

It is some sort of pseudo business class in that it was negotiated by a large entity with TWC. But I've never gotten a .biz.rr.com address, or decent upload rates until my encounter with 3rd level tech support a few months ago. They did something to the account when I was complaining about bandwidth, and never reset it back to how it was. So I'm 100% sure if I'm supposed to have that level of upload or not, due to the psuedo business class nature of the account. But I'm certainly not complaining about it.

Drew

Before HD, I was an avid user of ReplayTV DVRs. What great devices. (In fact, I still have and regularly use three of them.) After I recorded a show, I copied it to my hard drive with DVArchive. However, I now have a TW Scientific Atlanta/Cisco DVR and have never been able to transfer an HD program to a hard drive to edit and burn to DVD.

How are you guys recording HD? I read about the Linux box with Sage. Are you using HTPC? Windows 7? What is the closest HD equivalent, if any, to the ReplayTVs? Every time I ask this question and try to follow the recommended setups, I get lost. Hopefully there is a simple and effective solution by now.

On a side note, the AT&T guy who was conditioning the lines in my neighborhood said that U-Verse would be available at my home in 3 to 4 months. Good bye Time Warner.

Yes, I record HD off the air.

There are 3 ways to record HD from cable to a PC:

0) Clear QAM tuner: This gets just the stuff you can get OTA (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CW, WB, some spanish channels), and a few community access and shopping channels. You can do whatever you want with these recordings. The disadvantage is that TWC moves the channels around occasionally, and sometimes sends broken or missing metadata, both of which may interfere with recordings.

1) CableCard. This will leave most recordings encrypted, and will only be playable on the PC you recorded them from. My understanding is that TWC marks everything as requiring encryption, and not just premiums like HBO. This requires a Windows 7 PC. There are new devices coming out which allow you to record up to 4 channels at once.

2) HD Component capture: You plug a device like the Hauppage HD-PVR to your HD cable box's component outputs, and record in up to 1080i HD. The device has a chip that re-encodes the analog HD video to MPEG4. The advantage here is that the recording is not ecrypted, and you can do whatever you want with it. The downside is that you're re-encoding, so there maybe some quality loss, and you need 1 cable box / HD-PVR per simultaneous recording. This will work on nearly any platform (older windows, linux, maybe even macosx).

U-Verse (And satellite) does not support Cable Cards AFAIK, so you'd be stuck with #2

From what I've heard about ReplayTV, SageTV with comskip is pretty close. The nice thing about Sage is that you can keep your "server" in a closet, and put tiny, silent, low-power "extenders" next to your TVs (requires Cat5 to the TV location, or a really good wireless network). The advantage this has over, say, DLNA clients that might be built into a TV or Blueray player) is that you get the full SageTV GUI (including comskip), and you can do anything from the extender you'd do from the normal SageTV (like watch Live TV). The advantage an extender has client has over a PC is that it is silent AND cheap, and you don't need to mess with drivers. The setup process is basically: You turn it on, enter a license code, and you're done.

Drew

3) FireWire. For unencrypted channels.

I never consider that myself, because it has most of the disadvantages of HD Component capture (need one box per simultaneous recording) and QAM (only unencrypted channels), plus the added fun of finding HD boxes where the ieee1394 port is active. But I suppose it is an option. Is anybody locally using firewire?

Drew

I have been doing the cheap and dirty root. I picked up a Magnavox DVD recorder at Big Rots for $25.00 and record shows directly to DVD's. I typically use RW Dvd's because I have more editing options with a RW. I already own a NTSC version of the Mag that I got at Walfart about five years ago and had really good luck and reliability with it. So I figured the ATSC version may be at least as good.

And I know it is not 1080i as the Mag downconverts it to fit on a standard DVD. But if I use the 2 hr mode to record a movie it looks almost as good as a commercial DVD movie - at least to my aging eyes.

But I do get burned when I record at the better quality settings and run out of room on the DVD's.

I erase and reuse them for somethings and others are keepers or I pass them onto my brother in upstate NY that does not have the same channel options that I do here in Raleigh.

I wish someone made a DVD recorder, HD combo , and a built in OTA tv guide channel so I could just click on a show and have it record, But I have been getting by with just setting it up for timed recordings.

Anyway like I said it is the cheap and dirty way. Not high res, but does look darn good for me on my Pioneer 43 inch Plasma which does do good upscaling. And I have not messed with 5 channel on it. And honestly can't even tell you if it records anymore then stereo. I do think it outputs factory DVD 5 channel on a glass audio cable though.

I also experiment with digital ATSC USB tuners. And have one on an Upstairs computer but man does it use up the Hard drive space. And it is challenging to move it onto a DVD without using a DVD compression app.

Right now I am in the middle of hooking up a UN55B6000 55" 1080p LED HDTV (2009 MODEL) that I picked up at Cross roads BB. So maybe my DVD recordings will not look as good on the Samsung and I will have to move away for the DVD recorder. But so far everything has been looking great on the Samsung