[OT] HDTV recommendations?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>

| The selection of input is done by hitting 'input' then scrolling through
| an onscreen menu and hitting 'enter'.  This makes such a TV really
| annoying to use with a universal remote such as the Harmony, since you
| have to _look_ at the TV to know what the current input is in order to
| know how to get to another input.  That's really stupid.  It's also too
| many button presses.

+1

| The power button remote code is unfortunately 'toggle power state'.
| There is no code for power on and power off.  This too makes life for the
| harmony a pain.  It is easy to get out of sync and have to step through
| the 'help' mode to fix the setting on one of the devices to get things
| back in sync.  This too would have been trivial to implement.

+1

| It does have a lovely display, looks good, is 1920x1080, but man the UI
| design and behaviour is awful.
| 
| Compared to their old Sony CRT that this replaced, I can almost see
| why Sonys cost more now.  Apparently they actually think when designing
| things.  This just can't be right.

I have both those problems with my Sony LCD TV.

I have only the second problem with my Toshiba.

Another generic problem: these controls are open loop.  In other
words, the controller has no way of knowing if the commands were heard
or obeyed.  Or what the current state of the device really is.

It is long past time for a two-way control protocol to be universally
adopted across all brands and functions of home entertainment
equipment.

Another oddity:

The easiest organization of home entertainment
equipment is hub-and-spoke.  Where all signals go into a hub and it
distributes the signal as needed.

So what should the hub be?  Candidates are:

- the "TV Set" (perhaps only the monitor)

  + usually the monitor is big and singular (few systems have 0
    monitors, few systems have 2 or more monitors)

  + it's where you "look the system in the eye" so its where you
    intuitively think its brain is

  - often Monitors only pass stereo sound out, not surround sound.
    Crazy but true.

- the AV Receiver (like a HiFi receiver)

  - many people don't want or need AV Receivers.  One fewer box is
    good.

  + the people building these focus on sound and probably get a better
    result than the TV set builders.

  + can be relatively cheaply retrofitted into a system that is
    inaddequate (too few inputs)

- the surround sound system (!)

  + perhaps this is just a degenerate AV Receiver.

  I bought mine expecting it to be a slave to the TV.  It actually
  wants to be the master.  Not convenient when I only want to turn the
  TV on and not bother with the fancy sound.


Better would be a true network, with routing, like we do with
ethernet.  That wasn't done because different cables carry different
specialized signals (10 different kinds of audio, 10 different kinds
of video, 100 different kinds of control).  This no longer makes
sense: ethernet bandwidth is high enough to carry all those signals in
one trunk.  Ethernet ports are dirt cheap.  The wiring would be so
much simpler, cheaper, and effective.  We could have an expectation of
a single remote control for the whole shebang.
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