[Discuss] Totally off topic - TVs

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-06-28 14:43-0700 Deryk Barker wrote:

> As this list is a hotbed of technophiles, I thought I'd see what advice I can 
> glean...
>
> My wife and I are in the market for a new tv - probably 26-32". We don't want 
> another CRT - our 20" is quite big enough.
>
> Clearly the only plasma and/or lcd sets this size are a) widescreen and b) 
> mostly HDTV.
>[...]
>   2. We have no intention of going either digital or HD for some time (you 
> can guild a turd but it's still a turd)

:-)

> which means that for 
> the foreseeable future we'll be either watching cable or DVDs. Anyone any 
> insight                   into which is a good tv for 'letterboxing' 4:3 
> content - we do NOT want it stretched and frankly can't 
> understand  how anyone can watch that.

I think this is an interesting off-topic question, but just to bring it back
on-topic, have you considered buying a large monitor and running it with a
TV card installed in a dedicated MythTV Linux box?  Of course, a Linux
box gives you good viewing of DVD's as well.  I haven't bothered with
MythTV (because I frankly don't watch that much TV and more
than agree with your above characterization of it), but we threw away our TV
years ago and are happy with the alternative of a TV card installed in one
of our Linux PC's for TV watching, and a DVD reader installed on the same
Linux box for DVD viewing.

I mention the dedicated Linux box possibility because it does give you the
freedom to do anything you like with the TV signal and DVD data rather than
being stuck with whatever frozen hardware solution the manufacturer decides
you must have for your TV/DVD player.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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