Tag Archives: hd

Going HD TV

Leave a reply

Over the weekend, I brought my Starhub Cable TV Set Top Box to the service centre to exchange it for a HD version. It’s a nice $2 a month upgrade which let’s me enjoy HD cable content.

Starhub has a nice free offer to bundle in some HD channels if you are already subscribed to the standard def equivalent. All very nice!! Just for $2 a month and I get to enjoy about 10+ channels in HD.

All good except that Starhub doesn’t supply a HDMI cable with the set top box rental. It does, however, come with a complete set of component and composite cables. Since I have a good stock of HDMI cables that I am selling on ebay, I gladly supplied myself one of them 🙂

To my slight disappointment, the HD content is only available up to 1080i. It’s not full HD, just one step away from full 1080p. 1080i may be more commonly known as “HD Ready”, which happens to be what my TV supports up to anyway. So even if the cable content does come in 1080p, my TV won’t support it anyway.

Overall, I’m very happy with the crisp picture quality with HD TV. And for the price of 2 canned drinks a month, I’d encourage everyone to take up HD.

Apart from better picture quality, the HD set top box also performs faster than the non-HD model.

For the HDMI cable, I’m selling them cheap on eBay. Please do not get cheated into paying for those overpriced ones at the large electronics outlet, nor fall for cheap, poor quality ones on eBay.

Search for my listings, under the seller name “jasonyzs”.

XBMC on XBOX not playing MP4 files – solved!!

4 Replies

I’ve been using XMBC on the XBOX for several months now… (yes it’s kinda late) but hey, it still rocks!!

Then recently, I moved the XBOX to the living room and for some reason the MP4 files would not play anymore. Everything else worked fine… but not MP4. I spent over a month troubleshooting it, re-installing XMBC, etc.. nothing worked. All I knew was that these files would play, when the XBOX was in my study & in the bedroom.

Finally, I was shown the light, by someone a lot less techy than me… my wife. I lamented to her about the unexplainable problem I was having with the XBOX. Then she asked… “is it because of the TV?” That literally lit up the bulb in my head and it lit up the path to the solution.

So, how does the TV have anything to do with the XBOX? What ever the XBOX should not be dependent on the TV. So, up front, that theory should have gone out the window… but not exactly. It was due to the TV, or rather… the xbox is connected to the TV using component cables. Everywhere else was using regular RCA. So… what’s the difference?

The difference was 1080i. Because the XBOX was using component cables, I had it configured to go up to 1080i. So, I turned of all hi-def resolutions (480p, 720p & 1080i) and tried. The movie played flawlessly. It was just that simple!! Further testing confirmed that MP4 would play in 480p and 720p… but not 1080i. That’s good enough… since my MP4 were all standard def anyway.

So, the month long troubleshooting, network testing, performance tuning, all went no where. It was simply just the XBOX settings for the TV.

Definitely learnt a new lesson about checking on the basics… even if it’s seemingly unrelated.

All thanks to my dear wife, Winny =)