High Definition Finally

Tonight, nearly 2 years after I first got my HDTV I watched my first program in High Definition. I’ll wait while you read that again. I know that it doesn’t sound like me to have a HDTV and not HD programming, but I do have a good reason.2 years ago Armstrong had HD Cable and it was only $5 a month but they only had 3 channels. The reason that I didn’t get it was that I never watch live programming because I record everything on my Tivo and watch it later. Standard Tivos can’t record HD programming. If I did get HD it would have been used very rarely.Today I saw this article about using Bittorrent and RSS to do ‘Broadcatching’. Broadcatching is using a program to automatically download episodes from the Internet. I knew that people were using Bittorrent to download TV programs, but never realized that they were doing it with the HD broadcasts. As soon as I saw that I was excited, I’d finally be able to watch some shows in HD and not have HD Cable going to waste every month.The tricky part for most people is playing these broadcasts. You can watch them on your computer, but how much fun is that? You would need a High Def TV card and a Digital Audio card for your computer to watch it on a HDTV and get surround sound. Fortunately for me I already have a computer of sorts that has both of those features; it’s my X-Box. A modded X-Box and the homebrew software X-Box Media Center is able to play the videos in HD on my TV. I’ve wanted an HDTivo for a while now but it’s not in the cards. Because of the different flavors of HD cable there is no HD Tivo for cable and it’s not possible to build one with MythTV. The HD Direct Tivo is an option but it’s priced too high at $1000. Now I can say that the Internet is my Tivo. Well actually the Internet, Bit Torrent, RSS, and my X-Box is my HD Tivo (for popular programs at least).