Windows commercial gets wrong message across on 4:3 sets
By Darren Murph 
posted Nov 19th 2008 3:02PM
posted Nov 19th 2008 3:02PM
posted Nov 19th 2008 3:02PM
The percentage of returned gadgets that have nothing wrong with them.
Of the $13.8 billion worth of returned products in 2007, only 5 percent were because gadgets were actually broken, according to a 2008 study.
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haha epic FAIL
Wait. You're pinning this one on MS? Wow, I'm impressed here.
What does this have to do with Microsoft? Thats reaching pretty far. Did McDonalds serve 99 billio
Someone insert a FAIL caption.
Even worse: the Local fox broadcaster forgot to flip the HD switch for most of the night last night. My recording of House from 8-9 was in SD and my recording of Fringe was in SD until about 9:35 when it switched to HD until it was switched back off at about 9:55.
I heard one of the sat providers was doing this. They would take the 16:9 HDTV broadcast, crop the sides to make 4:3, and then downconvert it to SD to serve as the SD version of the channel in their lineup. I wouldn't be surprised if other providers are doing this as well. It's a sure fire way to make sure they don't get caught with the their digital pants down when the analog shutoff happens.
whatever darren! chuck is awesome! ;)
I hear ya Patrick, Chuck is a really great show!!
What are commercials? I'm sorry my Tv hasn't had commercials since my early days of 4 VCR's recording everything I want to watch.
In those days there was the FF button which zipped me through commercials lickity-split, then came my ReplayTv DVR's which would skip commercials instantly at the press of a button, now I record everything onto my HTPC which runs a commercial marking program and the commercials are skipped automatically on playback.
This isn't a screw up, it's just changing times. Calling this an "epic fail" is like calling Hulu or something of the like an epic fail cause it doesn't work right on a 28.8 baud modem.
I've been seeing this for quite some time. Our local news channels put all their screen graphics for their HD broadcasts and just crop everything off for the SD feeds. I'll see a story headline that looks like..
an found missing
is head
or:
e current temperature is
degrees
And all sorts of other things getting cut off on the right side of the screen too.
I don't see why they don't just broadcast everything in a widescreen format anyway, that way I'll still be able to see everything on my SDTV. Plenty of shows do it (house and 24 for example), so why doesn't everything?
On Nov 13 here in Delaware we had a slightly different kind of "failure". Our local CBS affiliate aired commercials throughout the prime time viewing hours that had no speech. All the background music and sound effects were there but no announcer's voice overs and no dialog coming from the moving mouths of the actors. There didn't seem to be any pattern to it.
The big problem, though, came at 10pm when CSI aired with only background music and sound effects. The SD feed carried all the info so rather than guess what was going on on CSI my wife and I switched to an hour's worth of old fashioned viewing.
This problem has not happened since. Still it is curious that these missing voice tracks were so random.
What? Chuck never lost anything! Is there any way to view Engadget without Darren's posts? Like a filter of some sort?