Month: June 2008

Tales of HDMI joy and woe

I’ve been slowly getting all the pieces together to get my new TV working well. I went out to my local Cablevision office today and traded my old cable box in for an HD box. My plan for the new box was going to be to hook it up directly to the TV via HDMI, then hook up the S-Video output on the box to my Tivo, so I could continue to record standard def stuff on the old Tivo. (I’m not quite ready to pop for a Series 3 Tivo yet.)
I wound up having a problem with this setup, that’s reasonably well-described here. I had to switch from HDMI to component. The picture’s still really good. And, surprisingly, the S-Video output to the Tivo seems to be way better than the S-Video output from the old box.
So now I’m set up to watch football next season in HD, though I won’t be able to use the Tivo functionality on it, unless I switch back to the standard def output. I guess that’s a good compromise until I’m ready to pop for the Series 3 Tivo.
I also hooked my HD-DVD player up via HDMI yesterday. I watched a couple of movies on that yesterday & today, and they look great.
So, now I’ve got the PS3 and HD-DVD player on HDMI, the Wii and cable box on component, the Tivo on S-Video, and the old PS2 on composite. I’ll probably retire the PS2 soon, since I also just got the little box I need to transfer my PS1 and PS2 game saves over to the PS3. Assuming Final Fantasy VIII, IX, and X work OK on the PS3, I think I can get rid of the PS2. That’ll be something else to sell on eBay, I guess.

eBay – old video games

I just listed some old video games on eBay. I only wanted to put up a few simple listings quickly, so I just used eBay’s most simple listing method, pulling in item details based on UPC. This method backfired on me, though. Every one of the games I listed wound up with “Gran Turismo 2” in bold letters above the stock box art photo. That was the first game I listed, so I guess some bug pulled it from page to page as I was listing stuff. While you can revise listings on eBay, it seems that you can’t fix something that’s wrong in the standard layout that’s generated when you pull in an item description. Very frustrating.

I tried the eBay online chat support, to see if I could get it straightened out. In the end, I’m not even sure if I convinced the support rep that anything was wrong. I think she thought I was just too stupid to navigate the “revise your item” page. Oh well. Everything else in the listings is right, so I just added a line to the description asking people to ignore the “Gran Turismo 2” heading.

These are old PS1 and PS2 games that nobody’s likely to want anyway. I just thought I’d toss them up on eBay to see if I could find them a new home rather than tossing them in the garbage.

In looking through other listings for PS1 games, in particular, I was surprised to see some games going for more than they originally cost. Apparently, the “black label” version (vs. the “greatest hits” version) of some of the old games is considered collectible. I guess that’s no stranger than some of the stuff that makes certain comic books more collectible than others (price variants and so on).

random TV-related stuff

I picked up this antenna at Radio Shack today, in the hopes of picking up some over-the-aid HDTV. It didn’t work out; it only allowed me to pick up one station, NJN. I guess I’ll be taking it back to Radio Shack tomorrow.

I also started playing around today with the idea of streaming audio & video from my PC to my PS3, using Nero MediaHome. It, surprisingly, works pretty well. There’s a how-to here. You need Nero Ultra Edition 7, which I conveniently already have.

new TV

I bought a new TV yesterday. It was kind of inevitable that I’d trade in the old CRT for an HDTV of some sort at some point, but I guess the PS3 was the tipping point. It just didn’t make sense to have both a Blu-Ray and HD-DVD player in the apartment, and not have a decent HDTV. I got a 32″ LG from Best Buy. It’s this model. It works great with the PS3, but that’s the only device I have hooked up via HDMI at this point. I only had one HDMI cable in the apartment, and I didn’t want to pay Best Buy’s price for HDMI cables. Instead, I ordered some from MonoPrice. When they arrive, I’ll be able to hook up the HD-DVD also.
Alas, there’s not much I can do with the cable box / Tivo combination. That’s composite at best. I can get a new HD cable box from Cablevision, but that’s probably not going to do me much good unless I trade up to an HD DVR, which I’m really not ready to do yet.
The Wii can’t do HDMI, but I can trade up from composite to component, which my friend tells me is worthwhile. I should have ordered a Wii component cable set from Monoprice when I ordered the HDMI cables from them, but I didn’t think of it until after I’d placed the order. Looking around, it does seem that Wii component cables are nearly as overpriced as HDMI cables — $6 from Monoprice, $30 elsewhere.
I’m also thinking about getting an antenna, so I can pick up over-the-air HDTV. Antennas are cheap enough, though I’m not sure how well they’ll work here in Somerville. We’re basically too far from both New York and Philly to pick up regular TV or radio stations from either market without some grief, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to pick up a few stations with a good antenna.

PS3 observations

I’ve had my PS3 for a few days now, and I thought I’d share a few random observations. First, if you hook up a PS3, and then start to get an incessant buzz coming from your TV, you’ve probably got a ground loop problem. This thread at the Sony forums describes the problem quite clearly. I solved the problem easily by using a cheap three-prong to two-prong adapter from Home Depot. Still, it was kind of annoying working through it and figuring out what was going on.
I do like the PS3 in general, and I think that now is the time to buy one if you’ve been holding off. When it launched, I wasn’t too excited about it. It seemed overpriced for what it could do, and there were a few questions about stuff like backward-compatibility that hadn’t been answered yet. The 80 GB MGS4 bundle I bought hits the sweet spot in terms of functionality and value. It’s got WiFi and wired Ethernet. It’s got a reasonably large hard drive. It’s got a reasonable level of backward compatibility with PS1 and PS2 games. And it’s maturing in terms of the software that’s out there for it. The downloadable stuff on the Playstation Network is pretty good. There are a few great games out for it — GTA4, MGS4, and a few others. And, like it or not, Blu-Ray has won the battle with HD-DVD.
I’m just starting to experiment with all the stuff the PS3 can do. I’ve watched a couple of regular DVDs on it, and it works fine as an upscaling DVD player. I’ve watched a few downloaded 720p movie trailers on it, and those look good too. I haven’t actually watched any Blu-Ray discs yet, but a friend gave me a copy of Ratatouille, so I’ll be checking that out soon. And I subscribed to Qore, which is kind of fun.

San Diego

There’s a great post over at The Beat on the San Diego con. It includes a short interview with David Glanzer. Some of the comments are worth reading too. As expected, four-day badges are sold out, and one-day badges will likely sell out too.

I think the con experience will be a little different for me this year, since I’m staying at a hotel that’s not in a reasonable walking distance of either the con or downtown. Since it won’t be easy for me to pop back and forth to the hotel during the day, I’ll probably wind up spending either more time in the convention center, or more time in the hotel. (I get the feeling that once I’m back in the hotel at night, I probably won’t want to bother making the trip back out to the convention center again for any late-night activities.)

Given the size to which the con has grown, I’m probably going to try to concentrate on stuff that’s outside the mainstream, and maybe look for some interesting off-site events, like the Rifftrax event I blogged about previously.

I’m actually wondering if there will be a lot of no-shows for the con this year, given the cost of gas, and the general state of the economy. Anyone who waited until just recently to book air travel may be having second thoughts, for instance. And I can imagine some local California folks who would normally drive to the con from, say, the LA area, skipping it this year.

Well, either way, I’m sure it will be interesting, and (as usual) a great change of pace from NJ in July!

video game stuff

While waiting for my new PS3 to arrive, I decided to dust off the PSP and play around with that a bit. I discovered that my battery could only hold a charge for about 10 minutes, which makes it pretty useless. I ordered a new battery from Best Buy, along with a new 2GB memory stick. My old memory stick was 128MB, and cost more, I think, than the new 2GB one. So, I now have enough room to copy some reasonably long videos down to my PSP, though there’s really not anything I’m interested in watching on it right now.

I also spent some time today playing Final Fantasy VIII on my PS2, which I haven’t touched in a long while. I did make some progress — I got past Norg, for whatever that’s worth. Despite the fact that I started this game in 2003 or thereabouts, I’m still determined to finish it at some point!

MGS 4

So I broke down and ordered the PlayStation 3 80GB Limited Edition Metal Gear Solid 4 Pack from Wal-Mart this morning. It looks like it’s sold out now, so I guess it’s good that I ordered it in the morning instead of waiting until I got home from work. I probably won’t get it for a couple of weeks, but that’s fine. I’m still really not that excited about the PS3, or MGS4 in particular, but it ought be fun to play around with. MGS has always been kind of a weird franchise, and I do enjoy the distinctly Japanese oddness to be found in MGS. And of course I’l use the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, though I’ll always be a little bitter about Blu-Ray beating out HD-DVD.