Back about a month ago I decided to take a bit of a risk on a cheap eBay transcoder vs. getting one of the ~$300USD high quality ones (for example HDConnection which is hand built by someone locally and has had great reviews).
My biggest concern was that it would not properly support the sync signal my Ampro required. Turns out that it does. It turns out that the eBay box I got is made by mayflash and is primarily advertised as an Xbox HDTV converter. Hey, it works. Not videophile quality I’m sure – but it enables me to view HDTV on my system and it was relatively cheap.
It took a while before we decided to take the leap and order HDTV programming from Starchoice (we were using the basic package which doesn’t include it). Well, with the Olympics on and all.. (hey, it seemed like a good excuse) we decided it was time.
Well, hockey in HDTV looks amazing.
It is pretty fustrating to see the mix of programming on the HD channels, a lot of upconverted material. Worse still, some of the ads are letterboxed, but in a 4:3 framing – so you get double letter boxing. The scores and other information on the hockey game are also clearly inside the safe 4:3 zone – which looks a bit odd on a 16:9 screen [I’m sure they do this to re-use the same feed for both].
It turns out that Die Another Day was on after hockey was over so I decided to check out what HD Movies would look like. Very nice. However, the sound was only in stereo which was a bit of a bummer. Commercial breaks also really interrupt movie watching – and as I don’ t have a HD PVR.. there is no way to pause things. It may look better than DVD, but I’m not sure I’m ready to give up DVDs quite yet.