HD Lesson Learned...

This past Sunday was Day #1 of the 4 Hour Season Premier of 24. A couple of weeks ago I searched for 24 in my DirecTV HD DVR (HR-20) and saw several listings (it's in reruns on other channels) so I found the new shows on FOX and set it to record as a series. Great, I thought... now I won't have to worry about it.

Except...

DirecTV carries both the HD and SD versions of Chicago local channels...

HD= 32 WFLD
SD= 32 FOX

I apparently picked the Standard Definition version because when I finally sat down to watch 24 on Sunday night, I was greatly disappointed that it was in SD. So much so that I deleted it without watching.

Now, thanks to the 'gray area' of the internet I was able to download the 2 episodes via Bit torrent and put them on my new 2GB SanDisk Cruzer Thumbdrive (Thanks again Darren!)

And.. thanks to the USB port on my Philips Upconverting DVD Player, all I had to do was plug the thumb drive into the DVD Player and I was all set to watch.

Now, it certainly doesn't look as good or sound as good as full HD but for a little 350MB file (per episode), it's very impressive on my Samsung 26" LCD and beats the pants off of regular SD.

This is just a warning to all of you HD newbies out there, especially with DirecTV... they certainly don't make it as easy as it should be. And the HR-20 is no TiVo. It's like TiVo's retarded cousin :(