I had to buy a new TV last weekend.
Two and a half years ago I bought a 32″ Toshiba TV (32HL67) for over a $1000. It was a perfect size for my room and had decent connectivity options – enough ports to connect all devices I had and more. It had perfect reviews. It started breaking after a year and a half. The screen would go dark once a week but the sound was on. I could live with that. But after few months the screen would go dark immediately after turning the TV on. I would turn it off and on and all was fine. This worsened over in the last months so that I had to spend few minutes switching the TV off and on to get the backlight to light on. Some days it worked perfectly, but some other days it took 5 minutes. Recently I was trying for 30 minutes with no effect and that made me buy a new TV.
I searched online and found out that many owners had the same problem. It all happened after 1 year outside warranty coverage. Toshiba confirmed the problem, blamed it on a faulty board and wanted $400 for a repair. $400 now gets me a new 32″ TV.
I wanted to go with Samsung. I picked a model with great reviews and decent features. I search for problems people were having with it and I was shocked to read that the screen would go black after a year. I read a lot of reports that the TV would not last 2 years.
So I got a Sony KDL-32L504 – the newest model that came out for the black friday for less than $400. I probably shouldn’t have gotten the newest model but I did not see many reports of screen going blank with Sony TV units. I insured myself by getting a 2 year protection plan – just in case.
It took some tuning of colors for the Mac Mini. It’s connected over HDMI and set to 1380×768 – the native resolution. The colors looked washed out. When setting pure 720p resolution the colors were great but the screen area smaller than the screen. Setting overscan made the screen area go over the borders. Only 1380×768 fit the screen. I noticed that when switching resolutions the TV changed the picture settings so a correction was necessary.
Sony is also better as a TV. It found all free analog and digital HD channels from my cable connection. Toshiba would set almost all digital channels to program 0 – switching channels was only possible with + and – buttons. Sony does it better and all channels have a program number.
Let’s see how long will this on last.
The third evening without cable TV went just fine. We watched some over-the-air and internet TV (Polish and German). It was just enough.
I went on hulu.com on Monday evening to check for the new House episode just to find out that they are two weeks behind. There is no such problem with abc.com where shows can be watched a day after. Can’t wait for ABC to put their programming on Hulu. It may prompt CBS to change their online show placement.
I’m also busy writing a script to download shows from TV Polonia. They are using Windows Media Player plugin which does not work on Mac that well. I can open a stream in either VLC or QuickTime Player but there is a substantial delay for buffering. I already scripted SaveTV (German online DVR) and it simplifies watching a lot. The shows simply show up in XBMC.
At the moment, having no cable TV is not so bad but it will take more time to find out if internet TV can replace it.
Yesterday, on Sunday, May 3, 2009 I disconnected my cable TV leaving only an internet connection.
The reason behind it is mostly money. I’ve been paying $100 for HDTV service with DVR box and one foreign channel (TV Polonia). I was recently thinking about my watching habits and came to the conclusion that $1200 a year is a bit too much for what I’m watching. I watch shows on the network channels (ABC, FOX), NBC in the morning, and few shows from TV Polonia. I watch mostly recorded shows, almost never live TV. I also enjoy Discovery Channel.
Now, I can get the networks for free over-the-air (I will need either a room antenna or use the cable connection). I can also watch the shows on abc.com and hulu.com. I can pay $7 for TV Polonia and watch it online, with a lower quality but I’ll live with that. The only channel I will miss is Discovery, but I’ll simply pay for Dirty Jobs on iTunes. All still less than $100 a month. And I know my wife will miss E! – no solution here yet.
And there is Netflix – mailed DVD’s and instant online viewing when there is nothing else left to watch.
I also hope that without cable I will turn off the TV unit more often. After a daily watching ritual, there will be nothing else left, except life over-the-air TV, which sucks anyway, so I hope to turn the TV off and read something.
More on life without cable coming soon…
UPDATE:
Aug 29, 2010: There is support for Save.TV XL but the sqlite database is not compatible with the old version. Delete save_tv.sqlite and start from scratch.
Apr 29, 2010: Around April 20, 2010, Save.TV redesigned their website. Get the new version below!
When I and my wife moved from Germany to New York few years ago we missed German television programming. To fill the gap I subscribed to SaveTV service – online DVR for German TV stations. It’s simple: I choose a program from a guide, click record, and download later. The shows are recorded in standard definition – no HD, but many stations air in 16:9 format.
SaveTV provides a windows application to download its shows, but other operating systems users can only download them using the browser. This is when my love to script kicked in. I wrote a simple Python script that logs in to the website, get a list of shows ready to be downloaded and gets them for me. I’d like to share the script because I believe there are many non-windows users out there who use SaveTV just like me.
The script depends on Mechanize library and wget utility. I’m releasing it under Apache License. No warranty and no support. The source is hosted on github.
The new version is a bit more sophisticated than the previous one. It uses sqlite to store downloaded shows and needs a configuration file. It can also send chat notifications (XMPP – Jabber, google talk, etc) and messages to Prowl (iPhone Growl client). To get chat notifications get xmppy module. For Prowl get this one.
Download the script here and the sample configuration file here. The config file is expected in the home directory as ~/.save_tv.cfg or globally as /etc/save_tv.cfg.