…one at a time. This one: download/upload speeds for my internet connection. I was pretty well pleased for several years after ditching dialup for a cable internet cnnection, because I went from a nominal 56kbs connection to a nominal 3mbs connection. Pretty good. Then my service provider began upgrading and things improved beyond that for a while, until enough users in my neighborhood began dragging the real connection speed down, clogging the pipes, as it were, in our shared node.
But recently, my cable company has undergone another round of service enhancements, and now,
And
…are pretty normal upload/download speeds.
Nice, since I’ve begun streaming more media and am considering a Netflix or Amazon addition to our media use (just discovered that Amazon.com both sells and rents movies–knew I could buy ’em there, but the rental part came as a surprise). I like our local rental place–good folks and all–but finding movies there can be a bit difficult (or impossible) from time to time, and sometimes we just feel like a bag of popcorn and a good flick. When–hopefully this summer–I cobble together a HTPC for the main TV, we’ll be glad of the bigger bandwidth pipe and faster flow for streaming/downloading those movies.
I got 7,099 kpbs download and 567 kbps upload. Not bad, considering I’m two tiers below the fastest option for my cable system. If I ever move to a new faster machine I may give the 20MB service a try.
Yeh, Woody, I kinda like the fact that, sitting on my cable access’ entry level, I get pretty decent speeds here in the boonies. I also like that fact that were I to pay for these kinds of speeds with our local mom n pop telco’s DSL, I’d be paying three times what I pay. And still not get it. I like cable.
Last week I watched the new South Park episode in my home theater, streamed right off the Comedy Central website. The picture and sound were higher definition than the TV channel, which is still 480i.
Weren’t we supposed to be switched over to ALL HDTV by now? I can’t wait for all the non-widescreen broadcasts to go away… Sick of seeing black bars on the sides or pictures that are stretched out.
Cable companies still offer much, if not most, of their content in analog; it’s only the over-the-air TV that was required to go all digital (and that NOT specifically required to be HDTV). I set my TV playback in my MPC to be “original format” so I don’t get the stretched out effect. Sure, that means my viewing switches from the standard analog box to the widescreen format from time to time, but it avoids making some folks look like double-wide loads. ;-), and yeh, the black bars are mildly irritating to me, too. I’m just a tad disappointed in my Win7/Hauppauge WinTV-1800 interaction. There’s apparently not a driver for Win7 that allows both the analog and digital tuners to work at the same time or even just switch out in a rational fashion. Indeed, the digital tuner doesn’t even tune the QAM channels my son’s cheapo Vizio 37-incher does off the same signal. *sigh* And yeh, I tried installing the Vista driver. No go.
And no go installing the Vista driver for the remote and IR blaster, either. And yet, of all the solutions I’ve tried on this box–in Linux or Win7–MediaPortal works the best so far with this hardware. I would have liked LinuxMCE to have worked better, because it includes a whole BIG bunch of home automation functions I’d like to implement, but it just isn’t good enough at the media stuff for my taste… yet.
And I still need to get off my fat a$$ and get that old XBox modded/finished. We have a nice “bedroom TV” coming our way that it’d do to serve movies and TV up to IF I can get the media director functions working right. It’d also keep me from splitting the cable signal any further. Sure, I know I can amplify the signal to the TVs–after the split off for the cable modem (NEVER amplify a cable modem signal; that’s the cable company’s realm)–but that’s just not something I really want to do if I don’t have to for a variety of reasons. No, streaming from my tuner on this computer to the XBox set up as a media director over ethernet would be ideal. The hardware hacks are done; I just need to set aside some uninterrupted time to do the software hacks.