Apr
11
HD
Category: Television |
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So, we have an HD-ready telly and a Freeview DVD recorder yet Freeview is about as likely to broadcast anything in High-Definition [1] in the next few years as the England team is likely to win the next European Championship. Yesterday, however, saw the installation of Virgin Media’s cable offering: it’s really jolly good, as Paul Masson used to say about his carafes.
The installers created a few issues: they dug up part of the front garden without asking us and trampled over daffodils, dogwood and other plants. Fortunately, customer services were swift in sending the manager round (we would have accepted a phone call!) to offer us compensation for any damaged plants. One of the two installers informed me that I would need to run a CD in order to get broadband up and running: in fact I needed simply to connect the ethernet cable between the computer and cable modem.
The box is a V+ box, offering similar functionality to Sky+ but with three tuners and a lot of Video On Demand: I’m currently watching Never Mind the Full Stops (well, someone has to) which I forgot to record last night and, had I been foolish enough to miss the final episode of Life on Mars, I could watch that too.
Perhaps one of the real revelations has been BBC HD: HDMI cables aren’t cheap (although the one I bought from CPC yesterday was only a smidge over a tenner) and it’s remarkable to see how much better the picture quality is. We started watching Supervolcano and were, if you would excuse the pun, blown away by the levels of detail. Of course, on my return from CPC, I noticed that Virgin had helpfully supplied me with an HDMI cable which the cat had sat upon.
It looks, by the way, as though we get a lot of HBO content in HD. Nice.
[1] Note to pedants: I know that 625 line television may also be considered high definition but I’ve never watched 405 line…
