Uber ding

I've had a Dolby 5.1 sound setup for DVDs for some years. I remember getting the previous DVD player because it did Dolby 5.1 via normal RCA audio leads rather than an optical connection, multi-region, NTSC and XviD at a very reasonable price, and the speakers came from a 'catalogue returns' website. When we moved and got an HD TV - the old widescreen CRT one stayed in London - a new DVD player was bought in a Maplin sale: as well as doing Dolby 5.1, it also upscaled DVDs to HD very nicely.

So the speakers are, erm, probably a decade old. Recently, the right rear speaker stopped working. Actually, it was the output for the right rear speaker on the sub-woofer - if I swapped the speakers' leads around, it was the channel that didn't work, regardless of which of the five normal speakers were plugged into it. At first, it would 'warm up' after a few minutes, but after a couple of weeks, it stopped working entirely.

Poo.

There's been an annoyance with the DVD player too in that there's something in the initial menus of a handful of DVDs that it just can't cope with.* So this means that while it's great for most DVDs, it won't play Green Wing, The Graduate, or The Fifth Element, for example, because it won't go past one or other compulsory menu on those discs. Clearly it's a firmware bug and there was never a firmware upgrade to be found.

So as I refuse to get a Blu Ray player, I've had an eye out for another DVD player - ideally upscaling, definitely doing 5.1 via something other than optical, ideally able to skip 'unskippable menus' - for a while and, more recently a replacement 5.1 sound system.

About eight months ago, I found a DVD player in a charity shop on the way back from a meeting JA had to go to. I don't know about the skipping menus, but it did the rest. Unfortunately, this was a period after L had got rid of the tenants in the London house and before she had sold it and money was very tight, enough that spending £25 on a DVD player I didn't actually Need was not on.

And there it's rested until this week. In August, I stayed with someone who had exactly what I was looking for in terms of the player - it was an Asda own brand, bought new for £25... that they don't do any more. Various other charity shops have had DVD players, but not doing 5.1. One place in another town nearby has had a 5.1 system, but it either had only five of the six speakers or some other problem.

However on Tuesday afternoon, one of the ones in Newark had a set of 5.1 speakers. Oooh. I looked, and there was something slightly odd: they were connected by ordinary speaker flex rather than anything with a socket on. A quick glance around found why - there was a DVD player with connectors for ordinary speaker flex on the back somewhere else in the shop.

I talked to the staff and pointed out that this was really one lot rather than two - while a pair of the speakers would work attached to, say, a CD system, they wouldn't work without some effort with the vast majority of DVD/BR players or PC sound. You couldn't even plug the sub-woofer and two speakers together to get 2.1 as the sub was just a large speaker in a box, with no amp, decoding, controls, or low-pass filter hardware. Equally, the DVD player wouldn't work with more usual 5.1 speakers without some work. So the £19.99 speakers and £12.99 DVD player became one £32.99 'DVD + speakers' item.

I pondered overnight and decided to go back on Wednesday - when I got to the shop, I was just looking up what the DVD player was and what it could do ('.. an LG, can't quite read that..'), when someone walked in talking about buying it just for the speakers. Fortunately, I was able to point out the problems to them and changed their mind. Phew. I paid for it and came back a bit later having dropped off the rest of the shopping.

Gosh, the DVD player is heavy! As it's being the amp, there are some serious heat sinks in it. A closer look revealed it also did DTS - had I noticed that, I'd probably have bought it the previous afternoon - but also that there's no other sensible output! For video, there's a RCA video connector for composite video and an S-Video socket, but no SCART or TV, so nothing with sound+video**. For audio, there's.. a headphone socket. If you don't have the right speakers, it won't make a sound! So I really did someone a good turn by getting them put together...

... and I'm glad it's me :) Once home, a look revealed that, as I suspected, I don't have any S-Video cables, so one was ordered from someone on Amazon.

Yesterday, I set up the speakers, replacing the old system. A look inside the old sub-woofer revealed nothing obviously wrong - I was expecting to see a failed capacitor or something in its circuitry. Eager to have a play with the new kit, I tried to find an S-Video cable in town, but the only place that reckons it should have them didn't. Grr.

Fortunately, the cable arrived this morning. The only problem was a struggle to get it to go in the socket at the DVD end - there are a number of reasons why S-Video was never very popular, despite the improvement in picture quality over composite video, and the connectors are one of them.

And it's really rather nice. I can't notice a difference between the Maplin's upscaled picture and this. I wonder how much it cost someone originally. Quite a lot, I suspect. Because of the assorted licence fees DTS was certainly not a cheap option when it was made - it still isn't, and most cheap kit won't do it - and the whole thing oozes high build quality.

The sound's noticeably better than the previous system too. The first DVD I tried was the Minimum Maximum, the DVD of the 2004*** Kraftwerk tour. That has two soundtracks: stereo PCM and DTS 5.1, so I've never heard the latter. Wow, someone did a nice sound mix on that.****

And, while it won't skip unskippable content, it does have a feature that means it will start playing the longest video track on the disc, i.e. what you want most of the time, rather than insisting you go via assorted ads and pointless menus.

Result.

Presumably the same donor was responsible for the Philips Streamium kit in the shop, but as well as being enormous - the base unit is bigger than many PCs - that looks to have a variety of issues... and if I wanted to stream audio around the house, I'd do it via another Pi or two anyway.

* _{Actually two: it also plays .avi files from USB stick or SD card. But it is very particular about how they're encoded and at what resolution they're at. It stopped being a significant annoyance when I got a Raspberry Pi and put what I'm still going to call XBMC on it: that plays just about anything...}

** _{It must predate HDMI.}

*** _{Gosh, it seems a long time ago that I saw that.}

**** _{The only problem is that there's not an equivalent DVD of their 1980s tours when the classic line-up were at their best live.}

Meet the old boss, better than the new boss

While I'm talking about old stuff being better than the new..

.. the Horror channel have been showing some of the very best of the classic Dr Who stories recently. Especially for the ones from the Tom Baker era, these show why I've never liked the new version: stories spread out over as many episodes as they deserve, with cliff-hangers, are better than 'we have to start, develop and finish this in 50 minutes' ones.

.. I see ITV4 are using Clive Everton as a snooker commentator. He's not been part of the BBC's World Championship coverage for years now, ever since they ditched everyone who's not an ex-top 16 player. Some of those are very good: Hendry, Davies, Taylor, Thorne, and Virgo* bring loads of value to the microphone. But not all of them do and at least one is almost an embarrassment. Clive knows as much as anyone about the game and is a great commentator, especially with a more informal one for 'colour'. If only he had been a better player...

* _{That's definitely in decreasing order of playing success, and probably increasing order of commentating ability, although it's always amusing to hear Stephen's 'I'd have won this by now...'-style comments.}

I really don't watch much TV

Apart from the recently mentioned House of Cards 3 and some classic Who, this is more or less it for drama and comedy.

I saw a repeat of the first Plebs by accident and liked it so much that I saw the rest. It's a 'poor people in ancient Rome' sitcom, with the two poor Romans (and their slave) trying to have sex with the poor Briton (and her slave) in the same tenement block and almost anything else that moves. The production values are particularly good: it was made at a permanent Rome set in an Bulgarian studio complex. If only I, Claudius had had that...

The second series of Bluestone 42 ended with a huge cliff-hanger, resolved that in the first episode of series three and has then taken a huge risk with the second... I wonder how it will work out, because they have a very high standard to match.

Speaking of third series, that of The Americans is managing to be even better than the first two. It's a disgrace that ITV decided not to buy it.

Better Call Saul is also very very good. In both cases, we know the final result - the KGB do not win the Cold War and we know at least three characters from the latter are going to survive to make it into Breaking Bad - but the journeys are done with real respect for the viewers' intelligence and attention span.

Not yet done, but I will: Wolf Hall.

Was the second series of Broadchurch any good?

Anything else? I've seen the first episode of Powers despite it being a superhero show. I'm wondering if it will be worth watching. I'm looking forward to a second series of Fargo, the ninth (and last, sniff) series of Peep Show and it'd be good if there was another Episodes.