{"id":128,"date":"2008-09-20T22:42:04","date_gmt":"2008-09-21T05:42:04","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=128"},"modified":"2011-09-12T03:28:16","modified_gmt":"2011-09-12T10:28:16","slug":"cablecard-impressions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2008\/09\/20\/cablecard-impressions\/","title":{"rendered":"CableCARD impressions"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>I have no idea why CableCARD has such weird capitalization.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s surprising how CableCARDs&#8212;solid state PCMCIA devices&#8212;seemingly can have such a defect rate.  Most people I know who&#8217;ve tried to set up a CableCARD have had to exchange them at least once.  Also, since CableCARDs must be paired with the device they&#8217;re connected to, it&#8217;s hard for Comcast to test them beforehand, and it&#8217;s easy for them to shift blame to the device manufacturer.<\/li>\n<li>I think it&#8217;s funny that the Fremont Comcast office has a wall of televisions in its customer service lobby, but they&#8217;re all standard-definition <acronym title=\"cathode ray tubes\">CRTs<\/acronym>.  There&#8217;s not a single high-definition television in sight.<\/li>\n<li>Comcast&#8217;s website is really confusing, and they do an awful job of explaining the differences between different plans.<\/li>\n<li>The non-local HD channels that Comcast carries seemingly are from Eastern feeds and aren&#8217;t time-delayed for Pacific time.  What the heck?  On one hand, I guess it (sort of) increases the available choices of what to watch when, but on the other, I think it&#8217;s confusing.  It&#8217;s not like this is the Central time zone, which is accustomed to being the Eastern time zone&#8217;s gimp.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s annoying that the TiVo HD lists hundreds of channels I don&#8217;t actually get; can&#8217;t the CableCARD figure that out?  Or maybe Comcast intentionally wants to show people all the channels they could be getting if they signed up for a more expensive plan.<\/li>\n<li>TBS&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Stretch-o-Vision\" class=\"unemphasized\">stretch-o-vision<\/a> is lame.  I don&#8217;t know how people stand it.  Their argument about not confusing viewers with pillarboxing would hold more water if <em>every<\/em> HD channel did the same thing, but luckily most channels aren&#8217;t that stupid.  So instead people end up with a mixture of pillarboxed 4:3 content on some channels and distorted 4:3 content on others, which is more confusing.  If they want to avoid complaints about black bars, they could do what ESPN sometimes does and show big station logos on the sides.  I&#8217;d even prefer (non-animated) banner ads.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have no idea why CableCARD has such weird capitalization. It&#8217;s surprising how CableCARDs&#8212;solid state PCMCIA devices&#8212;seemingly can have such a defect rate. Most people I know who&#8217;ve tried to set up a CableCARD have had to exchange them at least once. Also, since CableCARDs must be paired with the device they&#8217;re connected to, it&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[34],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantsraves","tag-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}