I just bought a 32" Govideo TV HDTV with HDMI slot. I have a Phillips DVD player and PS2. I run both of those through Component cables. The picture is unreal. I love it. Well when I run stright cable the picture is not so great. I ran it into our Digital box and then the Motorola digital box has composite only and the pic is still not so good. My question is what is the best way for me to go about getting the cable so it is clearer. Is there any type of box that I can run it into that from there will run either Component or HDMI into the back of the tv. I go into walmart and they have crappy tvs with amazing pics running basic channels on them. I looked behind them and they had component cables plugged in. So is anyone able to help me out.
Two things... There is no need to upgrade to HDMI if your happy with what you have especially since you only have one HDMI port. If you subscribe to High Def cable service then your set-top box would have HD capable outputs and would up-convert standard def programs so that you would see a better picture when your not watching HD content. I would use the HDMI with the HD cable box. Ced
Ok. I am not happy with my SD pic but when I upgrade to componet cables for the PS2 and DVD pic then the pic is great. So my only option to get a better SD pic is to get HD service? There are no boxes I can buy online?
Yes but analog SD content (in the US) is compressed using NTSC color space standards which uses the Composite video technology to transmit the video portion of the signal. This poor signal is hard to scale and will always result in a sub par picture on an HDTV. Using a digital video service that supports MPEG-2 (or MPEG-4) video compression, which uses the Component Video color space, (Y-Pb-Pr or Y-Cb-Cr) will have a better picture and be easier to up-scale. The box you can buy are called video scalers. They work to up-convert or down-convert video signal to the best resolution for your TV set. External Video Scalers are usually very expensive. Video Scaler? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_scaler A well written article on Video Scalers... http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/34579/195926.html One of the best Video Scalers on the market for the money... http://www.dvdo.com/pro/pro_isvp30.php Ced
Thank you for all your help. The reason I was asking is HD boxes are hard to come by from our cable company. We were told 3 months after Feb. 1st 2007. Well at lunch time today I had a buddy call that has a sister that works for the cable company and she got me a HD box. So atleast I can not watch ESPN/ESPN2 in HD. Again thanks for all the help.
You can also try to get Over The Air HD content with an antenna. That is in fact higher quality than cable or satellite HD since it does not compress like HD or Satellite to save bandwidth. Unless your cable company has switched over to mpeg4 hardware, which I find it unlikely anyway.
Our cable company is way behind with the rest of the world. Last nite I actually used my dads old rabbit ears and picked up some really nice HD channels.
This statment is correct but I felt an example would be nice so that people can see exactly how compressed HD Cable and Satellite HD are compared to Over-The-Air (OTA) broadcast. OTA (ATSC): Compression Codec: MPEG-2 Bit rate: 19 Mbps (per fixed 6 MHz band) HD-Cable (WSTN): Compression Codec: MPEG-2 Bit Rate: 8-13 Mbps (with Statistical Multiplexing) HD-Cable (Comcast): Compression Codec: MPEG-2 Bit Rate: 17-18 Mbps (with Statistical Multiplexing) HD-Satellite (DirecTV): Compression Codec: MPEG-4 Bit Rate: 8-10 Mbps (with Statistical Multiplexing) Statistical Multiplexer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_multiplexer Source: Sound and Vision Mag. January 2007 ------------------------------- Go here to see what HD content is available in your area... Titan TV http://titantv.com/quickguide/quickguide.aspx Go here to see what channels you can pull in with an outdoor antenna... Antenna Web.org http://antennaweb.org/aw/welcome.aspx Ced
