Plaidophile

Speakeasy rocks utterly. Yeah, I pay more...but I also never complain about network problems.

When I have had issues (mostly due to a crappy line between me ant AT&T) The people from Speakeasy and Covad have all been polite and competent. The guy they sent to diagnose the dropping problem I was having was happy to give me a complete course in exactly how DSL worked from an engineering perspective and why it was failing. When Speakeasy screwed up my billing (because the line issue meant I had to drop down one level of sevice) they managed to fix it and issue a refund in the course of a five minute call. (*Including* initial wait on hold time.)

And they don't care if I run web/mail/whatever servers.

Yeah, those are all the reasons I went with Speakeasy too. However, when I do move I'll probably go with Comcast, simply because I'll want basic cable and now I have proper web/ftp/etc. hosting which is a hell of a lot cheaper than what Speakeasy was costing me. Or, who knows, I might end up living somewhere with free cable and enough open WiFi that I don't care about getting any sort of hosting at all.

FYI: I'm seriously thinking of dumping Comcast for cable because of its suckitude.

I know it sucks, but if I end up in an apartment building, what alternative do I have?

I don't even want to get any cable shows, I just want okay reception of broadcast stations, and just want to get the limited basic cable since they are required by law to also provide the ClearQAM channels.

The stupid thing is that with my Comcast service ("Digital") the non-HD broadcast stations look like ass. It's a complete noise-fest, like I was using rabbit ears or something.

Yeah, I have absolutely no interest in digital cable. ClearQAM is technically digital but it's an uncompressed version of the OTA HD signal, which is much higher-bitrate than what Comcast does to their SD stuff.

Although some stations which provide multiple channels on a single carrier (i.e. one HD and 2-3 SD) tend to overcompress the SD as well, so the analog signal can still look better than those. But the HD signal is definitely a big win, and that's what I care about. (Well, that and Create, but I don't think there's any Create affiliate stations in SFBay, at least none broadcasting OTA which means if it's on Comcast it'd probably be analog. But that's fine.)

Yeah, no Create. Oh well. It looks like KQED has their own Create-ish subchannel anyway.

Funny how Comcast buries the ClearQAM stations with outrageously high channel numbers. Yay for virtual channels which allow them to do that shit, I guess. (Which is odd since I thought ClearQAM was one station per carrier and didn't have the sideband information...)

Anyway. $18/mo for broadcast + other nifty stuff is probably worth it to me.

Note: it isn't a compression issue. Broadcast channels look like ass. Standard cable looks. Ok for me because I rarely watch the networks.

Last I checked, Comcast forces you to get digital for certain channels. (Like Sci Fi, which is a dealbreaker for me because of Battlestar Galactica.)

Well, remember that Comcast is recompressing an already-decompressed stream that they get from the stations, and they probably aren't giving as much bandwidth to the broadcast stations as to their own stuff just because Comcast likes to be predatory and preferential that way.

Do you have a ClearQAM tuner? If so, what do ClearQAM stations look like? According to the channel lineup page it should be channels 702-709. (Which, again, is a rather odd range of channel numbers for ClearQAM stations, unless that's what they get assigned to on the digital tuner and they just aren't showing what parts of the analog spectrum they're getting.)

(From AVS Forum it seems that yes, the 7xx-range channels are a remapping that CableCARD and/or the STB is doing and non-digital users have to find the QAM stations themselves. Not a big deal, but I hope that doesn't fuck with eyeTV's listing guide stuff. It tends to be pretty fragile at that sort of thing.)

Doesn't look like compression artifacts. Looks like classic analog transmission artifacts. I think their transmissions from the satellite suck and they're too lame to fix it.

I just have a bog-standard analog TV.

Oh, so just fuzziness? Yeah, that's just a crappy source feed then.

ClearQAM would help with that.