Friday, April 18, 2008

Quick note about a great article about online Video download services

HDTV Magazine has a must read article for all of us who complain about our Cable/Satellite Services entitled "A Comparison of Movie Download Services".
Really, don't miss this article, it's a quick review of the current and future Video Content download services. Very well done!

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Appologies a Rant and a Sale

Apologies
Hello again to all of our old and new customers who were kind enough to subscribe to our email newsletter. We would like to make apologies, especially to our older subscribers as to the state of our current "upgraded" site. Our old site,while enjoyed by many people was very "old school". It was painstakingly "hand made" and had as much helpful content as we could manage to add. But it's 2008! So we had to move to a modern way of doing things. It's been hard to do. And we are way far from finished.
One painful decision was between copying our old content onto the new site or creating lots of entirely new, fresh content. We kept and updated some of our more in-depth content but decided on completely rewriting most of the rest of the site. While it may seem crazy to want to rewrite content for hundreds of pages, we are actually enjoying it. It's what we like to do - explain the basics of various forms of interconnectivity and help people understand and successfully use them.

Here are a few examples of our new content:
Video Converters
Networking
USB Cables


Of course we still offer updated versions of some of our best old sites content on our support page and all of our blog, Connectivity Today is still available.


A Rant
The upgrade to HD quality DVD player scam
DVD players that claim to convert your DVD to HD quality (1080i,1080p,720p) for your HD display are a scam. The marketing here is complete nonsense.
Your TV is going to convert the signal it is given to its own natural, resolution and refresh rate. If it is a 720p LCD it will convert whatever it is given to that. If it is a 1080p display, it will convert everything it is given to that. Feeding your HDTV 1080p from a DVD player may or may not be better than feeding it 480i, depending on the video processing of the HDTV and DVD player. Over and over, people don't get this. It is not just the player! People buying Pioneer Plasmas over the those off-brand LCD's are not just rich and obsessed with black level. Video processing is actually worth money. There are a lot of smart people paying a lot of money for stand-alone video processors. Why? Because they highly value the picture quality they are rewarded with. Putting a bit more into your TV purchase, or DVD/Blu Ray purchase can make a big difference in the resulting picture quality you watch, day in and day out for years to come. If you are obsessed with getting that 1080p signal from some oh so inexpensive upscaling DVD player to your HDTV, you really need to rethink how your system works. In a lot of cases your final picture quality will be better with an old, 480i or 480p DVD player of high quality (and they are selling for cheap). Of course you could just get an Oppo or on sale HD-DVD player to do very nice upscaling. It's never going to look like a true HD source with a good looking movie, though.

A Sale
We have a 15% off sale on Liberty THX Certified Optical Digital Audio Toslink cables
This week only?!