Actually, I’ve been thinking about writing a longer post about how news works in HD. I’ve only had CNN and CNBC in HD for a few weeks, but I really like the two different approaches they’ve taken.

When CNN has HD video, it has a ticker and fills its screen with eye candy, similar to what ESPN does; they use wings when they’re in Atlanta or other venues without HD video.

CNBC has SD video all the time as near as I can tell, but a very informative stock window with perhaps too much information. I find this similar to ESPN News, though it often has HD video, where they emphasize the information rather than the video.

Different strokes for different folks…

Dennis

Dennis

1. The station has turned over a new leaf, actually cares about presenting a quality HD picture, and will continue to upgrade and invest in HD going forward, or

2. They’ve had Mike Morgan tied to a chair during his off-air hours for the past two weeks, assuring him that as soon as the Olympics are over, he’ll be able to get back to his little red button and pull the premiere of Heroes off the air with live streaming coverage of a stiff breeze in Amarillo.

Given that during the closing ceremony, KFOR dropped the HD picture into its still-crappier-than-anyone-else’s SD for twenty minutes for absolutely no discernible reason (no weather maps, no local break-ins, no crawls, nothing—just no HD), I’d set the odds of the above two scenarios at 50-50.

NBC doesn’t do anything to rein them in, apparently. (NBC has its own issues. Why are the Olympic commercials for “Deal or No Deal” in HD but the show itself is not?)

I’m now having a problem tuning those channels in Vista Media Center TV Pack 2008. I pick them all up through Catalyst Media Center (using ati 650 PCIe), they are showing up as channels 115, 116, 117, and 118 - the guide in Catalyst Media Center doesn’t work for some reason. Anyway, you have to add the channels manually in VMC and I can’t figure out what it thinks those channel numbers should be. It wants them to be in the format ##-#, which doesn’t fit the format I have either from Suddenlink or from Catalyst Media Center as neither have a -#. For example, I’ve added both 720-1 and 117-1, but I get a no signal error in Vista Media Center with both. I also tried using the broadcast channel number for fox (4.1 as 4-1), but this doesn’t work either.

Anyone have any luck adding clear QAM channels to VMC TV Pack?

The three restaurants I found that could show HD were 1492 in Midtown OKC and McDonalds in Bricktown. Goldies in Edmond had two sets connected to rabbit ears showing OTA KFOR in HD.

Some locations that could show HD didn’t make the effort because of the black bars during commercials and local programming. They set the blurry 4:3 analog station to stretch mode so the 16:9 screen was filled at all times with overweight Olympians. The TV stations need to zoom the analog letterbox content to fill the HD screen and stop this travesty.

So I have a suggestion for KFOR. Drop the “4″ logo and use the equipment generating the channel 4 logo to put a HD weather map on the HD feed when there are tornado warnings in the state.

Above all. I really appreciate the quantity of great HD during the Olympics and pray that no local storms occur for the rest of the coverage! It reminds me of the 24/7 HD coverage we had during the 2002 Winter games on KFOR.

“Let the world take note: at 11:01 PM on August 15, 2008, KFOR-DT superimposed its own channel logo (in full color) over the HD picture.”

I noticed that, too, on Sunday night so maybe, just maybe, there’s hope for KFOR yet!