Daytime Television Blows

Last night I got a nasty case of the stomach flu. I woke up every 90 minutes to empty my stomach contents. Fortunately towards the end of the night, my stomach would cramp up, waking me, but I didn't need to go pray to the porcelain god. I think my body recognized I didn't have anything else to expel. I ended up staying in bed until 8am, which is late considering I usually get up at 6am. When I finally did wake up, I didn't feel like doing anything and so I turned on the television to see what I could find on broadcast TV. From the title of this post you can tell I came away disappointed.

When all of the streaming services became ubiquitous, I cancelled my cable subscription and increased my Internet speed. Now I really only use broadcast television to watch the nightly news every evening. Being too lazy to look for something to watch online, I cycled through the normal TV channels. Some of them had local news shows and others had national morning news shows. None of them interested me. I looked at a few of the public broadcasting networks and again came away disappointed. Ultimately after 30 minutes I turned off the TV and headed to my office to read e-mail.

I did the bare minimum e-mail for work and attended an hour-long meeting that got shortened to 15 minutes when I explained I spent the night with the stomach flu. Then I headed to my TV room to watch what I wanted in the comfort of my soft-padded-leather couches. While I could watch shows coming over the airwaves, I also had all of my streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and even YouTube. I entertained myself while eating a very soft and bland breakfast without the hassle of channel surfing. After about an hour and seeing that all the food I ate stayed down, I ate some grapes and yogurt as my energy is low and my stomach empty.

I have not really watched daytime-broadcast TV in about a decade and I have to say I haven't missed much. It is filled with the same programming I used to hate when I stayed home from school because of illness. Fortunately we have many more entertainment options and are not stuck watching VHS video tapes with their lousy 320x240-pixel resolution. Technology really does make being sick easier to deal with.

Getting the Most out of my PlayStation 5

When I first got my PlayStation 5, I kept it on my desk in my home office as I used it for work. Now that I am no longer working for Sony Interactive Entertainment, I have moved it into my theater room. I now have it connected to my brand-new 85-inch television. Unfortunately it was not as simple as plugging it into my TV as I had to also connect it to my surround-sound system.

Yesterday I posted about the importance of refresh rates and why 120 frames per second or Hz is significant for the latest televisions. I want to preserve the high refresh rate from my PlayStation 5 and that just isn't possible if I plug it into my current television receiver which is then connected to the TV. My receiver only supports 60 Hz at 4K and I do not want to spend money replacing it right now. I probably will in the future but for now I want to keep using it. So how do I keep the high video quality and also keep the high sound quality?

I can't take full credit for this as my oldest son helped me figure it out. The solution is to use the audio return channel or eARC HDMI output from the television. The high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) has been around for over 15 years and has evolved to allow for various scenarios like this. When I set up my PlayStation 5, I plugged it directly into my new television using one of it's two HDMI 2.1 interfaces. The second is used to connect the TV to the receiver. Now what happens is the picture and sound are sent to the television from the PS5. The sound is then sent back to the receiver for that shake-the-neighbors experience. HDMI works both ways so that any devices connected to the receiver use that same HDMI interface into the television.

One would think that with a PS5 I wouldn't need to connect any other device. It streams video, has a DVD drive, a Blu-ray drive, and can play 4K Blu-ray disks. I also have a PS4 Pro connected to a PlayStation VR as well as an old VHS video cassette player, from Sony, of course. The moment you connect your PS VR to your PS4, you lose the ability to play games in 4K without having to swap cables. Rather than deal with that, I just kept my PS4 Pro and use it with my PS VR. I also use it to play video games with my grandson and keep a healthy mix of age-appropriate games loaded on it. As for the VHS tapes, their quality is really horrible even with 4K upscaling. You never know when you may need to watch an old video though.

My son and I connected everything and then started watching Return of the Jedi on Disney+. While we enjoy the movie, we wanted to make sure the sound and picture were in sync. After all, nothing ruins the experience of a movie when you hear an explosion before you see it. The lip movement not matching the dialog can also be really annoying, which is why I prefer subtitles to dubbing for non-English movies. Fortunately both the TV and the receiver have mechanisms for delaying one or the other. In my case, the sound led the picture. I went into the receiver settings and added a 10ms delay. That improved things somewhat but wasn't perfect. I upped the delay to 20ms and everything synced perfectly. If it had been the other way around and the picture led the sound, I would have added the delay to the television.

Once we got the timing worked out on the PS5, I had to go in and check it on the PS4 and VHS cassette player. The PS4 is in sync but there is a 20ms delay on the VHS. I can turn off the delay setting in the receiver when I play video tapes to solve that problem. As I doubt I will watch a lot of VHS tapes, I'm fine not worrying about it. I can probably set custom parameters for each device and save them to the receiver but am fine with how things are set up now.

Should you find yourself with a new PS5 and an older receiver, just connect it directly to the television. Then use eARC to pull in your surround-sound receiver. You may have to adjust some settings but once you get it set up, you will be amazed at the quality.

Disc vs. Streaming

Recently I mentioned the Disney+ video streaming service. After playing with it for a while, I now have to ask myself what to do with all of the Disney DVD and Blu-ray discs I have. This is not a new problem as I originally owned them all on VHS video cassette. Over the years I have systematically replaced all of my favorites with the DVD and Blu-ray equivalents. Now I don't need any of them as I can get them all on Disney+ wherever I am in the world.

The move from physical copies of media is something the music industry faced over the past decade. Go try to find a CD of your latest favorite song. It can be tough because people have stopped buying CD discs. For a while, people were buying individual songs on services like iTunes. Now everything has gone to streaming. If you want to listen to a specific song, you just go to YouTube and pull up the music video which may or may not actually be a video.

I don't plan to get rid of my Blu-ray collection of movies any time soon. There are a number of my favorite movies that are tough to find on any streaming service. I am still looking for one of my favorite movies on disc that I used to have on VHS. Most people would think it is not that great of a movie but I really enjoyed it as a teenager.

I am also waiting how long it takes for people to tire of paying the monthly fee for access to movies. If you watch a movie several times a week, then paying for the streaming service makes sense. However if you only watch once or twice a month, there are some people that will justify pay-per-view, owning a disc, or owning the digital rights to favorite movies.

Ultimately I think the movie industry will follow the music industry and we will stop purchasing physical discs. While my current preference is to own physical media, I may be in the minority soon. The writing is on the wall.