12 ms·
TVs are all awful
- jodrellblank 15y agoWhy would any technologist reading the likes of this over and over and over, have any faith in future brain-computer interfaces, mind-uploading or similar?
- 7952 15y agoJust remember to keep your eyes closed when doing a firmware update.
- noonespecial 15y agoTv's too should have open firmware. Not to make RMS happy, but to protect savvy consumers from monumentally idiotic or short-sighted decisions made during the design. You can't make it perfect, leave the door open so your customers can. I expect Apple will solve this problem in their usual way; pick slightly less stupid settings and lock those in. In this case, the difference will be stunning and people will marvel at how those apple tv's can look so good.
- ableal 15y ago> Not to make RMS happy, but to protect savvy consumers from monumentally idiotic Hrrm ... that was RMS's point, way back when, with some printer, if memory serves ...
- slowpoke 15y agoI think that's exactly what your parent meant (or at least my interpretation of it). Some people might not (want to) believe it but there's actually a whole lot of very valid reasoning behind what RMS is advocating. We shouldn't desire open systems because RMS said so, we should do it because of what he said.
- baddox 15y agoI'm pretty sure that's what RMS's reasoning was as well. You make it sound like RMS just arbitrarily chose to desire openness.
- schiffern 15y agoRMS would disagree. Noonespecial is making an "open-source" argument: that open software is better than closed software, where 'better' is some combination of less buggy, better designed, more secure, etc. RMS specifically disagrees with this principle, right down to the semantics (preferring the term 'free software' to 'open source'). "Free software" is better because it promotes freedom, i.e. it cannot be used by the designer to oppress others. In RMS's worldview, software freedom is an inherent good, not a derivative good. "Many eyes make all bug shallow" is nice, but for him it's a side-benefit. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
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- redthrowaway 15y ago>I expect Apple will solve this problem in their usual way; pick slightly less stupid settings and lock those in. As someone who's dealt with the inimitable joy of trying to get an MBP to work with an HDTV, Apple's "usual way" appears to be to code to the standards and to hell with anyone who breaks them (or the users stuck with non-compliant products). This appears to apply to wifi as well. There's been an open bug in OSX for years involving OSX assgining its own DHCP lease when it fails to negotiate one with the router. This results in the dreaded "Self-assigned IP" message, which is nigh-on impossible to rid yourself of short of voodoo dolls and wifi dances.
- jrmg 15y agoThis appears to apply to wifi as well. There's been an open bug in OSX for years involving OSX assgining its own DHCP lease when it fails to negotiate one with the router. This results in the dreaded "Self-assigned IP" message, which is nigh-on impossible to rid yourself of short of voodoo dolls and wifi dances. Getting a bit off-topic here, but that's not a bug: it's assigning itself a valid zeroconf* address because the DHCP server is not responding. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_configuration_networking#Address_selection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_configuration_networking#A...
- kwamenum86 15y ago"code to the standards and to hell with anyone who breaks them" I think bug in this case just means that the software does not work as intended even though it follows the spec.
- calloc 15y agoYou can simply ask Mac OS X to request another DHCP address when it comes up with Self-assigned IP. The Self-assigned IP address is actually in a range that is specified in the RFC 3927 [1]. This is mainly done so that if it joins a network without a DHCP server it can still communicate with other hosts on the network, just not the outside. Also, in my experience Apple's DHCP agent will re-request an IP address after having assigned itself a self-assigned IP address. This generally takes about a minute or so, in that time the DHCP server can then reply once again. I've never had issues with this at all. [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3927.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3927.txt
- nitrogen 15y agoBack in the standard definition days, I loved my HTPC and the tvtime software (http://tvtime.sf.net/ http://tvtime.sf.net/). It was the next best thing to having an open firmware TV. It was also possible to get zero lag between the capture card and the video card by bypassing the CPU and having the capture card write directly to the video card's memory (using xawtv instead of tvtime).
- baddox 15y agoIs his final point (about overscan) still relevant? Years ago I used to hear HDTV enthusiasts urging everyone to check their TV settings, but in the last 2-3 years, I've only dealt with PCs hooked up to a few HDTVs (all with 1080p native resolution), and I haven't seen a single one that overscans a 1080p DVI or HDMI signal by default. The author acts like it's a certainty that your 1080p TV will by default overscan a 1080p signal.
- culturestate 15y agoI have a one-year-old Samsung LED-backlit LCD and it overscans from a unibody Mac Mini via HDMI into the TV's PC-specific HDMI port. I have to fix it manually with the overscan slider in OSX's display preference pane.
- lutorm 15y agoYeah, same with our LG LED-LCD. It may have been possible to disable it in some menu, I can't quite remember now.
- bradleyland 15y agoYou should probably have a look for a way to disable overscan in your television's manual. My several year old Samsung DLP supports "PC mode", which disables overscan.
- acon 15y agoI also have a one-year-old Samsung and I managed to get it to not overscan for at least one input. Put your Mac Minis HDMI into the HDMI 1 / DVI input and then select the input in the Source menu on the TV, press Tools on the remote, and chose PC as the name of the input. This magically turns off overscan. Hope it works!
- culturestate 15y agoDid that already; no joy. It's not a problem because of the overscan slider in OSX, but it was a huge annoyance before I upgraded the mini (you need the built-in HDMI to get the overscan adjustment).
- jpdoctor 15y agoRelevant: Viewers are awful too. Study: 18% of people can't tell if they're watching true HDTV content or not http://techcrunch.com/2008/11/24/study-18-of-people-cant-tell-if-theyre-watching-true-hdtv-content-or-not/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/11/24/study-18-of-people-cant-tel...
- almost 15y agoWhy is that a bad thing?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sehugg 15y agoUgh, this. Comcast re-compresses some of their video streams so much that it almost looks like YouTube. The best video quality I've seen on cable has been HDNet, but many providers have dropped their channels because they can replace them with three low-quality channels. Still, I've never talked to anyone who has noticed the difference, so I assume it's a rare gripe.
- jpdoctor 15y ago> Ugh, this. Comcast re-compresses some of their video streams so much that it almost looks like YouTube. All the cable providers are using the same set of transmission boxes from the same vendors. Usually, they are employing statistical compression: Take 16 channels and determine which video needs more bandwidth in real time. So if your favorite show is opposite talking heads, then it looks fine. But if you're opposite action-packed hunting in jungle scenes (lots of high-frequency content), you're gonna see it.
- drzaiusapelord 15y agoExcept 20 or so channels on my dish network setup are nothing but direct sales garbage. I think we're suffering because its economically more appealing to treat the TV as a sales machine instead of an entertainment machine. No wonder there's no bandwidth left over on satellite or over those fat DOCSIS connections. Carriers are too busy selling us "lose weight now" bullshit over providing the service we're actually buying. Toss in its "Public Interest" channels which hold useless junk like religious programming and public access, we have about 50 channels of non-entertainment nonsense. Everything looks like shit because the bean counters and MBAs think Billy Grahame and "Look good in that dress for $19.99" should be in contention over the actual shows and movies I watch.
- mrcharles 15y agoIf you are a gamer, TVs are now also awful for playing games, due to the built in lag between the TV receiving a signal and displaying it. On a CRT it was instantaneous, as game console data streams were sent basically straight to the electron gun -- nowadays there's a massive amount of processing before the signal is on screen. This manifests primarily in a feel of poor controls, or a game not doing what you tried to do. Good HDTVs will give you 100ms of lag or so, bad ones can be in excess of 400ms. With most games nowadays running at 30fps, that's between 3 and 13 game frames of lag. It's pretty absurd the difference this makes, and as a game developer I have to fight with it constantly and it is infuriating.
- sukuriant 15y agoI don't think I experience this problem. This may just be me, though; or, perhaps it's because everyone has these problems that we're on a level playing field. Also, I disable the vast majority of these post-processing features the TV provides. I'm a purist and a photographer by hobby and I can see all the 'fixing' that is done in in-TV post-processing, and it looks bad, less sharp, etc, to me. That may affect my experience... Or perhaps I just buy nice TV's (for the same reasons)
- mrcharles 15y agoDisabling those features generally helps but does not remove the lag. It is pretty difficult to see it in action, as it's more of a subconscious issue. A great litmus test is Assassin's Creed 2. I worked on that, and for all of development I had a CRT hooked to my dev kit. The game was always super responsive and I never missed a jump. And then, playing at home on my LCD TV... it was kind of insane the difference. It suddenly felt kind of mushy, and kind of like I was fighting the controls. The reality is that we as developers do as much as possible to hide it, but it's still there if you know what to look for.
- shasta 15y agoThe way you're describing the feeling puts it into the 10-40ms range. In the 100-400ms range you'd immediately and consciously wonder WTF was wrong with the game.
- digitalsushi 15y agoHere's a non-facetious, completely honest question from someone who just doesn't know why- Why is is 2012 and my new TV and monitor each have about the same horizontal resolution as my CRT monitor from 1998? It's 14 years later, and I still only have about 2000 pixels to play with. I know the obvious answer is that everyone is just matching the resolution movies are sold as, but why can't I get a professional grade monitor with a "retina" quality display for my desk?
- wmf 15y agoI guess as cheap monitors became good enough, demand for pro monitors plummeted, giving them diseconomies of non-scale. The good news is that you won't suffer buyer's remorse since prices don't go down.
- waqf 15y agoRight, because AIUI there are huge fixed costs in setting up and running an LCD fabrication plant. So the biggest market wins.
- Splines 15y agoI'm only postulating, but I think gains in flat-screen technology were put into other quality factors other than resolution.
- fleitz 15y agoYou can, phone any medical imaging shop. Keep in mind you'll pay professional grade prices for such a device. Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors 201 DPI for the T220/221. If you think about it their pretty cheap too. Remember paying 2K for a monitor back in the 80s? It's basically the same price once you factor inflation.
- thudson 15y agoThe T221 is a great monitor for coding -- check out the size of the "fixed" font on the wikipedia image. But with most configurations it only does 12, 24 or 48 Hz depending on how many DVI channels you can use. Also, since it is being driven as four separate 1920x1280 displays with xinerama there tends to be tearing across the boundaries with movies or video since the refresh from the cards is not synchronized. Other than that, I love mine and am considering a second one for dual head using eight DVI channels.
- wvenable 15y agoI have one of those terrible older 1366x768 TV's. This TV accepts input at 1080i and 1080p as well as 720p. What they don't usually tell you, is that some of these TV's will up convert a 720p signal to 1080 and then down convert it back to 1366x768. So you're actually better off with a higher resolution signal. Luckily I can get 1360x768 though the VGA port but the TV only accepts HD resolutions over HDMI -- this is becoming more of a problem as many computers now come with only with D-DVI or HDMI ports.
- WiseWeasel 15y agoThe VGA port is analog, meaning the signal from the computer gets sampled to analog by your video card, then re-sampled to digital by your TV. This seems like a lousy compromise compared to a computer monitor connected to that same computer via DVI or HDMI.
- wvenable 15y agoIt's only lousy if digital->analog->digital conversion itself is lousy -- and from everything I've read it's nearly impossible to see any difference. My original intention was to connect the computer via a DVI-to-HDMI cable but with only HD resolutions available with no 1-to-1 pixel mapping this is a no-go.
- cs702 15y agoThis would be incredibly funny if it weren't true :-( It reminds me of Joel Spolsky's rant about standards: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html -- the bit about headphone jacks in particular.
- dgallagher 15y agoI used an HDTV once that had three different HDMI ports on it (0, 1, 2). Each port reported a slightly-different EDID for the same TV! One of the HDMI ports reported this (extracted using SwitchResX): Established Timings: -------------------- 720 x 400 @ 70Hz 640 x 480 @ 60Hz 800 x 600 @ 60Hz 1024 x 768 @ 60Hz Standard Timing Identification: ------------------------------- #0: 1280 x 1024 @ 60Hz (8180) The two other HDMI ports reported this instead: Established Timings: -------------------- 640 x 480 @ 60Hz Standard Timing Identification: ------------------------------- Almost all other EDID data matched, including additional timing data inside the EDID extension block, so I'm not certain these differences were that big of a deal. None the less, weird when all coming from the same TV.
- mcantor 15y agoI thought this was going to be an alarmist article about getting rid of your TV and doing something else with your time.
- jedbrown 15y agoI want to put a display on the wall and stand five feet away with a keyboard and mouse while working (mostly Emacs, web browser, and reading pdfs). What should I check to determine whether a TV would work well in this configuration (without overscan issues and the like)? Is the only safe thing to go to a physical store with the computer, set everything up, and check for artifacts?
- moheeb 15y agoThis is probably most dependent on the video card and drivers that you have available. A good video driver should allow you to adjust things such as the overscan %, centering, etc. to get the best picture possible. I know from experience using an LG LCD TV with Windows 7 and ATI graphics that all drivers are not created equal. I was forced to downgrade my graphics driver when ATI decided to remove overscan settings from more recent releases. That being said, there are drivers out there that allow you to mold the picture to fit your screen. Your best bet would be to get a high resolution PC monitor and just use that. The monitor will have much better quality for computer use. If you must get a TV I would say the primary concern is what your computer is capable of, more so than the TV.
- jedbrown 15y agoThe reason that a TV seemed attractive is that I could get a 46" TV for about the same price as a 27" monitor, thus letting me work from a step further from the display with similar perceived pixel/display size.
- wmf 15y agoSearch AVSForum for 1:1 pixel mapping. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=166 http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=166 (It used to be the case that cheaper HDTVs didn't have "reality enhancement" stuff, but Moore's Law has probably eliminated that.)
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- protomyth 15y agoTV's also uniformly have one of the stupidest designs for input ports. My parent's HDTV has 8 input ports (4 are HDMI). All of them are crammed on the side of the TV and it looks like crap mounted on a wall. Not to mention being a pain to add new stuff. Why can't the TV come with a box that lies horizontal in my cabinet with all the in and out ports and have on umbilical cord hooked into the bottom of the TV? I know you can buy boxes, but it just seems like they should start looking at the implications of flat screens sometime in this century since they forgot to look in the last.
- smackfu 15y agoI'm surprised that when you pay more for a TV, you get more ports, even as it becomes more likely you only need a single HDMI to hook into your receiver.
- wmf 15y agoThe marginal cost (which is truly marginal) to add more ports can be easily absorbed by a more expensive TV. Considering how many people use receivers, I'm surprised there aren't good HD monitors with one HDMI input and no audio support.
- jal278 15y ago"and so because it's never possible to kill technology that's escaped into the wild we're stuck with it." Such a general truth, its why web devs have nightmares about old versions of IE
- smackfu 15y agoMy only complaint about my Samsung TV is that the input select menu takes about 45 seconds to dismiss itself. Most equipment like receivers that drives your TV expects that input select is instant and doesn't show a menu at all. So you press the button to switch inputs and it sticks text on your screen for almost a minute. Stupid.
- Derbasti 15y agoThere are ways to achieve arbitrary upscaling without loss of information (e.g. FFT-based). It would be interesting if TVs out there utilize such methods or if they scale using some simple interpolation scheme.
- obtu 15y agoTVs have ASICs that do that, see this subthread: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/8705.html?thread=254465#cmt254465 http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/8705.html?thread=254465#cmt25446... But it's only possible with a signal designed for perfect scaling. Computers send cripser signals that are designed for no scaling at all, and the transformations hurt those signals.
- kinnth 15y agowow I just read the etiquette on hacker news and then clicked around to this topic. I then just happened to click on user "mrcharles" as I never knew people had profiles before. Turns out he is a game designer too and I read lots of interesting stuff. I love this site it has great people on it!
- Aga 15y agoThe second comment on the target page has a nice explanation on why this weird resolution of 1366x768 is so popular. Apparently individual screens are cut from larger sheets of pixels. Using the same vertical resolution for 4:3 screens (1024x768) and 16:9 screens (1366x768) makes it possible to cut them from the same sheet, pushing down the manufacturing costs.
- Craiggybear 15y agoTelevision is the worst -- and best -- invention of man. Apart from radio. That was genius.
- algoshift 15y agoRight. One of the rules is "be nice". OK. This article is flawed and many of the comments are just as flawed. Having been involved in the design and manufacturing of LCD displays (down to writing all FPGA image processing code, scaling, deinterlacing, etc.) I think I can say that none of this is accurate if the intent is to apply it generally. Caveat: If you buy a TV don't expect it to be a computer monitor. Most TV designs are just that: TV sets. They are made to do one thing reasonably well: Take a crappy satellite/cable/whatever signal and give you a reasonable image back. EDID can be programmed with any resolution you want. Do you need 921 x 333 at 12 frames per second? No problem. There is no such thing as a resolution not being available in EDID. Standards are one thing, but the EDID mechanism isn't inherently limited by standards. BTW, there are commercially available EDID modifier gadgets that allow you to modify the EDID readout from the monitor. So, the monitor says one thing and your computer (or whatever device) receives your programmed values. If you need a TV that will play nice with a computer you need to find one that was explicitly designed to do so. Most consumer TVs use one of a very few commercially available processor chips to do their image processing. With a few exceptions they all do the same kinds of things. And no, the signals are rarely converted to YCbCr 4:2:2 internally but for the absolute cheapest and crappiest of processors. All the good ones convert the input to a common internal integer RGB format. The nice ones might standardize at 12 bits per channel (36 bits total) internally. When I did custom FPGA video processing we went as far as 24 bits per channel in order to avoid truncation of calculated values until the very last moment. This can make a huge difference depending on the application. In general terms "monitor mode", if you will, should be a mode that bypasses as much of the internal processing as possible. You can force this bypass by using and EDID modifier gadget programmed for the actual resolution and timings of the panel. In other words, open the back of the TV, get the panel model number, get the data-sheet and program the EDID modifier to output these values to your computer. The processor should push this straight to the panel and you get very little, if any, processing. Again, this does not work on all TVs. As I said before, they are designed to be TVs, not monitors. That said, I've connected many computers to off-the-shelf, un-modified, consumer TVs via DVI and HDMI. I have yet to run into any real issues.
- mjg59 15y ago"EDID can be programmed with any resolution you want" Indeed, as I said. I then went on to say that lots of 1366x768 devices don't provide a detailed timing block, so they're limited to what you can express in the standard timings - which limits you to horizontal resolutions that are multiples of 8, and so can't express 1366x768. That's the only thing you appear to disagree with about the article, so "This article is flawed" doesn't seem entirely fair. I'll admit to not being a video expert - I write a lot of code that interfaces with firmware at all levels, including displays, and I work closely with people who are video experts, but I've never built a TV. I don't think I've misrepresented any facts or presented any gross inaccuracies, but where I have made mistakes I'd love to be corrected.
- Tooluka 15y agoPerson who decided that HDReady should be 1366x768 was a little bit insane. And personally for me I have even more crazy problem because of that: When I transfer signal through HDMI from 1280x720 notebook to HDReady TV it actually thinks that the signal IS HDReady from 1280x720 and stretches it by that 6% of difference and crops it by 6% and stretches again. tl;dr As a result I have something around ~1210x660 center part from original 1280x720 signal stretched to 1366x768... Can't find any solution yet.