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It was awful when 16:9 tvs first started picking up and like 3/4 of the people I knew with them would have it set to "stretch" mode, thus making every 4:3 broadcast look terrible. "But it takes up the whole screen!" Yeah but now everyone looks like a fat midget. Also auto-brightness/contrast adjustment. I sure love when the picture becomes a washed out unreadable mess whenever it's a dark screen then takes a second to adjust when a bright shot comes up! E: my roommate has one with a sensor for that, and turning the light on or off would cause the TV to adjust it's image. Tried to explain it's not actually making the picture better, but the TV came with it so according to him it must be a good feature... The Gasmask has a new favorite as of 02:15 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 02:12
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My dad would set the TV so it cut off the top and bottom of 4:3 channels just so it would fill up the screen. It didn't help that the lovely TV would use bright grey for the letterbox area instead of black.
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Aug 16, 2016 02:16
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The Gasmask posted:Yeah but now everyone looks like a fat midget. 
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Aug 16, 2016 02:20
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The stretch isn't all that bad.
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Aug 16, 2016 02:24
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A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:I don't know if this is just a really rare feature or it was something that only a single model of TV did ever, but one of my dad's friends had a TV where you could hit a button and it'd readjust the electron gun to only scan a 16:9 area of the screen. Combine with an anamorphic widescreen DVD or LD and you had real, 480 line widescreen on a normally 4:3 TV. Speaking of TVs with uncommon but useful features we used to have one (I think it was by RCA) that had "mute only" setting for closed captioning. So captions would appear only when the TV was muted and disappear again when unmuted. Useful if you're on the phone or something and still want to keep up with whatever you were watching.
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Aug 16, 2016 02:50
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Nothing used to drive me crazier than people who would buy new HD tvs, have an HD source, but their picture would be in SD because they were still using RCA cables or they just didn't care enough to put it on the HD cable channel. How did that not bother them?! Today that has been replaced by TVs that have not had the soap opera effect turned off.
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Aug 16, 2016 05:08
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CubanMissile posted:Nothing used to drive me crazier than people who would buy new HD tvs, have an HD source, but their picture would be in SD because they were still using RCA cables or they just didn't care enough to put it on the HD cable channel. How did that not bother them?! I've had a HDTV for quite a while now. Only a month or so ago the powers that be in charge of the OTA broadcasting finally got us to all retune our TVs to get HD on a bunch of channels. Finally I can watch Football in crystal clear HD.
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Aug 16, 2016 05:20
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CubanMissile posted:Nothing used to drive me crazier than people who would buy new HD tvs, have an HD source, but their picture would be in SD because they were still using RCA cables or they just didn't care enough to put it on the HD cable channel. How did that not bother them?! You know what's worse? When they set their giant HD TV to stretch 4x3 standard TV signals across the 16x9 panel and everything looks weird. And nobody notices but you.
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Aug 16, 2016 05:21
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CubanMissile posted:Nothing used to drive me crazier than people who would buy new HD tvs, have an HD source, but their picture would be in SD because they were still using RCA cables or they just didn't care enough to put it on the HD cable channel. How did that not bother them?! Non-tech savvy people are the worst when it comes to television tech. Because God forbid you improve the picture/sound in a way that forces them to learn a new way to change channels/turn on their poo poo. "What!?! I have to push 2 buttons now!? gently caress THAT poo poo! Remember Video Input 1 instead of Channel 3? WHO AM I, EINSTEIN!?!?" Edit: Over the years, I've managed to learn how to spot these people early. They're the ones that ask you to recite to them "what buttons to push in what order" rather than learning what the buttons do. I always made an effort to explain that it's more important to learn what the functions do rather than "push X then Y, then Z" because if for some reason you begin at the wrong starting point, you're just going to get lost, to which I'd usually get either a blank stare, or a reluctant nod. woodch has a new favorite as of 05:31 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 05:28
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woodch posted:Edit: Over the years, I've managed to learn how to spot these people early. They're the ones that ask you to recite to them "what buttons to push in what order" rather than learning what the buttons do. I always made an effort to explain that it's more important to learn what the functions do rather than "push X then Y, then Z" because if for some reason you begin at the wrong starting point, you're just going to get lost, to which I'd usually get either a blank stare, or a reluctant nod. My parents are the worst for it. My mum got a free PS3 when she bought her TV as part of a redemption deal with Sony. She mailed it to me without asking and bought a Bluray player not knowing the PS3 had that functionality. Her husband is just as bad with tech - narrowly avoiding a fake microsoft tech support scam. Grandma on the other hand, lives in a remote property and managed to figure out how to use digital cameras herself including getting the photos edited and printed and even buy a cellphone. She does research and reads manuals. She taught ME how to program the VCR back when I was a kid.
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Aug 16, 2016 05:38
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Humphreys posted:My parents are the worst for it. My mum got a free PS3 when she bought her TV as part of a redemption deal with Sony. She mailed it to me without asking and bought a Bluray player not knowing the PS3 had that functionality. Her husband is just as bad with tech - narrowly avoiding a fake microsoft tech support scam. Yer grandma sounds cool.  To pile onto my point about learning sequences rather than procedures, it's like learning to drive by saying "first, turn on the car, then move the shifter to R, press the gas for 1 second, turn the wheel 2 full turns, press teh brake, etc."... yer just gonna get in a horrible wreck. You might as well drive with your eyes closed.
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Aug 16, 2016 05:56
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CubanMissile posted:Nothing used to drive me crazier than people who would buy new HD tvs, have an HD source, but their picture would be in SD because they were still using RCA cables or they just didn't care enough to put it on the HD cable channel. How did that not bother them?! My folks do that  I bought them a HDMI cable to go between their HD Recorder and their TV but they took it out because it caused issues with their reception. which of course was all my fault and has nothing to do with the fact that dad split the already questionable antenna feed to every single room even though they only have 2 tvs. (I'm surprised the HDD tuners even work from the signal, because the TV doesn't.) Kudos to them for actually working out how to use the HD box and Satellite tuner though.woodch posted:Worse than THAT were the one who had the HD TV, the HD receiver, and then insisted on hooking up the cable box using the coax (you know.. the "put it on channel 3" option). So not only were you not getting HD, you weren't even getting a clean video signal. You were getting MONO audio, RF-remodulated, analog broadcast signal. Yup, they're the loving worst, and you're wasting your time and theirs by attempting to enlighten them, some people really do need instructions on a need-to-know basis. Perhaps you could tell them that if they ever make a mistake they can turn it off and turn it on again; the product I was installing came with a big button on the remote that acted like an emergency stop, "If you ever get stuck or unsure press this button" goes a long way to assuage these neanderthals' fears and get me out of there quicker. I used to be a cable tech and most people were just happy to get their poo poo set up and working but I did see a lot of lovely setups. Worst one was a little old lady's little old crt TV with every input already in use, the customer didn't even want cable but their kids had paid for them to get the latest HD cable box, which of course doesn't have an analog modulator. So we plugged the box into the RCA input on their VCR, and they simply did not want to know how to actually get that on the TV, they were more concerned with how to turn the TV off of cable and back onto terrestrial (which is very much still a thing in Australia.) We wrote down step-by-step instructions for their rear end in a top hat kids and left it on normal TV for her and they were happy enough to sign off on the work order. Met a real life Hyacinth Bucket complete with Richard in that gig, fun times. The Sausages has a new favorite as of 06:28 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 06:19
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The Sausages posted:Met a real life Hyacinth Bucket complete with Richard in that gig, fun times.
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Aug 16, 2016 06:28
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The Sausages posted:I used to be a cable tech and most people were just happy to get their poo poo set up and working but I did see a lot of lovely setups. Do tell us more stories! How much fun did you have when card-sharing came to an end? All those people with expensive setups just hosed completely. 
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Aug 16, 2016 06:47
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I used to do internet tech support for Cox in Las Vegas. When I moved to Reno I got the same job with Charter and told them "Listen, I don't do television support. I refuse. If the call center expects me to do anything other then transfer the customer to cable tv on a misrouted call tell me now and I just wont take the job. I'm not spending my days listening to old people complain until the end of time that now the picture takes a full second to load when they flip channels now that they have digital cable." So things went fine for months and I started noticing that more and more cable tv calls were getting routed into my queue. At first I helped them because it was no big deal. Then it started getting worse. I asked a supervisor what was up and she said there was a problem with the phone system and calls weren't being routed properly. A month later still not fixed. I found out from another supervisor that my department was being dissolved and we were being transitioned into cable tv. I don't like being lied to so I just stopped taking calls. One would come in and I would just hit hold without saying anything until the customer hung up. Spent the day playing emulators on my work PC. Figured that would last until the end of the week when my supervisor would look at my numbers and notice my hold times were the same as my times on a call. Three months later and the only reason I got caught was because one of my coworkers told on me.
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Aug 16, 2016 07:10
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The idea that there are cro magnons out there who's television experience is sub-subpar makes me SSJ2 Goku – sometimes even SSJ 3 Goku – levels of pissed the gently caress off
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Aug 16, 2016 07:22
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CubanMissile posted:I used to do internet tech support for Cox in Las Vegas. When I moved to Reno I got the same job with Charter and told them "Listen, I don't do television support. I refuse. If the call center expects me to do anything other then transfer the customer to cable tv on a misrouted call tell me now and I just wont take the job. I'm not spending my days listening to old people complain until the end of time that now the picture takes a full second to load when they flip channels now that they have digital cable." I worked for Verizon Wireless and I hung up on angry prepaid cellphone people for like 3 years before I got caught. Then I did it for like 6 more months before I quit to get another job.
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Aug 16, 2016 07:21
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Metallica's S&M DVD actually contained multiangle sections. That was actually pretty cool. I do agree that this was something that was announced in the early days of DVD, only to then be quietly ignored. When it comes to aspect ratios, I kind of understand full-screen modes when you consider that many people had small TV sets (big rear end screens being massively available is a recent development). A wide screen film, with black bars, on a tiny 14'' would have probably sucked.
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Aug 16, 2016 11:00
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Non Serviam posted:Metallica's S&M DVD actually contained multiangle sections. That was actually pretty cool. I do agree that this was something that was announced in the early days of DVD, only to then be quietly ignored. A number of pornos did it too from memory.
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Aug 16, 2016 11:03
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The Matrix was a breakout DVD so WB went all in with working out ways to make it look cool. In effect the White Rabbit was a clever hack with the subtitles layer. Back then you used Sonic Scenarist and a somewhat cumbersome hodgepodge of photoshop files to lay out the menus along with After Effects for the videos. I don't really miss the trend of excessively animated videos that took forever to sit through and were unskippable. The other factor with DVDs were that space was a premium as 8gb double density was quickly filled with a 2 hour movie so stuff like commentaries and subtitles filled the remainder quite fast. One solution for multiple versions of a film was instead of having two copies of the film which would have taken up space the extra scenes were additional parts that were in their own playlist and spliced in when needed. Later on there was an attempt to do high quality encodes as a sort of pre-Blu-Ray.
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Aug 16, 2016 11:48
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I miss Apple DVD Studio Pro in the TiBook days, when authoring software on the PC was crap. Direct support of Photoshop layers and you could alter the player register flags. One of those is the "unskippable" flag which cheap unlicenced players tend to ignore. Capturing The Changeling (with George C Scott) from my VHS copy and creating fancy animated menus etc was a good learning experience.
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Aug 16, 2016 12:49
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A few pages late to video game rental chat, but even worse than getting a photocopied manual missing pages was just getting this little white-and-blue sticker on the inside cover of the plastic clamshell:
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Aug 16, 2016 13:34
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Yeah, but as mentioned before, those things sometimes had cheats and stuff on em. I definitely remember at least one time where a non-cheat hint on one of those pages got me through a tough boss, and I'm pretty sure the first time I saw the Konami code was on the rental box when I rented Gradius III.
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Aug 16, 2016 13:48
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Okay so all this vcr chat a few pages ago and not one person talked about vcr+. You'd open up tv guide or your newspaper tv listings and enter in a code and your vcr would be set to record that show.
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Aug 16, 2016 15:22
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tater_salad posted:Okay so all this vcr chat a few pages ago and not one person talked about vcr+. I thought it was the pinnacle of technology. Speaking of TV stuff, do stations still broadcast teletext, or has it been totally abandoned?
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Aug 16, 2016 15:50
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CubanMissile posted:Nothing used to drive me crazier than people who would buy new HD tvs, have an HD source, but their picture would be in SD because they were still using RCA cables or they just didn't care enough to put it on the HD cable channel. How did that not bother them?! I work for a telco/ISP that also provides IPTV. For the longest time, the HD channels were shunted away back to channel 30 and up, with the glorious SD broadcast starting at 1. They only changed this over as part of the new software they released last year for the STBs, and only on the latest models. Granted, most people appear to not even notice or care that they're watching SD on their fancy new HDTV. On the other hand, people with 4K TVs will call in to complain that 1080i is the highest resolution the STB offers(all HD broadcasts are in 720p too) and why are we not already working on getting a 4K demo channel on there(There was a 3D demo channel for a few years that was quietly disposed of) Along with that, there's a huge amount of calls of people unable to change input channels on their TV to switch to HDMI, or using SCART cables. These are mainly from the older generation though. At this point I can recite the procedure(including button name, color and location) for a decent amount of brands with the barest amount of information(even just going by what's displayed on-screen when they're set to RF input which we don't use at all) and identify TVs based on their startup sounds. Also something I've noticed going away: People ordering their channels on TV to their liking. A lot of them just stick with the default order and memorize the channels or use the digital TV guide instead. EDIT: Teletext is still around here in Belgium, but the amount of users has dropped down far enough that most channels only use it for closed captioning, while others are migrating to other technologies(DVB) for subtitles.
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Aug 16, 2016 15:52
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Smoke posted:Also something I've noticed going away: People ordering their channels on TV to their liking. A lot of them just stick with the default order and memorize the channels or use the digital TV guide instead. My current LG TV has a problem where if I retune because of a big change - I get new channels but they stack up with old ones too. So I end up with multiple of the same channel number. Say if I enter 073 I then have to Channel- or + to get the actual one that's the currently broadcast frequency. There is NO part of the menu system to factory default it or erase currently tuned channels enmass. I could just look on the back of my TV and get the model number then log into my work related LG backend system for firmware/other solution but I am a lazy lazy man. To support this - I found an LG robot vacuum I scored for free hidden under a bunch of maccas wrappers in the back seatwell of my car. I got it over 6 months ago and forgot about it. I mentioned a story of the adventures of a particular robo-vac my work was repairing about a month ago in another thread. The gist of it is: New brain PCB installed, robot put in a corral to test it. Robot finds a way out. Robot finds a way out of the workshop, warehouse and the staff carpark. Goes under the gates and onto the road where our delivery truck (supplying delicious new parts for some of it's ilk) nearly ran over it. The driver missed it, picked it up and then dropped it from laughter as it literally said "I cannot find the floor" in it's robotic voice. Lucky her truck had boxes of parts needed to then fix the damage caused from the drop. EDIT: it had a bit of masking tape with "Johnny 5" written on it when the customer picker it up. Humphreys has a new favorite as of 16:23 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 16:17
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I have a cable box but I don't use it. I tried to watch things on it but the HD channels look like total poo poo.
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Aug 16, 2016 16:20
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"100 HD Channels*" *each encoded at 2 Mbps.
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Aug 16, 2016 16:32
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I didn't even know you could re-order channels. I'll have to check if my box can do that. In other news I'm pretty sure my box is one of those awful ones that run everything on Javascript, and therefore take like 10 seconds to load every page (Verizon Fios, but not the fancy Quantum box or whatever they offer). Re: the whole "broadcasts are in 720p" thing, isn't it almost impossible to tell the difference between 720 and 1080 on a screen smaller than like 32"? Also, if that's the case then why is the jump from 720 to 1080 rendering so extremely noticeable in PC games? Even on my 21" monitor it's a gigantic difference. e: 99% of the time if the TV is on I'm using Plex so I know I'm broadcasting my own media which is almost entirely 1080 at this point. The other 1% of the time it's either tuned to FXX for The Simpsons (and we all know the only seasons of that show worth watching are the pre-HD ones) or dumb background noise like Law & Order or Cops, in which case I don't really give a poo poo that Ice-T's moles and scars aren't crystal-clear 1080 
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Aug 16, 2016 16:35
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I always wondered why in the name of gently caress the interactive guide thing could possibly be so slow, in this the nth generation of the concept.
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Aug 16, 2016 16:43
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drunk asian neighbor posted:I didn't even know you could re-order channels. I'll have to check if my box can do that. You sit closer to a PC monitor than most people sit in relation to their TVs. Also PC monitors use higher quality LCD panels than TVs of the same size typically do. Back when I used to have cable, I didn't have a lot of space, so I ended up putting a cablecard tuner in my PC and have it do double duty. Funnily enough, that setup actually ended up working better than any cable box I've ever used.
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Aug 16, 2016 16:43
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Instant Sunrise posted:You sit closer to a PC monitor than most people sit in relation to their TVs. Also PC monitors use higher quality LCD panels than TVs of the same size typically do. I wanna say it's also something to do with rendering of the game vs broadcasting a signal. I'm not sure why, but the difference between 1080 vs 480 on a TV signal is a very different kind of "it looks shittier" than a 1080 vs 480 comparison of a PC game. Also I do the opposite of your tuner solution - my main PC is in the living room anyway, so I just ran an HDMI cable from my PC to the back of my TV and just switch inputs for Plex or Netflix, that way I don't have to worry about my lovely router's poor Wi-Fi signal forcing Plex to render at a lower resolution and whatnot.
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Aug 16, 2016 16:50
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The scalers in tvs look a lot better than the scalers in monitors do as well. A tv is better able to scale something to native resolution and have it not look like a blurry mess than a monitor is.
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Aug 16, 2016 16:55
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Well, games are often designed around a specific resolution, and when those assets (such as UI bits and text) are downsampled to a lower resolution, it needs to somehow remove pixels while still retaining the original's qualities. This means you can have a UI border that has a two pixel wide blue edge circling it, which looks super crisp at 1080, but when downsampled the algorithm doesn't know how to deal with something that won't even be visible at that lower res, so the blue edge may appear too wide, or disappear completely, or show in straight lines but not curves, etc. It means devs have to redo all their assets for multiple resolutions if they want them to look great, and it's often way easier to just ignore it or shrink the labels/whatever in Photoshop and call it a day. E: it's also why you don't see extremely thin text or lots of very thin lines in TV shows - it sort of prevents the scaling issues to begin with. Also modern shows work with pretty impressive software and hardware packages for editing that have really nice scaling algorithms, so that helps when going from 8k to 1080. The Gasmask has a new favorite as of 17:03 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 16:58
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The Gasmask posted:Well, games are often designed around a specific resolution, and when those assets (such as UI bits and text) are downsampled to a lower resolution, it needs to somehow remove pixels while still retaining the original's qualities. That makes a lot of sense. Also after asking a friend of mine, the reason those cable boxes suck rear end are a) because all the software on the box is Javascript based and b) the entire application model is client/server based, so literally every button press on your remote that's involved with anything to do on the box (so basically anything except changing the volume) has to individually send a request to your provider's server. That is, if you're searching for episodes of Archer, when you enter the "A" it pulls a list of titles starting with A from the server, then entering R makes the box request an updated list for titles starting with AR, etc. It's a really awful way to do things and you'd think the technology would have been improved after who knows how many years. Even the fancy DVR boxes still perform like the lovely Comcast boxes we had in college, and that was almost a decade ago.
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Aug 16, 2016 17:06
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Well I mean that's kind of exactly how the modern Web works And while it does require a pretty decent connection, a cable box with 50mbps broadband doesn't get to be a babby about something that works fine on 3G
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Aug 16, 2016 17:15
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Data Graham posted:Well I mean that's kind of exactly how the modern Web works So the modern Web is entirely JS-based and every search or form entry you fill out requires multiple client-server interactions? Your last post wondered why those boxes are so drat slow, and when I gave an explanation, your answer is "well that's the way the internet works"? I'm a bit confused by what you're trying to say. e: I mean yeah maybe Google and such updates every time you add a letter but obviously that's a terrible way to do things on a cable box, seeing as how they're exactly as slow and clunky as they were a decade ago. It would probably make a lot more sense to, I dunno, poll the server every day or 2 and get the latest TV schedules and on-demand offerings; I feel like that would drastically reduce a lot of load times. Snow Cone Capone has a new favorite as of 17:44 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 17:41
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well there's good javascript and then there's bad javascript
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Aug 16, 2016 17:47
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drunk asian neighbor posted:So the modern Web is entirely JS-based and every search or form entry you fill out requires multiple client-server interactions? Sure, that makes a lot more sense architecturally, since the data set doesn't change very much and isn't very big. But are the cable boxes literally so pokey that the limiting factor is the app's UI responsiveness, or is it the network latency? Because I can't see the latter being a valid excuse.
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Aug 16, 2016 17:49
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