If your home theater system has a high definition television (HDTV) then you want to get the best digital pictures available. If you are watching DVDs then you want to get the latest generation DVDs - HD DVD or Blu Ray. If you are watching TV then you want satellite TV as this is the only source of HDTV broadcasting at the moment. This article will discuss the benefits of satellite TV to the home theater owner.

The two main providers of the digital satellite service (DSS) are DirecTV and DISH network. At this time these networks transmit their programs in digital but only a few channels have digital pictures. This is still better than the standard analog signal because the signal does not suffer from interference. Of course, to the watcher of TV the most important feature is to get digital pictures. I think this will change as more people get HDTVs and more program producers begin to produce high definition programs. At this stage, however if you want totally digital television, satellite services are the only way to go.

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A note about Premium cables. When you are buying a surround sound system, be wary of snake oil sales people trying you sell you a monster of a cable. They will give you all kinds of facts and specifications about the fancy cable and its fancy price. It was gas injected and braided by the purest copper. It might have a higher range of frequencies that the human ear cannot possibly perceive. The ends are made out of gold, platinum or some other rare metal. It is outrageous and many people fall to this ploy. The cables are outrageously expensive! Just say no thank you to the sales person and walk away.

The monsters of the cable industry are doing one thing and one thing only, making a huge profit from people wanting their surround sound to sound the best and their inexperience with cables.

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If you are bent on buying a new state-of-the-technological-art TV set, my choice would be the LCD television that is compatible with the PAL broadcast standard.

PAL, or phase-alternating line, is the standard broadcast system used in most parts of the globe, including Asia. To those residing in select countries of Asia and Europe in particular, it is important that their television sets be PAL compatible. Otherwise, their TVs would not be able to capture the video and broadcast programs. In other words, the television would have no signal and it will not work.

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Although HSDPA has caught fire in places like Europe and Japan, why can’t it win out in the US? After all, it is the faster standard. It reminds me of the VHS vs. Beta battle in the 80s. The standard you’d expect to win, the one with higher quality and smaller space consumption, ended up losing. When will Goliath ever catch his break and win?

If you compare stats, HSDPA is definitely the Goliath. It maxes out at 14.4 Mbit/second, which is nearly 7 times the speed of EVDO. The system is faster because of the “fast packet scheduling” protocol that is used. Essentially, the personal communication devices, such as smart phones, will schedule data sending/receiving incidents by periodically transmitting an indication of the downlink signal quality. By periodically, I’m talking up to 500 times a second. In other words, it micro-manages and optimizes data transmission on the fly many times per second. More data from the cell towers is then sent to the users whose devices say that they have better signal quality.

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If you have been looking at buying an LCD flat screen tv, no doubt you have read about the 120Hz models. You are probably wondering if the 120Hz models are worth the extra cost. The value of the 120hz feature has been widely debated in recent months. There are a number of things to consider before making your decision.

In the early days of the LCD vs Plasma tv wars, one of the biggest drawbacks to purchasing an LCD tv was that they were prone to motion blur and a somewhat choppy picture, especially in times when there was a lot of fast action such as sports or in movie scenes such as car chases. Although there has been a great deal of improvement over the years in the tvs ability to handle fast motion, LCD is still battling the stigma of not having as smooth of a picture as plasmas.

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In the last article (Data and MP3 Compression: Understanding “Digital”), I explained what a “digital” signal is. Remember, data can be stored as raw, or “analog” signals (like cassette tapes, VHS, or records) or they may be digitized (converted into a series of 1’s and 0’s) which we can later convert back into its raw format. Digitizing signals allows us to store information in an errorless format. So why don’t we digitize everything? The answer is simple: It takes a lot of 1’s and 0’s to represent the shortest songs, videos or movies. A standard 5 minute song can take over 70MB (which is 70 mega-bytes; each byte is made up of 8 bits or 1’s and 0’s). That is 560 million 1’s and 0’s! That is a lot! Not only do you have to store all of that information, but we need to process it and convert it back to its analog signal in a short amount of time.

Luckily, fast processing has been around for some time now and formats such as CDs have taken advantage of this. But CDs are limited in space: about 700MB (which will hold about 10 songs). The space issue definitely became a problem. That is when compression techniques were first introduced. How compression works is that we take the 70MB signal (as we described above) and by using either a mathematical algorithm or map, we can organize the bits in such a way that less bits are required to store the same amount of information (My next articles will cover the details about this a bit more).

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It’s coming!

It’s coming on February 17, 2009! It’s about to cut off the signal to your TV, and most likely you’re not prepared for it!

It’s almost as big a shift in home entertainment as happened sixty years ago when television replaced radio in America’s living rooms!

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Cricket videos have joined the online world. You can now find a vast range of video clips, live matches and cricket highlights online, to complement traditional VHS and DVD video. So, what’s the advantage of all this choice? It’s so easy to drown in the sea of video products. So, if you want to enjoy more cricket or inspire your junior cricketer, you’ll need to be selective.

VHS tape and DVD cricket video are still popular, and don’t have internet related transmission issues. So, it’s worth considering them for your collection, but consider the picture quality of archive TV footage before you part with your money.

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