RCN Cable

[evilcrayon.livejournal.com]

I pay for basic cable, no cable box. But I don't use rabbit ears and now I have no channels whatsoever. Does anyone know what is going on? I thought that the only people affected by the switch to digital in February were people who did not get their tv signal through a cable already.

Comments

[ionicaq.livejournal.com]

Standard digital can be done in 16:9 as well.

[ron_newman]

OK, now I'm thoroughly confused, as I thought "16:9" and "HD" were the same thing.

[ionicaq.livejournal.com]

Not according to what I've read, no. Standard digital can be either 4:3 or 16:9, HD only comes in 16:9. Again, this is just from what I've read.

[warlord-mit.livejournal.com]

HD by definition is 720 or 1080 and 16:9, but you can have digital SD (640x480i).

However my point was that RCN used to have clear QAM where all my HDTVs could get all the local HD stations using their QAM tuners. Then RCN encrypted most of their QAM (including all HD content) and is offering me less service at a higher cost. That's my beef.

[rainbow-spork.livejournal.com]

16:9 is just the aspect ratio of the tv (ie the dimensions of the picture). HD vs. Standard actually refers to how many lines the tv draws across your screen to create the image. To be HD, it has to draw at least 720 lines per image (1080 is the other common HD standard), while "normal" American, non-HD televisions only 480 lines per image. In theory, you could make an HD television that's in 4:3, or a non-HD tv that was 16:9, but for some reason they don't. I don't know enough about the history of HD to know why the aspect ratio standard changed with increasing the definition.

[ron_newman]

I think 16:9 was chosen because it approximately matches the most common current movie format. (And 4:3 was chosen back in the 1940s because it matched the movie aspect ratio of that time.)

[rainbow-spork.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I did figure that, but I wasn't quite sure why the two changes happened simultaneously. I honestly wouldn't have expected the industry to be together enough to say, "hey, we're changing this one standard, so we might as well change this other one too while we're at it, that way people won't have to change their equipment twice." Which is what seems to be what actually happened.

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

"16:9" is just the ratio of pixels. 16:9 is the default aspect ratio for shooting HD content (you'll notice it's the square of 4 and 3), but the two are really independent of each other.