On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 00:28:11 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
They're corporations. It's not about turning a profit. It's
about being under a legal obligation to shareholders to extract
*as much* money as possible.
Indeed. But at this rate, they're not even staying competitive
with their corporate alternatives. The cable company will have to
shape up or accept defeat, but nope, they keep raising their
rates. Maybe they're just milking what they can.
And yeah, I agree with the sad state of tv. A lot of what I watch
are actually reruns but there's a lot I like about regular tv
over dvds: the cost (which was a pure loss with cable, but a win
with over the air), the variety, and actually I kinda like
commercials because they give me a chance to get up. Yes, I could
pause a dvd whenever, and change the discs for variety, but eh
the regular tv is nice and mindless.
(usually anime)
Sailor Moon rocks btw!
Or that awful digital "stutter".
Ugh, yeah. It is beautiful with a good signal, but just awful
otherwise.
were going to redo the protocol, I'm sure they could have done
something far better than the non-degradable new system we
ended up with.
Yeah, my thought is at least they could interlace the frames,
using the same signal they have now, just changing it from a high
res compressed stream to a lower res, redundant and
error-correction supporting stream. So it sends frames like:
1 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 3 2 2 1 4 3 2 1 5 4 3 2
well that's confusing looking, but the idea is if the resolution
is like 1/4 the size, we should be able to send each frame 4
times in the same digital signal. So then if your connection cut
out and you lost a frame, it is ok because you'll have another
chance to pick it up 50ms later. So if you then have a small like
16 frame buffer in the box you could pick up almost a second to
recover a frame and piece it together from its sub-frame
checksumed chunks as it is rebroadcast, to give the user a smooth
picture.
Or something like that, I'm not a signal expert nor a reliability
engineer, but it seems to me that it ought to be possible.
