Reach for the Sky MoFo

So after having an HD-Ready TV for three years and after resisting the temptation for all that time, we finally got Sky HD installed yesterday. There was a huge delay in getting it installed, apparently due to high demand.

So far, I'm very impressed - particularly with Channel 4's output. But I do have a couple of gripes:

1. Audio setup is a bit of a pain when transmitting video to the TV through HDMI and audio to the A/V Amp through the optical output. It's not that it's complicated, just that the difference in the amount of time the two take to decode their signals mean that you have to fiddle to get it synced properly. And anyone who's ever looked too closely at syncing on tv will know that no matter how hard you try, it never seems quite right after you've looked at it too much.
2. Sky doesn't seem keen to transmit aspect ratio info via HDMI. I'm not someone who likes to stretch what I'm watching to 16:9 but rather I like to watch TV in it's native format. Unfortunately, if you decide to set the box to send it's picture as 1080i (the highest my tv can support - it's three years old remember) and therefore upscale normal tv everything is fixed at 1080i - and therefore stretched if it was 4:3 or letterbox. If you set it to auto-detect, then SD broadcasts look really nasty when shown alongside HD. Some channels overcome this nicely (Sci-Fi HD, FX HD, even Sky 1 and Channel 4 HD) by putting their own side-bars down each side but the less technically oriented (or maybe savvy) channels just transmit as is and let the box deal with it. Which is crap, frankly and means you're caught between two compromises. I've stuck with upscaling everything to 1080i and living with a few peoples' heads looking a bit fat.
3. The BBC seems to be uncharacteristically reluctant to embrace HD. This is really odd as they're a technology friendly company. Just look at their websites, their kids on-line games, the interactive tv facilities and the iPlayer. So why have they only got one HD channel? They're really missing a trick as they have done some lovely HD shows in the past. But scouring the BBC HD for HD versions of their SD output is a ball-ache. Maybe they're just waiting for FreeSat HD to take off.

I'm sure some of these niggles are just teething troubles. Some of it will just take some getting used to. Some might get sorted out with new firmware. Some of it could just be a question of waiting for the other broadcasters to fall into line.

None of it detracts from the fact that HD is really what your telly was meant to do. For a TV geek like me it's just what I've been waiting for.

In praise of HDMI

So the XBox HDMI cable that I was bitching about arrived on Monday (praise has to go to Amazon third-party trader "Gadgetsville" for fantastic service) and to be honest I wasn't expecting much. As an A/V fan, I've got a fair bit of history of messing about with different cables and different output formats. Mostly, the differences are fairly subtle - certainly back in the standard definition world. So, while I thought that outputting from the XBox via HDMI might have some benefits for video playback and for upscaling standard DVDs in particular, I honestly didn't expect to notice much difference when gaming.

I tried out Fallout 3 and WOW! The game looks great through component output, but plug in an HDMI cable and the difference is veeeeery impressive. The amount of contrast is instantly noticeable. It seems to increase the range of brights and darks substantially. This increases the depth and three dimensional effect massively.

Have yet to watch a DVD through the new cable. First off, I'm hoping it sends aspect ratio info through to the tv as having to manually adjust when we watch The Wire is a bit of a pain. But I'll be interested to see the difference it makes to standard definition tv. Also makes me look forward to having Sky HD installed a whole lot more (come on Sky, hurry up!).

Has meant that I've added yet another thing to my list of necessary buys. Not only do I need a VGA switch for the office, but I now need an HDMI switch for the main tv.