What do you all think of Digital Cable?

[Technoid]

In Sweden, there is a Terestial Digital TV.

They send out a encrypted mpeg2 feed that you reciev with a anormal tv antenna.

The above was the comecial...

The reality is:

A BIG "normal" antenna is needed!

If you are to close two nearby trancievers they kill each other and you wont get any picture!

If somethings disturbs a portion of the feed you get a free game of "Tetris"

Comercial breaks are edited out....
Sometimes (rather often) they edit out 5 or 10 minutes of the program your watshing.

And ofcourse, The reciever is a "stupid" computer wich has to boot up and "load" it's software...

And as it's cpu doesent have a HS it's easily killed by heat (has already happened once, we accidentily put a cd on top of it)!

Other than that it's great as long as you don't like action movies...

[xortam]

We have OTA digital in the U.S. and a majority of people are having great success with it here in the Bay Area with moderately sized antennas. HiPix makes a card that you can place in your PC that receives and records OTA HDTV (MPEG-2, onto your HDD).

I really like getting the feeds off of BUD because you don't get any local commercials (just black) yet you still get the national commercials. Of course there's always the fun raw feeds of news/sports reporters in the field doing embarrassing things while "off-air". Some shows, like Voyager, are fed with no commercials at all and only a couple seconds of black as filler. The whole show records in about 45 minutes (saves tape too ) and I got it days in advance of airing.

[Bohrn]

Thanx for all the responses people! I phoned Shaw (the cable and internet people here) and they said that I can try it for a month for 10 bucks. I figured that that was a good deal, seeing that they have to send out a tech to hook it up and bring out the reciever, which they will let me use for the month. So, after monday, I will give my first impressions. And later on,maybe I will put up a more comprehensive review. <Bohrn crosses fingers and hopes that he does't set himself up for a big dissapointment>

[Gurm]

I have mixed feelings about digital cable. Perhaps RCN's implementation of it in the PA area is just so-so, but I'm not super-thrilled.

The movie and video channels are sometimes as good as satellite, but sometimes devolve to MPEG1-ish blocks of color. Still acceptable, but not "hi-res" or anything. The sound is nice though...

I also experience the occasional dropout and digital channel rearranging based on the box's whim.

But I do get like 8 premium movie channels for $4/mo., and 30 music channels and 10 music video channels for another $10/mo., and digital pay-per-view. So it's nice.

And when the lines get upgraded to broadband it'll be better. Better signal (no MPEG1-ishness), etc.

- Gurm