pudge's Journal: HD Is Not That Hard

On Friday or Saturday I recorded the series premiere of "Masters of Science Fiction." Tonight I tried to watch it.

I failed. It's not my fault.

The opening titles were in 4:3 format. I said, "um, how could this not be in HD?" A few moments later, however, the screen expanded to the full HD 16:9. OK, so ABC or the local affiliate just goofed it up.

There was some music, and then a couple of people started talking. But there were no actual words. I waited to see if it was intentional -- would be weird, but you never know -- but sure enough, no dialogue. The surround channels were coming out the mains as well. So just background noise and music, no dialogue at all.

For the entire first half hour of the show, there were no words. After the commercial break at 30 minutes, they fixed it and it worked at the end. Of course, I scanned back and forth to test it: I wasn't going to sit through the whole thing. I suppose I could have used closed captioning, but I just deleted it.

Great way to start a new series.

I see TV channels breaking HD pictures all the time. I haven't watched it in awhile, but I used to try turning on the local NBC affiliate at about 7:15 a.m. to catch the weather: even though the local affiliate does HD, they would switch the beautiful HD weather maps in the national feed to SD almost as soon as they started, then show the local weather in SD too, then leave it in SD sometimes until the commercial break.

The local CBS affilliate apparently can't put their own local graphics on HD feeds, so sometimes coming back from commercials they show SD to show their graphics, then switch to HD.

It's all just stupid. HD is not that hard. Figure it out.

My local CBS had similar issues...

[Miguelito]

Right after I got my Tivo S3.. I was recording Jericho and the same thing happened then. Actually, they'd been showing SD copies of shows like CSI for months on the HD channel, then finally started broadcasting in HD the start of this last season. Took them a few weeks to get it right.

Sometimes you're have the surround sound without the dialog track. Sometimes you'd get huge sync issues. Sometimes they'd give up and fall back to SD.

Lately they've been doing pretty good though.

Scary pathetic that anyone is having this much trouble with HD considering they already had like a decade-plus stay on when they were originally supposed to convert to pure HD.