Bored

Well, didn't do too much today. I picked up the new TV today. It must have some kind of digital antenna built into it, because I get a few HD channels over the airwaves. It's too bad with TV specs, every manufacturer has their own word for everything, and things aren't very standardized with TV's. For instance, if I wanted to do some wireless networking, you've got your choice of 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g cards, switches, and routers that all fit the bill. For TV's, the only real standard thing there seems to be are all of the different resolutions, you know, like 1080p and what not. But all this other shit is unique to each manufacturer. This set has this built in TV Guide system, similar to the channel guides that come with most digital cable services. It's weird though, I guess it works for TV Guide because it is ad supported. But they had this thing called a "G-Link cable" that you're supposed to hook up from your cable box to your TV if you have a cable box. Then there's also this whole feature on the TV to be able to hook it up into your home network. Honestly, I was pretty surprised it didn't just have 802.11b built into the damn thing. It wouldn't be more than a $5 part for the manufacturer. Instead, they expect you to have a damn rj-45 outlet in your living room.

The network feature doesn't seem very useful at all either. All it can do, is view JPEG's and play MP3's off of networked computers. That's it. Can't play any other sound formats, can't view any other picture formats. Can't stream video, read text files, check email, or browse the internet. No instant messaging, no nothing. The other feature of the network capability, is that you can send emails to your TV to tell it to record certain shows. Sounds good in practice, but I read through the instructions to it, and it seems way out of reach of the average person. It was real technical, and I almost think it'd be easier for me to setup my own recording system than to use the one built into the TV. It's not even a record system in the TV, they expect you to hook up a vcr to the TV, and to use that little g-link cable to tell the vcr to record. The g-link cable has an IR-sender on the end of the cable, and you're supposed to basically tape the IR-sender infront of the IR-receiver on the vcr. That's neat and all, but I don't think you can tell the TV to record just new episodes, or entire seasons of shows. I'd imagine it would fail as a TiVo alternative, or even a PC based PVR alternative.