[mythtv-users] Tour de France

Bruce Markey bjm at lvcm.com
Mon Jul 11 13:44:02 EDT 2005


Brian Meehan wrote:
> A fellow Tour fan! My wife and I spend the month of June catching up
> with hour 1hr dramas from the normal season viewing to have maximum
> disk space for the tour stages. Some of those mountain stages take
> 6-9Gb per showing. Thanks for the idea with the custom record option.

Space can be an issue. I mentioned recording profiles without
elaborating. Broadcast television has limited quality and
recording at high res won't make the picture better it will
just waste bit for the same image. For my OLN reception, 400x480
or even 352x480 looks about the same as higher res. At the same
time, there is a lot of motion all the time and so compression
may be lossy making the image worse. Therefore, I use a high bit
rate to avoid compression artifacts. I have one of my profiles
set up for low-res high bitrate that I use for sports which gives
me a pretty good image without taking up too much space.

For me, the Tour coverage has always looked a bit grainy with
slightly drab colors. However, when they put up the promo graphics
in the lower left, they are perfectly sharp and fully saturated.
This leads me to believe the problem is in the equipment they use
to get the signal from Europe. Yesterday, CBS did their weekly
one hour review. They used OLNs intro (with different music), maps
and I recognized all the footage except the video quality was
spectacular.

> I had set it up to record all, no repeats and it getting the 1st
> (live) showing and then the evening re-broadcast.

Off-line, David Engel (the scheduler guy) pointed out some
inconsistencies in the listings. We often pick apart odd listings
problems to see what myth can or should do. In this case, they
were inconsistent about which replays were and weren't given
the replay programids. There are really three different versions;
live, compressed daytime version, and primetime "expanded" coverage.
These are not clearly distinguished in the listings.

> Sadly, I'm rebuilding my system now, and I've had to watch the
> prime-time "Al Trouthead" 8pm showing until we're back up (thanks Axel
> for posting the kickstart tonight! We're loading as I type!). If you

Hopefully you can finish on this rest day.

> read along with Velonews or Daily Peloton (.com) while you're at work,
> the 5pm showing is pretty good for catching the most exciting bits,
> and you still have Paul & Phil doing the commentary, not Bob and Al
> Troutwig.

I'm enjoying the commentator's points competition especially
with Phil getting off to a fast start and Paul overtaking. It
really shows that Paul & Phil know what they are talking about.
As a long time professional sports anchor, Al pays attention
enough to make solid, safe choices to pick up a lot of second
place finishes. The current standings may be an indication of
the quality of 'expert' analysis =).

--  bjm


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