CNET Live - Episode 82
It's our international show with an Australian phone, U.K. laptops for life and bandwidth troubles solved for a South African.
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Things We Crave
Non-G1 Android phone to hit Australia in January
First Look
Best of the Web
Quick Tip
Back up your DVDs to iTunes and your iPod
Your video calls
Charlie in South Africa sent a video about bandwidth metering. There are a lot of filtering programs out there meant for protecting children, but that can be used to password protect Internet access. For more advanced Internet control, try Traffic Shaper XP. I found it referenced in this article here. You could also try third-party firmware for the router like dd-wrt or Tomato.
Alex needed some help getting a printer connected to Vista to play nice with a Mac. Brian Tong recommended Bonjour for Windows, which allows a Windows machine to network easily with the Macs Bonjour networking protocol.
Roberto just wanted to say thank you for winning an iPod Touch on the Holiday Help Desk last Friday. Your very welcome Roberto!
Your calls
Steve called back with woes regarding his Actiontec router for Verizon Fios which constantly loses connection. Molly noted this is a common complaint of Fios users and suggested switching channels to see if you can avoid interference, and also suggested that Steven turn off his 2.4 GHz phone which may interfere with the Wi-Fi router. There's also a thread on DSLReports.com about other users trying to replace the Actiontec router.
You can use an old TV with component cables and 5.1 or optical audio just fine. The only video issue will be the lack of 1080p for high-definition content. But otherwise it will work well.
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The second option and hopefully the one that can help is outputting the signal via the analog outputs. Let the player do the processing and output the signal via the 5.1 analog cables(RCA).
The third way is to use the digital outputs s/pdif outputs either optical ore coaxial. While this option is not preferred you will experience a slight improvement in signal since the original material is encoded at a higher bit rate but will not be near the quality of using either of the previously mentioned solutions.
Remember the new blu ray disc are capable of 7.1 channels of surround sound and if your receiver is only capable of 5.1 channels you will not be able to receive all those channels. If you go the analog route you will need to experiment which rear channels you prefer since you have 4 to choose from 2 on the side and 2 on the rear, I would go with the rear channels. If you go with the optical or coaxial way the player will output in dolby digital not the plus or ture hd.
Link to the article just incase of any misrepresented information on my part
tp://www.dolby.com/consumer/technology/trueHD/avrs/trueHD_avrs_2.html
Hope this helps
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by iansl_tx
December 6, 2008 11:19 AM PST
- Regarding the ActionTec router, a few tips:
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Reply to this comment
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(3 Comments)1. For cordless phones, the best option at this point is probably getting a DECT (or DECT 6.0 in the US) phone set. The phones run in the 1900 MHz band, near (but not overlapping with) where phones from Sprint, T-Mobile etc. run, and the audio quality is digital and solid. I have a set from Uniden that you can get at pretty much any store and they work great.
2. ActionTec's router has coax input for the internet side of the network connection. This will prove to be a problem when replacing your router (which I would go ahead and do...Linksys WRT54GL if you want cheap, WRT310N if you want midrange, WRT610N or Airport Extreme if you want high-end I'd say). The solution: run ethernet from your fiber box to your new router.
Hope this helps. Love the show!