[gewood]

How important is a firewire connection in the future? I'm looking at the Sony 36XBR450, but wonder if I should wait until next year when I presume the new model will have a firewire input.

 

[Savageone79]

No don't wait.

 

[michaeltscott]

Quote:

Originally posted by gewood How important is a firewire connection in the future? I'm looking at the Sony 36XBR450, but wonder if I should wait until next year when I presume the new model will have a firewire input.

Everything's a gamble right now--nobody knows exactly what they're going to do for copy-protection. The only thing I feel fairly sure of is that they're going to implement something. FireWire might not be it, though. If not, it'll be something nobody's named yet, since protected DVI can't be recorded at all, and they're not going to get away with that alone.


Even if it doesn't get chosen as the HD copy-protection standard, the copy-protection protocols of it are built on top of a few other A/V interconnection protocols that I feel have great potential for wide adoption. Using them, all of your future devices can be connected together with a single daisy-chain of cable--one cable i to each, one cable out, and a single cable going into your receiver. (See a picture illustrating this at my post here ). This alone might make buying a FireWire enabled set worthwhile.


Sony's KD-34XBR2 has FireWire connections and has been generally well reviewed by people in these forums who have bought it--do a search for posts on it. It's a 16x9 direct-view which incorporates an ATSC tuner (all current sets with FireWire do--I suspect that they always will, since receiving video over FireWire will require an MPEG-2 decoder), so it's significantly more expensive than the set you're talking about--you can get it from crazyeddie.com , for $3300 (who, of course, also have the KV-36XBR450 for $1880).


-- Mike Scott

 

[DTVisCool]

Depends what you want. Read latest Consumer Reports for a balanced coverage and various biased comments on here. Also, you might want to see what the next CES (Consumer Electronics Show in January) comes up with in terms of new HDTV hardware features.

 

[inocen1]

Just wanted to put in a warning on the sony set. The firewire is input only and will ALWAYS be that way, so you can't do a input-output situation with that set, thus you CAN'T output the HD signal EVER.

Matt

 

[michaeltscott]

Quote:

Originally posted by inocen1 Just wanted to put in a warning on the sony set. The firewire is input only and will ALWAYS be that way, so you can't do a input-output situation with that set, thus you CAN'T output the HD signal EVER.

Right--if you read the entire thread that contained the post with the pictures that I linked, that's what it was originally about.


-- Mike Scott

 

[gewood]

Seems like this thread proves the point that, as Mike put it, everything's a gamble right now due to the lack of clarity and consensus.


Mike, the other thread was also helpful. Any other pointers to additional description of the DVI/firewire/copy protection situation?

 

[michaeltscott]

Quote:

Originally posted by gewood Seems like this thread proves the point that, as Mike put it, everything's a gamble right now due to the lack of clarity and consensus. Mike, the other thread was also helpful. Any other pointers to additional description of the DVI/firewire/copy protection situation?

Just do a search for the term "HDCP or DTCP or DTLA or copy-protected or 5C or DFAST" (without the quotes), confined to only the HDTV forum group and you'll get over 1000 hits. Unfortunately, people started using phrases like "Stop DVI/HDCP now!" in their signature as a protest, making these terms show up in unrelated threads. We have hashed this topic to death over the past months in multiple threads with a great deal of passion: one of the most interesting discussions is this , a thread that was shut down for becoming too large. There are many other threads altogether containing many hundreds of posts, if not thousands.


-- Mike Scott

 

[dleithaus]

DTV--

Consumer Reports is hardly balanced or well researched!

I encourage you to turn to page 37 and read their report on Digital Video Recorders. Notice anything wrong with this article??

They say that the two providers for DVR service are Tivo and Replay. NO MENTION OF MICROSOFT ULTIMATE TV. I could not believe it. AND, I wrote them about my displeasure. The wrote me back a response about consumer preferences.... da da da. I am sorry but leaving MS Ultimate out of an informational article on DVR's is like not mentioning AOL in a report on ISP's. If this article is questionable I think the rest of their information is questionable too.


dL

 

[michaeltscott]

Quote:

Originally posted by dleithaus Notice anything wrong with this article?? They say that the two providers for DVR service are Tivo and Replay. NO MENTION OF MICROSOFT ULTIMATE TV. I could not believe it. AND, I wrote them about my displeasure. The wrote me back a response about consumer preferences.... da da da. I am sorry but leaving MS Ultimate out of an informational article on DVR's is like not mentioning AOL in a report on ISP's.

Huh? AOL is the dominant national ISP--Microsoft isn't even a player in this market. For one thing, their product is only usable by the 20% of television who use DBS, and only the subset of those who subscribe to DIRECTV. I'd imagine that Echostar has sold more PVRs than they have at this point--did you complain to them that they omitted their name?


Not to say that their report was balanced--I didn't read it.


-- Mike Scott

 

[DTVisCool]

According to Silicon Image, the Consumer Electronics Association has recently given its full endorsement to DVI/HDCP and will make that announcement at the CES in January. Look for many if not most new HDTVs at the CES to have a DVI/HDCP input.

 

[dleithaus]

Microsoft is a player in the PVR market. They are certainly a larger corp than either of the other players. If IBM offered these services I would expect an informational article to mention them. Anyone know where to look for how many Tivo vs. Replay vs. UTV customers there are??


I thought that Dish PVRs were being served by Tivo. Am I wrong?


dL