Ask The Tech Guys Episode 1970 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Mikah Sargent (00:00:00):
Coming up on Ask the Tech guys. I'm Mikah Sargent and I'm gonna give you some advice on how you can make sure that while you're charging, while traveling, you're also staying safe and protected.
Scott Wilkinson (00:00:10):
And I'm Scott Wilkinson, guest hosting for Leo. This week I'm gonna talk about spending some time with Leo's new tv plus I'm gonna answer a bunch of audio video questions.
Mikah Sargent (00:00:21):
And Chris Marquardt is here to give us the results for the perfect assignment and lead us into the next assignment for all your photos. Stay tuned for Ask the Tech Guys
... (00:00:36):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.
Mikah Sargent (00:00:45):
This is Ask the Tech guys with Mikah, Sargent and Scott Wilkinson, episode 1,970 recorded Sunday, April 16th, 2023. My Eyes are in Landscape. This episode of Ask the Tech Guys is brought to you by AG One by Athletic Greens. If you're looking for a simpler and cost effective supplement routine, ag one is giving you a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Go to athleticgreens.com/techguy. And by thanks Canary, detect attackers on your network while avoiding irritating false alarms. Get the alerts that matter for 10% off at a 60 day money back guarantee. Go to canary.tools/twit and enter the code twit in the How Did You Hear About A Box? And by Mint Mobile Mint Mobile's secret sauce is that they're the first company to sell wireless service online only to get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free. Go to mint mobile.com/atg and by Cisco Meraki with employees working in different locations, providing a unified work experience seems as easy as herding cats. How do you reign in so many moving parts? Well, the Meraki Cloud Managed Network. Learn how your organization can make hybrid work, work. Visit Laportet. It's time for ask the tech guys. Leo Laporte is still Yes, on vacation.
Scott Wilkinson (00:02:16):
Must be nice <laugh>,
Mikah Sargent (00:02:17):
But worry not because if you're listening, then you just heard the, what is it?
Scott Wilkinson (00:02:23):
<laugh>
Mikah Sargent (00:02:23):
Yes. Of Scott Wilkinson.
Scott Wilkinson (00:02:25):
Hey. Hi Mikah. How you doing, man?
Mikah Sargent (00:02:28):
I'm doing well. We have you here in studio.
Scott Wilkinson (00:02:30):
Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. This is just really great. I missed it.
Mikah Sargent (00:02:33):
Aw. Well, I am glad to have you here with us. And I am looking forward to this episode because I know a lot of people are always kind of curious about their home theater setups, about helping other people with their home theater setups and everything in between. And then this is, this is what you do, this is what you know,
Scott Wilkinson (00:02:53):
This is, this is my area of expertise and I'm so happy to share it with as many people as I can. Anybody who needs help, I'm willing to help 'em.
Mikah Sargent (00:03:00):
That's awesome. And of course, this is the show where people can call in, write in email, in, in some cases Messenger pigeon in <laugh>, their, their support requests. If you are looking to call in, it's at call.twitch.tv. We suggest you go there on your smartphones. If you do, then you will get a little popup that says, Hey, let me join you to this Zoom call. And then depending on whether you have the Zoom app installed or if you just want to do it via the web you're able to take that call. We suggest doing it on a smartphone because you've already got the webcam and this and the microphone. We're all right there. So it makes for a really good sounding, really good looking call. But if you are a little camera shy, don't worry. You can just call us with your voice as well. Again, call dot twit tv and you just keep the video off. And of course, we always take questions atg@twitch.tv, so you can send in those questions. We've got a few of those as well. But as we typically do, we're going to start the show off with a little bit of a, we, we've called it the Sermon <laugh>.
Scott Wilkinson (00:04:09):
It's fairly beloved.
Mikah Sargent (00:04:10):
We are gathered here today, <laugh>, to talk about televisions.
Scott Wilkinson (00:04:15):
Televisions my favorite subject.
Mikah Sargent (00:04:18):
Yeah. So you had the opportunity to check out was this one of the latest, greatest technologies that's available. How, tell, tell me first, where did you go? <Laugh>? What is this
Scott Wilkinson (00:04:29):
Tv?
Mikah Sargent (00:04:30):
What's
Scott Wilkinson (00:04:30):
Going on? Well, I actually went over to Leo La Port's house.
Mikah Sargent (00:04:34):
Oh, okay.
Scott Wilkinson (00:04:35):
He recently bought the second generation of the newest flat panel technology. Okay. it's from Samsung. Two companies are producing this type of tv. Samsung and Sony both have introduced. Second generation Samsung's is out, Sony's is not yet. So Leah went ahead and bought the Samsung. They, this year they came out with a larger size. It came you last year, it was 55 inch, 65 inch. Now they're offering an in addition, a 77 inch. He wanted to replace his a hundred inch ultra short throw projector mm-hmm. <Affirmative> as his main TV in his living room. And 77 inches is quite a bit smaller than a hundred. Yes. <laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (00:05:17):
So why would someone make that that choice?
Scott Wilkinson (00:05:19):
Well, because the QD ole, which, which is the name of the technology is quite a bit brighter. Ah. And so if you wanna watch in a room with light in it and this is particularly appropriate for like Super Bowl parties or some, some large gatherings then it's, it's gonna be better. Plus it renders high dynamic range content much more effectively than any projector.
Mikah Sargent (00:05:47):
Oh, okay.
Scott Wilkinson (00:05:48):
Okay. So he sacrificed some size in order to get these other advantages.
Mikah Sargent (00:05:53):
Now, with, with the that change as well is, is a projector as good at sort of, well in, in the current technology, is it as good at refresh rates as just a, a straight up panel? I mean, can I, for example, cuz you know, if you, if you take a computer and you plug it into a, a television monitor that's not the latest and greatest Right. And you're moving your mouse across the screen, it kind of
Scott Wilkinson (00:06:17):
Takes forever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mikah Sargent (00:06:19):
Are are short throw projectors up to snuff? Can you game on a short throw
Scott Wilkinson (00:06:23):
Projector? Yes, you can. Yeah, you absolutely can. No, I'm not a gamer. I'll, I'll be the first to admit that. So I'm not up on all of the gaming parameters. I,
Mikah Sargent (00:06:32):
I thought you and Joanna played Call of Duty together.
Scott Wilkinson (00:06:34):
<Laugh> thanks. Sadly not. No. Okay. Now but for the most part, short, ultra short throw projectors, modern ones are up on the latest gaming. For example, I think I have to look this up now, but I think they probably have something called variable refresh rate, which certainly the Samsung does, which is important in gaming because sometimes there's a lot of fast action and you want a fast refresh rate, and sometimes it's more slow and you don't need that fast refresh rate. And so a variable refresh rate takes, takes advantage of that. But which TV programs and movies and so on, they're at a constant frame rate. So u s t projectors and regular projectors, modern ones have a have some gaming features like these on
Mikah Sargent (00:07:21):
'Em. Okay. another question between the two mm-hmm. <Affirmative> what, what in theory lasts longer? Is it short? Is an ultra short throw projector because of the, the nature of its technology more likely to die out before the TV does or vice versa?
Scott Wilkinson (00:07:37):
Mm, no, they're, they have roughly these, well, lemme put it this way, an ultra short throat projector, which uses as its illumination source lasers. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, as Leo would say, lasers <laugh> have roughly the same lifespan. Okay. It'd be 20,000 to 30,000 hours of, of, of actual operation. Okay. And that's more or less the same for o led TVs, qd O led TVs LCD TVs, and 20,000 hours, as I recall, at eight hours a day is something like eight years or something. Oh, wow.
Mikah Sargent (00:08:12):
Okay. Okay. So the life of a a TV before you tend to buy new one anyway.
Scott Wilkinson (00:08:17):
Exactly. Exactly. So anyway, Leo's new TV is from Samsung. It's called the S 95 C. Okay. And Samsung and Sony both do this thing where they put a letter at the end, which indicates the year, the model year. So, so c C is 2023 in Samsung speak. Okay. It's, and in, in Sony speak, it's k Uhhuh <affirmative>. They don't talk to each other, but they somehow came up with the same notion. Even in more interesting, the Sam, the Sony QD O led this new technology is a 95 has 95 in the model number. So it's 95 K for Sony, 95 C for Samsung, which gets a little confusing. Yeah. I'm gonna do a, a, a Home Theater Geeks podcast on model numbers sometime, because I just think that how do they come up with these model numbers?
Mikah Sargent (00:09:04):
Yeah. And it's an easy way to decode too, if you are looking for sort of you, you're shopping and you see these different models to be able to quickly go, okay, that means this one came out this year, cor. Correct.
Scott Wilkinson (00:09:15):
That's, that's nice if you can decode it. Yeah. It's, it's actually useful information. It's
Mikah Sargent (00:09:18):
Like a VIN for a car,
Scott Wilkinson (00:09:20):
<Laugh>. Right? Exactly. Yes, <laugh>. Yeah, exactly. So this new technology is called QD od. Now we've heard of OD Oles been around for a while, organic light emitting diode mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And it, it, it is, in my opinion, the best TV technology out there because each pixel actually each subpixels, each red, green and blue subpixels emits its own light. Wow. as opposed to an L C D TV where you have a backlight that just blasts light through another layer of L C D subpixels that dim or brighten that close or open, they're sometimes called shutters mm-hmm. <Affirmative> to let more or less light through, but they can't close down to let no light through. There's always some light getting through. And so it's very difficult to get a really deep black level, which to me is a really critically important part of picture quality. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> but with an O O L E D since it's emitting its own light, it can be brought down to zero, so it's black, and that makes for a beautiful picture. Now, QD O LED is, is the addition of a technology called quantum dots.
Mikah Sargent (00:10:32):
Okay.
Scott Wilkinson (00:10:34):
Which these are microscopic particles that emit their own light. If they ex, if they can rece, if they receive, say blue light, a blue photon mm-hmm. <Affirmative> of light, they will absorb it and then re emit a lower frequency, a lower, a longer wavelength, lower frequency photon of green or red. Okay. And which, and, and they can be very precisely controlled the size of these little tiny spheres. And the size determines what wavelength of light they emit. So you make one of a certain size, it, it accepts a blue photon, it emits a green photon, you make one a little bigger, it accepts a blue photon and emits a red photon. Mm. So this is a very efficient means of light production, more so even than olet. So they can get brighter than Olet and they can, they can have a wider color range than regular olet even. So my next TV is gonna be a qd olet <laugh>, no doubt about it.
Mikah Sargent (00:11:37):
So that's, when you say it, it does a better job with H D R? Correct. That's because of the wider range
Scott Wilkinson (00:11:43):
And the brighter Got it. And the, okay. The
Mikah Sargent (00:11:45):
Brighter peak, this high dynamic range. Right, right.
Scott Wilkinson (00:11:47):
Right. Correct. Brighter peak brightness and greater color range. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Exactly. So I got to thanks to Leo. Thanks Leo. He let me come into his house and look at his tv. And I, I did some initial, I only had a couple hours with it, so I did some initial settings and so on. He actually had it set up pretty well. Okay. I was very impressed actually, that he had selected the movie picture mode. Oh. Why do you suggest that one? Well, because when a TV comes out of the box, it's generally in what, it's generally in a much brighter, more garish mode. Got it. Like a vivid mode to really catch someone's top, to really catch somebody's eye. But that's not accurate. I'm all about reproducing the artist's intent. Yep. Right. So what were they looking at when they were creating the content?
(00:12:46):
And there's a very specific set of standards that, that their monitor follows mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that they've set up their monitor to follow. And so what I recommend to people who have a TV at home is to set it up with those same standards. Yeah. Because that way they will see it as the director intended. And Leo already did that. He picked the, the movie picture mode. He selected the, there's a variety of color temperatures that you can set the TV at. He's selected in Samsung's case, the most accurate one is called Warm two. Warm. I love that. Again, it's just, it just depends on the television. Yeah, exactly. Other, other manufacturers call it something else. Yeah. But it's generally the warmest, because normally they'll, they'll say the color temperature will be cool, standard or neutral, uhhuh and warm. And you might think, oh, well, I'd, I'd want standard or neutral.
(00:13:36):
No, you don't because it's just gonna be too blue and so warm typically is the most accurate. And at first you pull a TV out of a box, you turn it on, you go, oh wow. That's just, that's just knocks me over the head. So you set the movie picture mode, and then you go and you set, you go select the warm color temperature, and you go, oh, that looks kind of, kind of seepy tone. Yeah. By comparison, Uhhuh <affirmative>, it does live with it for a while. You know, just try to live with it for a while, and very soon it won't look that way anymore. And green grass will look like grass. Blue sky will look like sky. People will look flesh tone <laugh> accurate. Not this garish. I mean, if you put it on on blue, green grass won't look right. Sky will look too blues.
(00:14:28):
People will look f you know, very ped uhhuh <affirmative>. So these are the things that I recommend people do, and Leo already did 'em. Cool. So he's kudos to him. He, he really did a good job. Now, one thing I will say, Leo you have your speakers, he has a set of speakers Yes. Surrounding the tv Tenon elac. Elac, that's right. Yeah. Which are very nice speakers. Really nice. But he has the, the center speaker, which is a very important speaker cuz that's where all the dialogue comes from. He has it amounted on the wall where it was for the a hundred inch screen. Yes. It's now too, too high on the wall for the 77 inch screen. He needs to move it down, because when people are talking on camera and you hear their voices coming from up here, that's not, that's not realistic. It's, it's, you want the voices and the sounds to be coming from where they look like they're coming on the screen as much as possible. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So all I can say is Leo moved down that, that center channel speaker, you'll be golden. Mm-Hmm.
Mikah Sargent (00:15:34):
<Affirmative>. So that was the only thing that really needed changing. Was there other visual settings that
Scott Wilkinson (00:15:39):
Well, no, the visual settings were actually pretty good. I, I'll tell you a problem I had though. The only disc player Leo has is an Xbox Series X. Okay. Okay. And it does play disks. And I brought along a setup disc because I wanted to see, well, did he have his brightness set correctly? Did he have his contrast set correctly? The, there are a couple problems with a Xbox X as a disc player. The most important one that I ran into was, it doesn't send, this is gonna get pretty geeky here. That's fine. That's fine. That's what this is for. This is what this is for here. It does not send what's called below black <laugh> <laugh> <laugh> below black. Below black. That's the name of my nightclub. There you go. Yeah, there you go. Okay. So in TV land brightness is represented by numbers, right? I mean, it's all digital. Right? So in eight bit brightness, you go from zero to 2 55. Okay. That's the, that's the total maximum range. But in TV land black is defined as 16. So it's a little bit above zero. Okay. And peak white is defined as 2 35, a little below the actual maximum. Wow.
Mikah Sargent (00:17:01):
I had, I didn't know about this.
Scott Wilkinson (00:17:02):
So the so when you set up an, and here's another really weird thing, and I don't think I ever really understood it completely. When you set up a TV's brightness control, which, speci, which controls black level mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and the contrast control, which controls the white level, you wanna set it so that you don't see black below 16.
Mikah Sargent (00:17:27):
Okay. Okay.
Scott Wilkinson (00:17:29):
But you do wanna set it, so you see white above 2 35. And the reason is there's, there's never any content below 16 in a video signal. But there sometimes is above 2 35, for example sports will often have white above 2 35. Do you remember the movie fifth Element? Yeah. Bruce Willis. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> <laugh>. There's a, there's a scene where the, there's a waiter serving drinks, and his white jacket actually has content above 2 35. Really? Yeah. So there are certain examples of that. Anyway, to set brightness properly, you want to be able to see below black. So that, and, and the test pattern that I used from a disc called U H D H D R Benchmark. Okay. This is a, a setup disc you can buy on Amazon for like 30, 40 bucks, something like that. And I brought one, it's a U H d Blu-ray, 4K Blu-ray, and I put it in there. And the brightness pattern that you put up in order to set the brightness control it, it has below black in it. Okay. And so you set the brightness control to the point where you can, you just barely can't see it. The Xbox Series X does not send below black, it's limited. Oh,
Mikah Sargent (00:18:55):
No. So, and you're looking at it, you
Scott Wilkinson (00:18:57):
Can't see the below black, so you can't set the brightness control properly. Now, I did some research and I found that it, it is possible to set the Xbox Series X to what's called PC rrgb mode, which goes zero to 2 35. Got it. But they, they put up all these warnings. You are you sure you wanna do thi you don't really wanna do this to you <laugh>, no, no, no. You really shouldn't do this. And you say, yes, I wanna do it. And they go, are you absolutely sure you wanna do this? Yes, yes, yes. I have like three times say, yes, I wanna do this. And the weird thing that I don't understand, and I'm gonna have to do some research on it, is even when I did it, I still couldn't see the below black.
Mikah Sargent (00:19:38):
Oh, wow.
Scott Wilkinson (00:19:39):
So it's possible that the Samsung TV does not display below black. I, I have to do some research on that. I don't really know. So I set the brightness control as best I could. Yeah. Without seeing the below black. I, it's unfortunate.
Mikah Sargent (00:19:55):
Interestingly the new PlayStation when you, because what you're describing there sounded familiar to me mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, when you turn on H D R on the PlayStation five, it has one of those, it says it shows a white background with this sort of light gray sun in the middle of it. Okay. And it says adjust it so that the, the, the icon can barely be seen mm-hmm. <Affirmative> mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And then it does it with the dark side. Yep. It's black, and then there's like a dark, dark, dark gray sun and you're supposed to adjust it so that, so
Scott Wilkinson (00:20:28):
You can't really see that that that thing. Okay.
Mikah Sargent (00:20:30):
It kinda reminds me of what you're talking about there with that separate dvd V d right. Or
Scott Wilkinson (00:20:34):
Blu-Ray. Well, it's nice that the PlayStation has a built-in calibrator, calibrator sort of adjuster optimizer. Let's, let's call it, cause calibration is a different thing mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But it's in along the same lines, but it's even more involved. Involved. Yes, exactly. Requires a lot of equipment training. It's, it's not a, in a simple thing, not a trivial thing. But I wish the Xbox had that. That'd be awesome.
Mikah Sargent (00:21:02):
Yeah. I thought that was a really cool thing that Sony had considered in, in helping you set it up so that it looked as it was supposed
Scott Wilkinson (00:21:09):
To. The other thing I will say <laugh>, I got there and I tried to play the disc and it wouldn't play. Turns out Leo had not downloaded the Blu-Ray player app <laugh> into the
Mikah Sargent (00:21:21):
Xbox or the Xbox. Oh
Scott Wilkinson (00:21:23):
Boy. So I, I had a couple of rounds with Anthony Nielsen, Uhhuh <affirmative>, a producer on home theater geeks who has an Xbox X. And he led me to that. Well, maybe does it have the app in it? I don't know. So I found it and I downloaded it, and then I was able to play the disc. How
Mikah Sargent (00:21:40):
Do you, where do you stand in terms of physical Blu-ray versus streaming? Because it does seem like these days a lot of us are streaming content. Absolutely. Even, even if you take the moment to download the content and then play it back. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's all just the digital, there's, there's a benefit to Blu-ray though.
Scott Wilkinson (00:21:59):
There is. Okay. There is it's, it's simply the highest quality image you're gonna get. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I mean, streaming is getting a lot better. There's no question about it, because compression is getting a lot better. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but it's still compressed more than a Blu-ray. And so if you're a video file like I am, you wanna see the best possible quality. Yeah. And the best possible quality is from a physical disc. Right. Just no way around it. Not to mention there are extras. I mean, if you're a real fan of the content and you want to see, you know, an interview with the stars or an interview with the director, or you know, making hide the scenes in making of that kind of thing you're not gonna really get that on streaming you, but you will on a disc. Another thing that really bugs me about streaming, which I don't know if there's anything can be done about it, is that streaming companies can giveth and they can Yes. Take us
Mikah Sargent (00:22:56):
Away and boy do they. And
Scott Wilkinson (00:22:58):
They do. And it bugs the hell out of me. Yep. That I, I get these emails all the time. Oh, you better watch this movie on, on H B O before it disappears next week. What? With a disk? Yes. You have to store it. It's physical, you have to get up and you have to put it in a thing, but it's there forever. You have it, you can watch it whenever you want. You don't have to worry about the company, you know, making it go away because their rights agreement expired.
Mikah Sargent (00:23:27):
Right. They're not gonna come into your house and take your blue. They're
Scott Wilkinson (00:23:29):
Not gonna come into your house and take your blueray. No. Yeah. So that's another reason I I like discs.
Mikah Sargent (00:23:36):
Yeah, that makes sense. That makes
Scott Wilkinson (00:23:37):
Sense. Now streaming is much more convenient. No question about it. You know, cuz you can just go and find some content and a lot more content you can find than you probably have disks.
Mikah Sargent (00:23:48):
Yes. And the discs take up
Scott Wilkinson (00:23:50):
Space. And they take up space. You gotta have storage for 'em. Yeah,
Mikah Sargent (00:23:53):
That makes sense. Anything else you wanna say about the TV or experience with it before we do take a little break?
Scott Wilkinson (00:23:58):
Sure. well, just that it looks fantastic. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it just looks great. I watched some of the what's called demo material on the U H D H D R Blu-Ray. It's, oh, it's called U H D HD R Benchmark. Right. and he, the creators of that disc are two guys. Stacy Spears and Don Munsell. Both video scientists worked for Microsoft for a while. Stacy, I think now works for Red Digital Cinema. They make digital cinema cameras really, really fine ones. And he knows his stuff. They both do just backwards and forwards. And so they shot some footage in 4k, H d r and that TV just looks awesome. Yeah. Really awesome. So when the time comes, I will tell you this, I'm probably gonna get the Sony version of it rather than the Samsung. Okay. And the reason is one reason only Samsung does not support Dolby vision.
Mikah Sargent (00:24:57):
Oh, that's right. Yes.
Scott Wilkinson (00:24:58):
And don't support Dolby Vision. H D R. And interestingly, the Xbox Series X supports Doy vision for gaming and streaming, but not discs. Oh wow. Isn't that weird? That's very weird. It's weird. I don't get it. Why
Mikah Sargent (00:25:16):
Don't it a, a licensing thing, it seems,
Scott Wilkinson (00:25:17):
I guess, but they already have the license for gaming and streaming, so why not just add discs? Huh. It doesn't make any sense to me anyway. The Samsung does not support Samsung as a company. Yeah. Does not support Dolby vision. None of their TVs
Mikah Sargent (00:25:31):
Do. What is it that they
Scott Wilkinson (00:25:32):
Have? Oh, they have HDR 10 plus.
Mikah Sargent (00:25:36):
Yep.
Scott Wilkinson (00:25:37):
And I could go into what's the difference between, well, HDR 10 plus and Dolby Vision are very similar, I'll just say, because they use dynamic metadata, whereas the baseline HD R format called HDR 10 uses static metadata, dynamic metadata is much better. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And there's a lot of content and Dolby Vision, a lot of content. Yes. So I wanna be able to render it on my TV as it was intent. Mm-Hmm.
Mikah Sargent (00:26:03):
<Affirmative>, that's what it's, that's what it boils down to, right? Yeah, exactly. You want to see it as much as possible close to the bare metal, essentially as you possibly can. Right, right.
Scott Wilkinson (00:26:11):
Precisely.
Mikah Sargent (00:26:12):
Okay. Alright. Let's take a quick break here on Ask the Tech Guys this week with Scott Wilkinson. I remind you you can head to call.twit.tv to get an answer. And we would love to take your call live on air. Looks like we've got a few people lined up and waiting, so we will get to those momentarily. But I do wanna tell you about a new sponsor here on Ask the Tech Guys. It's Ag One by Athletic Greens. Now I gotta tell you, like so many other people out there, you, you know, I, I wanted to find some ways to support my health <laugh> without having to add a bunch of vi I can think of my great-grandparents who every morning my great-grandma would get ready with her and my great-grandpa just vitamin after vitamin after vitamin after Vitamin <laugh> loading up the, the table with the all these vitamins.
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You're meant to kind of take it in the morning before breakfast so that you get the best absorption possible. But what's great about it is instead of kind of taking these individual supplements, having it as, as sort of a, a full focused start to your day it seems to make all the difference for me. I've been, you know, drinking this each morning and also using they have this great vitamin D, vitamin K sort of tincture. And between those, these are the, the vitamins and minerals that I wanted to make sure I was getting every day. And now I don't have to think about it before I actually do it. Athletic Greens is also a climate neutral certified company. They believe that good nutrition should be available to all. And I love this for every purchase they donate to organizations helping to get nutritious food to kids in need.
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So while you're feeling good inside, you can feel good also inside, I guess technically <laugh> <laugh> feel good in your heart and in your gut because you know that you're also supporting others. And the story behind this is great too. The guy who founded the company was having all these issues feeling very worn out getting sick a lot, and basically through a bunch of different tests was told that his gut health was out of whack and it was resulting in him not properly absorbing nutrients as he needed to. And so it resulted in him spending so much money every single day just to get the nutrients he needed. He said, there's gotta be a better way to do this. And that is AG one by Athletic Greens. And for a person like me who I kind of, I have, I, I struggle with the idea that like, I have to eat to stay alive.
(00:30:40):
I wish that that wasn't the case. I love to enjoy food, but the fact that I have to eat to stay alive, that it's not just this thing I get to do cuz it's fun, bothers me. And so I oftentimes will forget, oh, you know, you need to eat something. So at least knowing I'm getting those vitamins and minerals and everything that I need at the start of the day and then going throughout my day, it just, it, it works for me. It all just makes sense. A sense it clicks in my head. If you're looking for a simpler and cost effective supplement routine, ag one by Athletic Greens is giving you, this is Wild. A free one year supply of Vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. So go to athleticgreens.com/techguy, that's athleticgreens.com/techguy, T E C H G U Y, check it out and you know, get that offer free one year supply of Vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase.
(00:31:36):
It's so worth it. Especially as you know, the pandemic has kept a lot of us indoors, maybe not getting all of the vitamin D all the sunlight we we're meant to be getting. So you can get that back on track with Ag One by Athletic Greens. Alright, we are back from the break. And I believe it is time to take a call. We've got someone with video John, if we want to go I, I'm not able to see their name on screen, so if we can also enable that setting so I can figure out, I think it says Cliff is what I'm reading from here. So we'll bring Cliff on air and Cliff will join us momentarily and then we'll be able to get their question. All right. Cliff, are you with us?
Caller 1 (00:32:20):
I am. Nice to talk to both of you.
Mikah Sargent (00:32:22):
Nice to talk to you too. Where are you calling from?
Caller 1 (00:32:25):
Calling from Goleta, California, otherwise known as Paradise
Mikah Sargent (00:32:29):
<Laugh> not
Scott Wilkinson (00:32:30):
East. I, I spent a summer at U C S B in my junior year between my junior and junior years in high school and spent a lot of time in Goleta. Beautiful place.
Caller 1 (00:32:38):
Yeah. Scott, I'm surprised you ever left because once you graduate from U C S B, almost everybody does anything they can to stay here.
Scott Wilkinson (00:32:44):
Well, I went to U C S C in Santa Cruz Okay. For my college. And in fact recently moved back there because that's where I really wanted. That's your paradise. That's my paradise. Exactly.
Caller 1 (00:32:58):
Exactly.
Scott Wilkinson (00:32:59):
Alright. Right. So how can we help you? I,
Caller 1 (00:33:01):
Yeah, I called particularly when Scott, you're on the call because I currently have a vio mm-hmm. <Affirmative> series I got about five years ago. And and it keeps locking up freezing. It's been doing it for years. I've just been too lazy to replace it. <Laugh>. Oh. I turned it off and on, but now I see last week I was with my brother-in-law watching the Masters golf tournament and he has od Hmm. And I'm like, wow, OD really is a lot better.
Scott Wilkinson (00:33:28):
It is. No question about it.
Caller 1 (00:33:31):
And that's, and that's my question is, you know Costco has a great lg or it has an LG for a reasonable price. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> 77 for $2,700. I sit about 13 feet away from my, from my tv. So that's my question. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> 77 I think is funny. Big enough, even though I could go bigger. <Laugh> is, is that the right tv? I mean, I'm willing to spend more. They have a three series that's 3,400. But I guess that's my question. What in your recommendation would be the I'm happy Sony, lg, Samsung, but I want big and I'm now going with oed. Yeah. So what is your basic suggestion?
Scott Wilkinson (00:34:10):
Well, my basic suggestion is you're sitting 13 feet away, so 77 inches is you, you could go bigger. Yeah, the optimum range to screen size, the screen size is bigger than you think. So, you know, you could go with 83 70 seven's. Okay. It's, you know, it's fine. I'm, I'm gonna be in my new home. I'm going to be probably getting a 77 because that's as big as the Sony cut goes. And I'm gonna be sitting about eight feet away and that's even, that's not quite big enough. But I'm gonna live with it <laugh>, so to speak. But in terms of your situation, definitely O LED's the way to go it really produces a gorgeous picture better than any L C D in my opinion. And Costco does have 'em for good prices. I generally, I don't know about, do you remember whether the Costco is the B2 or the c2?
Caller 1 (00:35:14):
It is. If you gimme half a sec, I'll look it up. Alright. So it is the LG 77. It is c2. Yep. And then the 3,400 is the c3.
Scott Wilkinson (00:35:23):
Okay. So the c3, here's another example of model numbers. LG did it better. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, C2 is the 2022 models. Oh, C3 is the 2023 models. Yes. And so Sure. Get the c3, get the, you know, if you can afford it, get the later, get the later model. You're not gonna be unhappy with the c2. I have been recommending the C2 all last year. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> if that's what was available. And it's the most cost effective. LG olet, they have more expensive ones. They have the G series. And the G three actually has some a new technology that is very exciting, I would consider it myself where they've greatly brightened the ole output and using something called a micro lens array. Ooh. M l a where each pixel has a tiny little lens in front of it, ah, which actually increases the brightness along with the processing that they've added to it. There you're starting to get into some serious money. I forget what it was exactly, the G three is gonna be, but for most people, the C2 or the c3. Wonderful. Wonderful. You're gonna be super happy with that. Just make sure you go into the picture menu and select the movie mode or cinema. I forget what LG calls it. And that should should make it more accurate as I was talking about earlier. And man <laugh> 77 inch c2, that's, or c3. That'll be awesome. <Laugh>.
Caller 1 (00:37:02):
All right. So now talking about a bigger one. Do you have any general recommendations if I do decide to go bigger? Cause I've been thinking about it, but I recognize the ole, you know, once you start getting, even in the seventies and certainly the eighties. So price just seems Yeah,
Scott Wilkinson (00:37:16):
Ted goes up quite a bit. Yeah, that's true. That is true. Well do you does the I, for, I don't, I think the C2 comes in in 83. I'd have to, you
Caller 1 (00:37:30):
Know, I don't know. I'd have, i'd I could easily look cuz I just, right now Costco's literally a mile away from me. Again, I live in Paradise.
Scott Wilkinson (00:37:37):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Costco's close by <laugh>. That is great. That's one definition of Paradise. Costco down the street, <laugh>,
Caller 1 (00:37:45):
I've got the beach, I've got the bluff. All,
Scott Wilkinson (00:37:48):
All, all in one Uhhuh. I've got golf. Scooter X in the chat room is saying LG 83 c3 bun with an Allstate Fi three year protection plan for, what did he say it was? 4200 4300 bucks. I'll look for that. So yeah, it's okay. It's, if you got the money, if you have the budget for an 83, I would say at 13 feet away, I would say absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. All right. Now another thing about that though is are, are you gonna mount it on the wall?
Caller 1 (00:38:27):
Yes.
Scott Wilkinson (00:38:28):
<Laugh> mounting an 83 inch TV on the wall is not a trivial exercise. Are you gonna have some pay somebody to do it professionally or are you gonna do it yourself?
Caller 1 (00:38:38):
No, I'm mounted the 70. I have a 73 right now.
Scott Wilkinson (00:38:41):
Oh, and you mounted it up there yourself?
Caller 1 (00:38:43):
Yeah, it was just me and a buddy. I put the bracket up. It's, you know, as
Scott Wilkinson (00:38:47):
Long, make sure it's anchored into studs <laugh>, because an 83 gonna be really heavy.
Caller 1 (00:38:55):
And that's, and that's why you know, I've got the right bracket. You can normally get them at Costco, not to keep promoting Costco, but it's just convenient. Get the right brackets, it's in studs. And then I just use two people to carefully put it up there not holding the holding the frame and not,
Scott Wilkinson (00:39:11):
Not the screen. Don't touch the screen. Well, you know, you can wipe off the screen.
Caller 1 (00:39:16):
Yeah. But no, I'm, I'm inclined to look Now the scooter said, and Scooter X said the one is only 4,000 and some
Scott Wilkinson (00:39:23):
<Laugh>. Yeah. 4,300 bucks for the C2 83 inch, you know, Hey, if you can, if you can swing it at, at that, at the distance you're at, that, that would just be awesome. <Laugh>.
Caller 1 (00:39:36):
Yeah. I think I think that's a good suggestion. I mean, I'm, I like lg, Sony, all of them. Sure. But to have a suggestion, LG seems to be a reasonable price.
Scott Wilkinson (00:39:44):
I'll tell you this also, the Sony will be more expensive
Caller 1 (00:39:47):
Okay.
Scott Wilkinson (00:39:48):
For, for equivalent for an equivalent tv.
Caller 1 (00:39:51):
And I, and I'll tell you, I have a surround sound five clips. I've had 'em for years.
Scott Wilkinson (00:39:56):
Very nice. So
Caller 1 (00:39:57):
Lovely. Yeah. All the all the accessories are underneath the mounted tv. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, the speaker, the center speakers right in the center.
Scott Wilkinson (00:40:06):
Excellent. Close to the screen.
Caller 1 (00:40:09):
Yeah. I listened to you. Yeah, it's right underneath the screen.
Scott Wilkinson (00:40:11):
Excellent.
Caller 1 (00:40:12):
Excellent. It worked out well,
Scott Wilkinson (00:40:13):
So Sounds great. Matt.
Caller 1 (00:40:14):
I yeah, I you may hear back from me in a little while asking for some more advice on, on getting the best picture out of it. So,
Scott Wilkinson (00:40:23):
Well, I've got my new podcast or my reinstated podcast here on the Twit Network Home Theater Geeks. I've been talking lately about how to do exactly that, so check it out.
Caller 1 (00:40:34):
Yeah. I've you know, actually I was going, ah, do I need to join? Do I need to join? And not to make your head swell. I was like, Scott's joined. I need to Ajo
Scott Wilkinson (00:40:43):
<Laugh>. Thank you, Scott
Caller 1 (00:40:47):
<Laugh>. Mike, I already listened to you for free. You can Yeah, Leo, on this show. So I, I don't need to join except for Scott, so God, I
Scott Wilkinson (00:40:56):
Oh, that's, that is so gratifying. Thank you so much.
Caller 1 (00:41:00):
My pleasure. Take care. Thanks for the thanks for the answer. You
Scott Wilkinson (00:41:03):
Bet.
Mikah Sargent (00:41:03):
Absolutely. Thank you for the call.
Caller 1 (00:41:05):
Take care.
Mikah Sargent (00:41:06):
All righty. We've got some more calls. We will go to an email question before we come back and take a few more calls. Okay. From the Zoom Jerry has written in and says in the news, now the F B I is warning against using u sb charging ports at public spaces like airports.
Scott Wilkinson (00:41:28):
Oh, no, I
Mikah Sargent (00:41:29):
Recall. There are U USB charging cables that don't carry data, and I was wondering if those are safety use and also, what are they called so that I can search for them? This is a great question. This is, I don't know the answer to this. Yeah. So this is a, a really good re a really good question. And it's something that Steve Gibson on, on security now and Leo have been talking about for quite some time. Uhhuh <affirmative> you should be careful when you are going to a public place and they have some form of, of charging available because there are different devices that can be installed that depending on how your phone is set up, depending on what version of the operating system you have installed and all these other different aspects, when you plug that device in, it could potentially take information from you.
(00:42:19):
It could potentially install something on your device that could been key log. Yes. You should never just take a cable and plug it into one of those chargers. A USB Yeah. U us USBs port at a hotel at an airport or anything like that, because you never know. I did that last night. Oh, no. Oh no. Oh no. You, and this is the thing, honestly, you're probably okay, right? Yeah, yeah. It's just, it's, it's not the, the idea that, you know, every single place is going to have, it's just, if you can be careful, you should be careful. And the reason why is because with the typical u SB cable, there's there, there's connection between the two for charging and for data data mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And so you either need to get a cable that only does charging so that it'll only pass power to the device, or, and this is what I suggest, what we call a quote unquote SB condom.
(00:43:13):
And essentially what it does is no matter what cables you have, it will only allow the passing of power between your cable and whatever you've plugged it into. There's just a little dongle that it's Yes, it's a little dongle. So you plug this into the U s BBC port or the U S B A port and the hotel and the airport, Uhhuh, <affirmative>, and then it basically just all of the little pins that are for data Right. Doesn't do anything with those. Right. It only passes along the power. Wow. Okay. That way you don't have to get new cables that are special for this. You just carry around A U S B A condom, a u s BBC condom, and then you're good to go. <Laugh>. is that what they're actually called? That is what they call them. Yeah. <laugh>. So, you know, protect yourself.
(00:43:53):
Indeed. Uhhuh. So ZDNet has a, a good article called Protect Your Data with the u SB condom that actually lists a few options, including a company called Porta Power and, or excuse me, porta Pow Porta pow. And these have different models, again, U S B A and U S BBC that just no matter what you're plugging it into, the data is blocked and it's only going to pass along power. The article also discusses some of the devices that look as if they're just standard cables, like there's nothing wrong, turns out, no. These cables actually have the firmware, the software, the, the, the bad acting stuff in it that will actually gain access to your devices and potentially install something. Now, of course, it's worth noting that many modern, especially mobile operating systems have lots of protections in place to keep you safe.
(00:44:51):
And so if up to this point, you know, you've been using those chances are you're probably okay. But if you just want to go forward with the knowledge, okay, I'm good. That is where something like this will be helpful to you. In fact, the article kind of is a little tongue in cheek in saying the super paranoid folks out there <laugh> to make use of these because these this is a, typically a targeted attack. This is not just anybody in the airport, they're scooping up whatever, because the information that could be gained through it is more meant in a, in a targeted attack. So you find out that some head of state is staying in a hotel, and then, you know, the espionage goes in, and that, that's kind of where this has mostly been. We've seen it mostly used in the past. But again, if you want as much sort of caution as possible, then these USB condoms are a great thing.
(00:45:43):
And I, I suggest not just going to Google and typing that in and then buying the first one because you don't know then where that's coming from. Look for one of these established brands that have been talked about before by computer security professionals. So the company, again, port a p is a great example for an option to make sure that you're only passing power to your device. There's also the question of, well, what if I am using a wireless charger at an airport as opposed to, you know, you just set the device down, that's even harder to be able to pass along any, in
Scott Wilkinson (00:46:22):
Fact, this is how, this is what I was doing at the hotel last, oh, good night. Oh, yeah. It's using an wireless charger.
Mikah Sargent (00:46:26):
Yeah. So that's your, you're even more safe. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Of course with newer devices like the iPhone, there is an N F C reader that's involved in the power charging mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but it is specific to apple's own accessories. So they include in some of the devices and cases like this case, it has a little chip in it that tells the phone what color and what device or what accessory rather you're putting on so that it, whenever you actually stick it into the, the case, it shows up an animation that shows the actual case that you're putting on it. So it's a little goofy, it's gimmicky. But that could be the only concern that someone would have is, oh, well, what if they pass information over that N F C connection? But that n FFC connection is so limited that it's highly unlikely that there's going to be anything passed along.
Scott Wilkinson (00:47:17):
You know, one thought I just had was, what if instead of using a a u SB cable mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, well, you use, use a USB cable, but you also have one of those AC power things.
Mikah Sargent (00:47:29):
That's, that's the best. I mean, that's really,
Scott Wilkinson (00:47:31):
Because that's not gonna pass any
Mikah Sargent (00:47:32):
Data. If you're just plugging in your own device and then you're passing, then you're charged, you're fine there. Yeah. Yeah. This is strictly, you know, you've got a lamp. They, they have those lamps in hotels that's they'd have the USB two USBs in them. I've used them. Yeah. And there are times where somebody has taken the, you know, the bottom off of that lamp and then discovered that inside someone had installed some sort of dongle that was then passing alongside. So yeah, that's nefarious. Yes. An nefarious a bad actor was
Scott Wilkinson (00:47:59):
No good
Mikah Sargent (00:48:00):
<Laugh>. So it is a good question, Jerry. And that is why, again, I recommend getting the little dongle as opposed to getting a cable. Because this is the thing a lot of times it, they're the cheap cables that are only for passing along power. And when you're buying cheap cables, you're also running the risk of, of shorts and all sorts of mm-hmm. <Affirmative> bad stuff that lead to fires instead. So <laugh>, I think another thing you don't want Yeah, exactly. You don't want fire, you don't want somebody hacking into your stuff. So one of these little dons, or as we've said, u sb condom can be helpful. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> in, in this case. All righty. It looks like we've got the, oh, I should mention call.twiz.tv is the r l you wanna type in. You can then go to Safari well any browser on your, your mobile device and type that in and join us for the call. Let's go to the Mac geek who's joining us today for Ask the Tech guys, Kevin from Las Vegas.
Caller 2 (00:49:11):
Oh,
Mikah Sargent (00:49:12):
All right. Hi there, Kevin from Las Vegas. How are you? Hi.
Caller 2 (00:49:16):
I'm doing great. In honor of both Scott and of Leo. I had to mention I know Leo talked about his fabulous socks that he had. And of course, I think Scott had mentioned that earlier. And I have to show you something that I often use in the pit when I'm playing it with the orchestra for a show, because you, as you know, you have to have all black, so you can't have any anything showing. So these don't show. But there's something that kind of is interesting for the cast and the crew. And I
Scott Wilkinson (00:49:51):
Show you <laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (00:49:53):
So we're, we're getting a look at the Fun
Scott Wilkinson (00:49:55):
Socks. Oh, the fun musical socks. I love those. I want a pair of those.
Caller 2 (00:50:01):
Yes. So there you go. So that's my go-to for fun in the pit <laugh>.
Scott Wilkinson (00:50:07):
Oh, that's fantastic. What do you, what do you play in the pit?
Caller 2 (00:50:10):
I'm aist and organist, and so I've, I've done, geez, a lot of show. It's, it's been, it's been a hoot. I just retired to Las Vegas about a year and a half ago, so I have a little more time to call and talk in and get answers to questions. And so my question for you is, since you're on here and and with the, you know, information about theater, home theater, I have an old Panasonic tv, which is not even 4k. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I have an old Denon receiver that won't die. I've had it from <laugh>
Scott Wilkinson (00:50:43):
Just making
Caller 2 (00:50:44):
It Please Die. Oh my God. It's like 20 23 0 7 ci av. I mean, it's just an old
Scott Wilkinson (00:50:51):
Yeah. It's been a, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Caller 2 (00:50:54):
So
Scott Wilkinson (00:50:54):
It's an og.
Caller 2 (00:50:56):
Yeah, it definitely, definitely. So I'm looking eventually within the next, hopefully six months to a year to upgrade mm-hmm. <Affirmative> would it make sense to just do the TV if I want to do part at a time, do the TV first, do the receiver well, and then what would I upgrade to Sure.
Scott Wilkinson (00:51:14):
For both. Sure. Well, one thing that comes to mind immediately is that old receiver will undoubtedly not pass 4K or h D R content.
Caller 2 (00:51:26):
That's what I was afraid of.
Scott Wilkinson (00:51:27):
Yeah. <laugh>, I, I, I would seriously doubt it. So, you know, if, and how many source devices do you have?
Caller 2 (00:51:38):
Let's see. I've got Apple tv.
Scott Wilkinson (00:51:40):
Is it a 4k Apple TV 4k?
Caller 2 (00:51:43):
Yeah. Okay. It's not the current model, but it's the first 4K they came out with. Okay. All right. A couple of generations back. And the a Blu-ray player, Sony Blueray player, and a and let's see, that's about it really. Okay. I, I've,
Scott Wilkinson (00:51:58):
But it's a Blu-ray, not a U H D Blu-ray?
Caller 2 (00:52:02):
Yeah, I believe it's just a Blu-ray.
Scott Wilkinson (00:52:04):
Okay. So that's 10 80 p the, the Apple 4k. The Apple TV does do 4k. So, and the Panasonic is still working, is it a plasma, Panasonic plasma?
Caller 2 (00:52:18):
Oh, no, not at all. Oh, okay.
Scott Wilkinson (00:52:19):
It's an LCD about 10
Caller 2 (00:52:21):
Years
Scott Wilkinson (00:52:21):
Old. No, it could be, it could very well be a Panasonic plasma at that point. And they made some excellent plasma TVs. Plasma TVs are no longer made. They're, they're dead. It's a dead type of of technology, but when they were being made, they were my favorite TV technology. So it's a tough one. If it's still working, then it's still working.
Caller 2 (00:52:51):
Yeah.
Scott Wilkinson (00:52:53):
And you don't really have anything, any source device other than the Apple TV 4K to give a 4K signal? I mean, ultimately yes. You'd, you'd wanna upgrade to, in my opinion an ole tv, LG or Sony LG is less expensive and still really good. And you would then want to upgrade to a receiver. But you know what you could do in the meantime, you could bypass the receiver. You could just plug the Apple TV 4K directly into the, your new 4K tv and then it would show 4k and it wouldn't be, it would mean a little more remote swapping and, and fiddling around. It's always nicer to have everything go through a receiver. That's always much nicer. And if you wanted to do that, then you'd have to upgrade your receiver as well.
Caller 2 (00:53:53):
Yeah, because I've cut the cord, I have Sling and I have a, an antenna just for local broadcast, Uhhuh, <affirmative> and Apple TV with paramount Plus also on there as well. Sure.
Scott Wilkinson (00:54:05):
I appreciate too. Well, again, that, you know, that Apple, that Apple TV will give you 4k, I don't remember if Sling has 4K capability. I'll have to look that up.
Caller 2 (00:54:20):
Yeah, cuz it's on the Apple tv, the app on the Apple tv. Right. so I just tune into that and log in and mm-hmm. <Affirmative> all that same thing with Paramount Plus, it's all there on the Apple tv.
Scott Wilkinson (00:54:32):
Yeah. Yeah. But you're not getting any 4K through that receiver? I, I would be willing to bet.
Caller 2 (00:54:37):
No, no, not at all. I mean, even though it shows up and it's a 4K Apple tv, I'm not getting, if
Scott Wilkinson (00:54:44):
You're not getting 4K signal. Right, exactly. The, the Apple TV is looking at the TV and the receiver and going, oh, you can't, you can't deal with 4k, so I'm not gonna send it to you. I'm only gonna send you 10 80 p.
Caller 2 (00:54:57):
So pretty much you're saying I should probably up upgrade both
Scott Wilkinson (00:55:00):
I that really, I do. I'm afraid. So, <laugh>, I'm afraid. So if you want, you know, if you really want the best experience now that you can get, you really do wanna upgrade both of them. Otherwise, if you just upgrade the TV and you plug the four Apple 4K directly into it, you know, they have to change the inputs on the TV to watch one thing versus the other switch swap around remotes. And a lot of people find that pretty daunting.
Caller 2 (00:55:26):
Well, I'm using the, the sofa baton remote. In fact, I, I did a mini review a few months ago with Mikah and Leo mentioned and showed that, and I had bought it on Amazon for like 40 bucks on sale and it's doing great. I think it's even better than the Logitech promotes.
Scott Wilkinson (00:55:48):
Oh, I haven't looked at the sofa baton. I would be hard pressed to find, to think anything's better than harmony <laugh>,
Caller 2 (00:55:56):
But buttons for macros so you can program several devices. Yeah, it's very, and the only thing is it's r was it in not infrared, it's R RF
Scott Wilkinson (00:56:09):
So you don't have to point it anywhere.
Caller 2 (00:56:12):
Yeah. It's a drawback to that. And also it's got a little klugy kind of a scroll wheel that changes devices where you can
Scott Wilkinson (00:56:19):
Change the, I'm gonna have to get me one of those and, and check it. Yeah,
Mikah Sargent (00:56:23):
I'd love to hear you get
Caller 2 (00:56:24):
For 40. It's well worth even 50. It's well worth.
Scott Wilkinson (00:56:27):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, good. You've, you've given me something to look, look for. Thank you. So
Caller 2 (00:56:31):
The only question is, obviously the size of my apartment is not big, so I, I've got about a 55 inch right now. Oh yeah. And that's, I'm sitting about six to seven feet at the, oh
Scott Wilkinson (00:56:41):
Man. 55 inch TV would be fine for you. And an LG Lgc two, I think I last saw on on Costco or Amazon, maybe at 1500 bucks, 1600 bucks, something like that.
Caller 2 (00:56:58):
Yeah. I was looking to see if I could, you know, get maybe under a thousand, but I don't know if that's
Scott Wilkinson (00:57:04):
Possible. You, you could have for Super Bowl Sunday and back in Black Friday might have been possible. And as the 2020 threes start to actually become available in retailers, they're gonna discount the 2020 twos. So if you can wait I'd say a couple of months, maybe one or two months, you might see the L G C two down, close to a thousand, I think at Black Friday last year and Super Bowl Sunday, the C 2 55 was 1200, 1300 bucks. So getting close.
Caller 2 (00:57:39):
Okay. So it's yeah, it's not urgent, but I'm definitely, I mean, cuz they say that Panasonic and the, and my Denon receiver just chugging along
Scott Wilkinson (00:57:47):
<Laugh> <laugh>.
Caller 2 (00:57:49):
It's a good picture. It's fine, but it's just not 4K and it's not the,
Scott Wilkinson (00:57:54):
Not hdr. Yeah.
Caller 2 (00:57:56):
Yeah. So since you know, I've, I've now retired, I figured, well, I'm gonna be doing a lot of movie watching and
Mikah Sargent (00:58:03):
Right.
Caller 2 (00:58:05):
So we'll see. Yeah. See
Scott Wilkinson (00:58:07):
What happens. I, I'd say, I'd say wait a couple months, if your system's chugging along, then chug along with it. And when the 2020 threes start coming out and the 2020 twos start going on better sale, then go for it.
Caller 2 (00:58:23):
Okay. Sounds like a winner. All right. But do check out that sofa baton.
Scott Wilkinson (00:58:27):
I will. That I will. Thank you for the recommendation. That's, that sounds great.
Caller 2 (00:58:31):
It really works well. And like I say, just a few, couple of little drawbacks, but for 40 bucks it does a heck of a job.
Scott Wilkinson (00:58:38):
Oh yeah.
Caller 2 (00:58:39):
You know, it's well worth it. So, yeah. Anyway. All right. Thanks.
Scott Wilkinson (00:58:43):
Thanks for the question.
Caller 2 (00:58:44):
Yeah. We to your show now and unless you're back on the air
Scott Wilkinson (00:58:48):
Yeah, please do.
Caller 2 (00:58:51):
I'll do it. All right. Thanks Scotty.
Mikah Sargent (00:58:53):
Quick. Yeah. Thanks for calling in. All right. We are gonna take a quick break before we come back with more. Again, if you have questions particularly home theater questions for Scott Wilkinson, who's here with us, it's call.twit.tv. You can also email us ATG twit tv. I do wanna tell you about Thinkt Canary who are bringing you this episode of Ask the Tech Guys. Everybody knows Honeypots are a great idea. These little sort of moments, these little, these little devices where you're drawn in to go and dig inside, and then boom, you capture that bad actor. And so you kind of wonder, why don't all internal networks have honeypots set up? Why aren't they all running them? Well, it's because with all our network problems, nobody needs one more machine to administer and worry about. You know, the boss might want a honeypot set up on the network, but the IT team is going, literally, we've got so much to think about every single moment.
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Jason Howell (01:02:59):
All right. So no more H B O, it's just Max.
Mikah Sargent (01:03:03):
Yeah. So <laugh> Warner Bros. Discovery Warner
Jason Howell (01:03:07):
Bros. Warner Bros.
Mikah Sargent (01:03:08):
Discovery has made the choice to ditch the H B O branding and go with a new streaming platform called Max. It announced it as we're recording this show just yesterday, and kind of talked about some of the upcoming stuff that will be part of the max launch. But what I found <laugh> interesting was how upset people were getting about this this change. <Laugh> and I,
Jason Howell (01:03:42):
I it doesn't take much to upset. No.
Mikah Sargent (01:03:43):
Let's no, I I mean, change, change is the thing that gets people
Jason Howell (01:03:47):
Upset, but yes,
Mikah Sargent (01:03:48):
Indeed. It's always fascinating when it's some, like you, HBO o's been around for a long time. Yes. It's something that you pay for and then you get to watch shows on it. And so I struggle, I guess what I'm saying is I struggle a little bit with the, with understanding how someone's identity can be tied up in it so much that they get so bent out of shape about the fact that <laugh>, you're getting rid of HBO o part of this, what in the world, regardless of that, that's what's happening. The launch is going to happen on May 23rd here in the United States. It'll come to other places later on. And I also, according to this variety article they're planning on launching an average of more than 40 new titles and TV show seasons every month.
Jason Howell (01:04:43):
Wow. That's
Mikah Sargent (01:04:44):
A lot.
Jason Howell (01:04:45):
Right? That is, I wonder how that compares to like Netflix. Cause Netflix in its heyday, and I think we're kind of beyond the Netflix heyday at this point. Yes. That, I mean, that felt like a reality. Yeah. There was so much streaming new stuff into there and, and so much of it was internally produced. It wasn't just, you know, third party content that they got licensed for. And it got confusing, like at a certain point. Yeah. There's, it was just too overwhelming. Like,
Mikah Sargent (01:05:09):
What, what do I even where, what's new? What's not Yeah. What's theirs, what's not, what's still available, what's been taken off, that kind of thing. They've definitely slowed down some, but there's still new content appearing there all the time. Sure. And that, that does kind of seem to be what HBO O Max is doing, or excuse me, what Max is planning on doing. Hmm. what along with this change is going to be some changes in sort of the pricing and tier structure. So I wanna go over this. There are three, there are going to be three tiers. An ad light, an ad free, and an ultimate ad free. Sure. the ad light plan, of course, is going to cost the least amount of money at $9 and 99 cents a month, or a hundred dollars a year. You can have two people streaming at the same time.
(01:05:59):
It's only 10 80 p resolution. You can't download anything. And then there's not Dolby Atmos for the sound, the ad free version, of course. It's just like the ad light version, except you don't have ads. You can do 30 offline downloads. So if what is an offline download, it just means that at any time, if you know you're going to be without internet connection, you can download several episodes or movies and have those available for a certain period of time. You're on a flight to Costa Rica, you're Exactly, yeah. And you don't wanna pay for the air the airplane's wifi or whatever. Right. Right. That'll bring it up to 1599 or $150 a year. And then the Ultimate ad Free plan, of course, has ad free content for concurrent streams. And that's the only one that features the 4K content with Dolby Atmos. Yeah. So E H B O Max is losing the HBO o And I was curious to hear your thoughts on this as someone who, you know, has your mind in the home theater area and streaming content mm-hmm. <Affirmative> the library, smart move. Weird move.
Scott Wilkinson (01:07:11):
I think it's a weird move myself. Now I understand their point that H B O has a huge brand recognition, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but it's also associated with what we would call adult content. Yeah. I don't mean X-rated
Mikah Sargent (01:07:27):
Or anything like that. Not blue content. Not blue
Scott Wilkinson (01:07:29):
Content, but, you know, content that would be inappropriate for little kids. Yeah. And now they're adding Discovery Plus and they want it to be more of a family thing. So having H B O be associated with, you know, game of Thrones and, you know, these other more adult titles might put some families off on the other hand, simply calling it Max <laugh>, what the hell does that mean?
Mikah Sargent (01:07:55):
Right. It is so generic. It's
Scott Wilkinson (01:07:57):
So generic. It's too generic. Yeah. so I, I can't say I've got a better idea right now. <Laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (01:08:04):
Yeah. What call it Lucy instead of Max.
Scott Wilkinson (01:08:06):
Yeah, exactly. <Laugh>, I mean that, it, it didn't make a lot of sense to me to call it that. Okay, you wanna lose the H B O to make it more family friendly, but you don't wanna lose the people who wanna watch Game of Thrones or, or these other more adult content, what do you call it? I mean, they could have run a contest, maybe <laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (01:08:25):
Yeah. I guess, yeah. I, my, my thought in the end is kind of the people who were in it for watching H B O mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, probably a little, a little more sophisticated mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I, I, cause I think about HBO o for the long, like HBO's been around for a long time, long time. And in order to get it in the first place, you had to know a little bit about, you know, you couldn't just, you call your cable provider and just get the standard package. You know what I mean? You had to go and say, I want the HBO O package, or to understand even what that was. And then as we've moved kind of away from it being part of cable mm-hmm. <Affirmative> to being the separate subscription or in some cases bundled in with other stuff. Right. So it has a little bit of sophistication Yeah. In getting it set up. So I think you don't necessarily alienate the H B O people mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So it's almost like they just have trust that the HBO o people are always gonna know where they can find their favorite HBO o shows. Right. So they can almost just go, we'll just put those to the side. You all know what you're doing. We're trying to draw in a new client, Cleon tail. <Laugh>
Scott Wilkinson (01:09:27):
Cleon.
Mikah Sargent (01:09:28):
And in that case, I, I sort of understand that aspect. If they're trying to grow the user base Yep. They're like, we're not worried about you people who already, you're gonna gripe, we're ready for that <laugh>, but we're not worried about you going away cuz you love these shows. So you're gonna find this,
Scott Wilkinson (01:09:44):
You're gonna find or what. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I, I don't know. Not calling it Family Max, maybe.
Mikah Sargent (01:09:51):
Yeah. Yeah. That, yeah. That wouldn't be bad. Something like
Scott Wilkinson (01:09:53):
That. Something like that to make more indication of what it is.
Mikah Sargent (01:09:56):
Yeah. What is Max? What is Max? I don't know what's on there. Every it's Max. Yeah. That, that part is fast. And I'm curious too. So the way that I get H B O max right now mm-hmm. <Affirmative> is as part of my at and t my cellular plan, Uhhuh <affirmative>. So I've got a plan that has at and t or that has HBO O Max bundled in with it. And right now nothing is changing. They've said that even after the launch, nothing is changing right away. Mm. But I do wonder if eventually that little will go away, that little benefit will go away. Good question. And if we start to see people who have current H B O max subscriptions, if we see those change too depending on which streaming package you have, is it the full 4k? Is it just 10 80 p et cetera, cetera? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And it is something to watch.
Scott Wilkinson (01:10:46):
Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (01:10:46):
And that's what you were talking about earlier, that problem with streaming. That's
Scott Wilkinson (01:10:49):
Exactly right. The problem with streaming is that it changes, it morphs, it evolves in ways that are sometimes confusing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and how do you keep up? Yeah. I mean, I have a hard time keeping up. How is
Mikah Sargent (01:11:01):
Yeah. Because it's not as if there's one central sort of zone of truth <laugh> that you can go to and say, I I can go here and I know exactly what's available. I know when it's all gonna go away. Everything different, all of the different services that you have to go to. And then some of them, they don't even just, they just don't even announce it. That's right. I gotta tell you the most glaring example of this that I ran into there is a, so you may have heard of like Survivor the show. Yeah. It's a real, I don't watch it, but yeah. It's a reality television show where people basically are put on an island and they all have to eat bugs, eat bugs, they all try to survive. And it's kind of a social thing too, because you want to not get voted off.
(01:11:41):
Well, survivor here in America has really changed over time and it is not the enjoyable show that it once was. Really? Yeah. It's just they've, they've tried to speed things up because I think people's paces have changed and they're really just trying to make it more for a modern audience, but in a way that some of us who've watched it for a long time, eh, don't like so much. Don't like Yeah. There's an Australian version of the show Australian Survivor that is just Chef's Kiss. Beautiful. Amazing, wonderful. And I, it used to be that it was part of I can't even remember now. It may have been Peacock, it may have been. I think it was Paramount Plus. Okay. So it was on Paramount Plus. And my partner and I, we would watch that show. I mean back to back to back to back to back.
(01:12:25):
Cuz we had several seasons in between. It binge it, we would binge it. And I remember this like it was yesterday, although it was now a year and several months ago. Huh. It was quite literally Valentine's Day. And we're watching, you know, we had just gotten through the season, we're watching the finale episode of the season Of Australian. Of Australian Survivor. Survivor. And we were all about ready to get to the sort of end of the episode when the people would be announced who, who won. Yeah. Hit pause. And you know, I think we were making dinner or something like that. We came back and they, a thing popped up on the screen and it said having trouble loading this content, which is something that happens on Apple TV from time once in a while if the internet connection drops, whatever.
(01:13:11):
Right. I go to reload it and as I was reloading it, I happened to look at the clock and I realized that it had just turned to, I think it was 6:00 PM so it was like on the dot. And that is where I sort of had this panic in my mind, like, oh my God, no. Did a licensing thing just flip over? Lo and behold, that is exactly what happened. And instead of letting people like finish out for the, for at least the whole day, like let, yeah. I've never had, even in shows that have lost their licensing, you can still finish like the episode that you're on because you probably in streaming it, you were downloading, you buffered it. Yeah. You've buffered it. Yeah. They, it wouldn't even let you finish the episode. The switch flipped and you could not even go. Let's just say that there is a certain sponsor on the network that is a virtual private network sponsor Uhhuh. And we were able to finish the episode, but we had to, we had to fly to Australia and finish <laugh>, which was really Frustra, but you're really not supposed to do. Yeah. Yeah. And so that was frustrating me. No. And that was one of those moments where I thought, ah, if I could have just bought this series, I wouldn't have had to, this wouldn't have been a thing. Yeah. And that is like, that's, that's the worst example of it where you're quite literally That's
Scott Wilkinson (01:14:22):
Terrible in the middle of the
Mikah Sargent (01:14:23):
Final episode. Yes. Come on. Really? Yeah. That was who won calling. So I, I did not like that. <Laugh>. Alright. Let us go to, we've got a call and we'll go to that in a moment. But I did wanna mention here in about 15 minutes we will have Chris Marqui joining us. Ooh, cool. Yeah, so I'll talked to him in a while. It has been a while. And Chris is here for the assignment. We will take a look at the, the, the word was perfect and so we're gonna see what people have submitted for. Perfect. And then Chris will draw from the fishbowl for next month's assignment or for next next. Yeah, it's about a month. It's about a month between. Alright. So let us go to Grant. Who is calling in? Call.Twi.Tv. All right. Let's wait for Grant to All right. Grant. Hello. Hello.
Scott Wilkinson (01:15:23):
Hello. Grant,
Mikah Sargent (01:15:24):
We heard you there for a moment. P and Grant. Oh, I keep, we keep,
Caller 3 (01:15:37):
Can you hear me?
Mikah Sargent (01:15:38):
He, hello Grant, where are you? You going
Caller 3 (01:15:39):
From? Nice. There we go. Atlanta, Georgia.
Mikah Sargent (01:15:42):
Oh, right. Doing well. How are you guys?
Caller 3 (01:15:46):
I'm wonderful. Today. Well, sort, I had issue with and suspended my account, but since Scott's here, I'm a different question. I've wanting to know. I'm little camera shy by the way, if you're
Mikah Sargent (01:16:01):
Oh, well you can just do if you'd like. It's totally up to you.
Caller 3 (01:16:05):
Yeah, lemme do that. So
Mikah Sargent (01:16:07):
I can actually, that's no problem.
Caller 3 (01:16:09):
Sweet. So Scott? Yes. I know you do a lot in the home ab space. Oh yeah. Yeah. So I install high-end home automation systems. Oh yeah. Control for Sivan Josh, ai, Uhhuh, <affirmative>. And I was wondering if what, like if you were to put something in a home high end, they don't, like the customer just doesn't wanna have to deal with their smart home. They're good with a dealer coming by, doing everything for 'em. What would you recommend
Scott Wilkinson (01:16:41):
In terms of, of, of a smart home automation system?
Caller 3 (01:16:47):
Yes. Cause there's like Crestron, there's Control four, there's Savan Josh AI is a new one in the space. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which is actually really sweet, if you've ever heard of
Scott Wilkinson (01:16:59):
It. I have heard of it. I get a lot of their emails. I will tell you this, I don't spend a lot of time studying, researching, using smart home systems such as these. I will tell you that Crestron has traditionally been the system of choice for really high-end homes. Their, every, they, you know, they're at, I I when I used to go to cia, the Custom Electronics Design and Installation Association. Yep.
Caller 3 (01:17:36):
I went last week actually in Atlanta.
Scott Wilkinson (01:17:38):
Oh, you went last week in Atlanta. Okay. Nice.
Caller 3 (01:17:40):
<Laugh>. Yes,
Scott Wilkinson (01:17:41):
Sir. Well, do you go to the, do you go to the annual one, the expo in September or October?
Caller 3 (01:17:46):
Not, not usually. I've only been in the space a few years now.
Scott Wilkinson (01:17:50):
Oh, okay. I would recommend if, if you can go to the one that's coming up in September in Denver. And that is a huge show. And Crestron normally has a huge booth at the show. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And when I used to write about very high end home theaters in a magazine called Audio Video Interiors, it was like the Architectural Digest of av and I remember clearly that the most common automation system that they used was Crestron.
Caller 3 (01:18:27):
Yeah.
Scott Wilkinson (01:18:28):
So if money is no object you know, then that's probably what I would recommend. I haven't, like I said, I, I don't keep up on this as much as I do audio and video technology specifically. And I presume that Crestron has kept up with all the latest innovations in home automation. When someone wants to save some money, I generally send them towards Control four. Yeah. which is some less expensive than Crestron. Josh ai, I don't know. I mean, I know of them, but I don't know much about them. Are they, are they kind of in the lower end of the price point spectrum? Are they in the higher end? What do they have that others don't? I'm afraid I can't answer that cause I, I don't spend that much time researching whole home automation as important as it is. You know, I stay more focused on audio, video technology.
Caller 3 (01:19:25):
Sure.
Mikah Sargent (01:19:26):
Oh wow. So I'm just now learn. I did not know about Josh I of course used to host a show on the network, sweet Smart Tech today. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And we covered a lot of consumer facing brands. Uhhuh, <affirmative>, not some, which
Scott Wilkinson (01:19:38):
Crestron really isn't.
Mikah Sargent (01:19:39):
Right. Exactly. That's,
Scott Wilkinson (01:19:40):
We didn't
Mikah Sargent (01:19:40):
Installer builders and installer stuff. Exactly. but it was always something that was in the back of my mind. So I knew about Crestron and some of the other
Scott Wilkinson (01:19:47):
Control four, probably
Mikah Sargent (01:19:49):
April four, some of the other names that you mentioned. But Josh, this is really cool. It does look incredibly high end. They keep using the word luxury all over the website. So <laugh>, those prices are probably up there. Yeah. But have you had the opportunity to check out any of it? Cuz you said you do these kinds of installs? Yes, yes,
Caller 3 (01:20:05):
Yes. We're a Control four house. My my company and we do control four mostly across the board. But I've been exploring other options like different price ranges and Josh seems a little lower. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> on the lower
Scott Wilkinson (01:20:19):
Than Control four.
Caller 3 (01:20:21):
Yes.
Scott Wilkinson (01:20:22):
Oh wow. That's, oh
Caller 3 (01:20:23):
Wow. But the coolest, the coolest thing about Josh is how well it can integrate with different things. Like, let's say you wanna watch a specific show on Netflix, just say, Hey Josh, watch this episode of this show and it'll just bam on your tv. Oh. And it knows what room you're in because of where you put the microphones knows what room you're in. So if you're in the kitchen, it's playing on the kitchen tv. If you say, Josh, I'm home and you're coming through the garage, it's only gonna turn those lights on in that area. And then as you move to a different area, it might turn other lights on. However you set up the scenes. And the scenes are all natural language that you just type it out there it goes. Oh,
Scott Wilkinson (01:21:05):
That's cool. That's very cool. Yeah.
Caller 3 (01:21:08):
Yeah. And they're, and they're the whole G P T thing that's gonna be a part of things going forward, hopefully.
Mikah Sargent (01:21:16):
Ah, that's clever. That is really clever.
Caller 3 (01:21:18):
Yeah. It's gonna be really sweet. Oh wow. I just became a dealer. We're waiting on our parts to start playing around with it. But I'm, I'm super excited about that type of technology. Cause that's really what people want in a smart home is something where it's just say what you want. That's what happens. Right.
Mikah Sargent (01:21:36):
Yes. That's, that's a big thing right now where you're having to speak the language of the device that you're talking to and they all have different dialects. Right. And so to just be able to say, I just, can you please put on the show <laugh>?
Scott Wilkinson (01:21:51):
Yeah,
Mikah Sargent (01:21:51):
Yeah. It's going Okay. You're talking to the microphone that's right there. It's in this room. I know you're talking about that television. And it does that. And then I'm also seeing, cuz see some of these companies will promise that they get smarter over time. Right. And they come up with these sort of routines. But a lot of times I find that it just annoyingly ends up turning on a light. I don't want to <laugh>. So if this can do that and actually be smart about the routines, that is
Scott Wilkinson (01:22:17):
Gonna be, that's really good. Something good. And you, you said G P t meaning the AI is, is involved here?
Caller 3 (01:22:23):
Correct. They call it Josh, g p t. Nice.
Scott Wilkinson (01:22:26):
Nice.
Caller 3 (01:22:28):
Yeah.
Scott Wilkinson (01:22:28):
Wow. Okay. Well that's super cool.
Mikah Sargent (01:22:30):
I honestly, I hope you'll call us back grant, after you've had a chance to play around with this just to tell us kind of what the experience has been like, because then I can convince Leo who you know, has a few dollars to throw around to install Josh in his own home. And then we can do it,
Scott Wilkinson (01:22:47):
Then we can play with it. Yeah, man, I'd dig at that.
Caller 3 (01:22:50):
Yeah, man, I'm down.
Mikah Sargent (01:22:52):
Yeah. So that would be great. I'd love to to hear more about that in the future.
Caller 3 (01:22:57):
Yeah, totally.
Scott Wilkinson (01:22:58):
All right. Will do.
Caller 3 (01:22:59):
I'll let you know.
Mikah Sargent (01:23:00):
Thanks Grant for calling.
Caller 3 (01:23:01):
So yeah, can I ask a super duper quick question? Of course. Yeah. that you could email me some information if you need to. My YouTube account got suspended. I don't post anything I haven't posted in years mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. I have it commented in a long time. I just watch a ton of video, just all nerdy stuff. And they just suspended it and they won't gimme any information Why I've done the appeal. They said we won't be putting your YouTube account up because of spa repetitive spam posting. Apparently. What? That's all the information I got. Well, you
Scott Wilkinson (01:23:37):
Don't have any content on it, right?
Caller 3 (01:23:39):
No. Oh, that one video on how to fix a Sony tape recorder years ago,
Mikah Sargent (01:23:45):
<Laugh>. Wow. That makes it sound like your YouTube account scam. Big hack. It had been
Caller 3 (01:23:50):
Hacked. Yeah, I changed.
Mikah Sargent (01:23:52):
Yeah.
Caller 3 (01:23:52):
Yeah, I changed my account or my password and I put two factor on mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and yeah, I mean, I've, like, what I'm worried about is they got my Google account and got all the passwords off of there. Right. Which would be a massive issue.
Mikah Sargent (01:24:07):
Well, okay. Well my first recommendation to you, I, so this, unfortunately, as far as the YouTube thing goes, this always ends up being the answer that I have to give, which is you have to follow their processes. And unfortunately it sounds like what happens is what happens to everybody, which is that you don't, it's a black box. Mm-Hmm. And you don't end up getting anywhere unless you happen to get somewhere. And it's unfortunate that, you know, there's not more that we can do, even folks who have gone as far as to appear in, you know, national press. The, the guy was on the New York Times talking about this and his account still wasn't given back to him, even though it was proven that what was suggested that he did, he did not do. And that's because inside of these companies, they may look like monoliths on the outside, but inside of <laugh> a mess of flow charts and you know, distribu distribution networks and different roles. But as far as the fact that you got this spam thing, that does seem to me that there is some account hacking going on. So Yeah.
Scott Wilkinson (01:25:15):
Somebody hijacked the account. Yeah. Started posting all kinds of
Mikah Sargent (01:25:18):
Junk. It's good that you turned on two-factor authentication and changed your password. Honestly. And it's not fun, and I hate to have to say this to anybody, but it is my recommendation that any account that has that email attached to that YouTube account as the means of password reset is something that you should go and change the password on. Might I recommend our sponsor Bit Warden as a password management platform, which will make it at least a little bit easier because then when you go to the site, you change the password, you've got different passwords for each one, and that will at least help you stay safer. But ultimately, yeah, it sounds like you may have been hacked. And that's one of the main ways that, you know, we, we think of, we always wanna think of hackers as like getting in and learning your bank account information and then draining your bank account.
(01:26:14):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But a lot of times, unfortunately, it's a lot less exciting <laugh>, I mean, in the bad. That of course is a horrible thing, but Right. It's a lot less interesting, I guess. And it's just there's some server farm out there that somebody somewhere else is hiring to make their YouTube videos look good. And so they hijack accounts and they post from those accounts onto different videos. And that's what it sounds like has happened here. So yeah. The only thing I can recommend at this point is consider now that you've ch, I don't know if you have, have, if you changed your password, set up two factor authentication and then went through the appeals process, but if you went through the appeal process before, now that there is this password change on record, it may be an opportunity for you to go back through the appeal process because then maybe the person who's doing it can see, oh, they may have been hacked because they're trying to change their password, they're trying to update their, their account. But that's all I can suggest for that, unfortunately.
Caller 3 (01:27:14):
Yeah. I've also logged out all my devices and everything, so that kinda tell that. Well, I mean, if, to be honest, if I was a hacker, that's probably what I would do.
Mikah Sargent (01:27:26):
Yes.
Caller 3 (01:27:26):
Let's log out all devices, but hopefully it'll give 'em kind of a, an idea that it's, it's some sort of spam going on. So
Mikah Sargent (01:27:34):
Yes. So that I agree. Yeah. I appreciate it. A hacker of course, you know, would not follow through with this, this process to sort of get everything. So Yeah, I best of luck with that and do genuinely consider giving us a call in the future after you've had a chance to try out Josh. Cause I'd love to hear more about that.
Caller 3 (01:27:51):
Yeah, totally.
Mikah Sargent (01:27:52):
Thank you, grant,
Caller 3 (01:27:53):
Appreciate your time.
Mikah Sargent (01:27:55):
All righty folks. We've got Chris Marquardt coming up. Is Chris with us, sir? All right. Yay. Chris is with us. Hi Chris.
Chris Marquardt (01:28:04):
Hi. How's it going?
Mikah Sargent (01:28:05):
It's going well. Good to have you.
Scott Wilkinson (01:28:07):
Hey Chris. Scott Wilkinson here. Hey,
Chris Marquardt (01:28:09):
Scott. Good to see
Scott Wilkinson (01:28:10):
You. You too, man. It's been a long time. How you doing?
Chris Marquardt (01:28:13):
Yeah, I'm, I'm still thinking of the Tubas, <laugh>,
Scott Wilkinson (01:28:16):
<Laugh>. Chris helped us couple years ago during the pandemic, I, I run a show called Tuba Christmas. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which is Christmas music played by a hundred tubas. Wow. And I wanted to do a virtual tuba Christmas, and so Chris helped me and my td mm-hmm. <Affirmative> work with what's it called? Open o b s
Chris Marquardt (01:28:42):
VI Video Ninja. It's a, it's an open source yeah. Video transfer tool that helps you do remote remote video things as in getting someone on the air. And that was right,
Scott Wilkinson (01:28:56):
The tool. Right. That's so he helped us get, get, it
Chris Marquardt (01:28:59):
Was just so amazing to see a hundred tubers on a stage. Yeah. This is just <laugh>
Mikah Sargent (01:29:03):
Hear a hundred tubers on a stage.
Scott Wilkinson (01:29:05):
It's an amazing sound. It really is.
Mikah Sargent (01:29:08):
That is, yes. That's awesome. Well, Chris is here with us today because it is time to take a look at the photo assignment. Chris joins us once a month for this and yeah. Take it away, Chris.
Chris Marquardt (01:29:23):
Yeah. So thanks for having me back. I have taken a look at all the pictures that were submitted for the perfect assignment. So that was running for a month now, and I've chosen three pictures to take a look at. Here's the entire hawk. Very, very good pictures. I mean, I'm, I'm, it was a, it was a tough choice to make between these two to pick three to look at. But I did make a choice. And the first one is by Gregory Chesney titled All I Need and <laugh>, this is, this is one, this is one of the, the examples in photography or in any sort of visual art where you don't need a lot of information to convey a lot. I mean, if you're looking at this at face value, we're seeing a black and white photo of a camera, but there's not much on it, not a lot of detail. A lot of of the camera just disappears in the shadow in black. So you have a few bright elements, a lot of very dark, but in your, in your, your mind is, is capable of putting that together into not just a, a beautiful picture, but you'll make sense of it by just looking at it out of this limited information. And it's a beautiful picture and it, and it tells a bit of the story. So it's
Mikah Sargent (01:30:41):
Gorgeous
Scott Wilkinson (01:30:42):
How meta a, a photograph of a camera
Mikah Sargent (01:30:45):
<Laugh>,
Chris Marquardt (01:30:47):
Which, which means that Gregory, he took the photo at least owns two cameras.
Scott Wilkinson (01:30:52):
Exactly. <laugh>,
Mikah Sargent (01:30:53):
There
Scott Wilkinson (01:30:54):
You go.
Chris Marquardt (01:30:55):
There you go. Second picture that I wanna share is by Demi lenta titled Red and Wow,
Scott Wilkinson (01:31:02):
That's beautiful.
Chris Marquardt (01:31:04):
And, and, and we're, so we're looking at a, a red flower in front of a green background. The flower is cut through ha in half. So we are only seeing half of the flower. It's not just the flower. It's also wet. So there's, there's reflections on it. There's a, there's drips hanging off of the pedals. And this is, okay, so first, first thing here that's going on is we are looking at complimentary colors. Red and green are, are kind of the opposite on the, on the color wheel, which makes them harmonize. Well, just think of a tomato. And if you don't have that green bit at the end, it doesn't look right. Right. It belongs there. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So the grid and the green go together so well. Also what Demi did here is, is technically impressive because when we look at the red pedals, they are like super saturated. It doesn't get any redder in the photo. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> without losing all the detail, because you can, you can overexpose pictures. We, we've seen this with photos that, that just go white because it's so much light that no, no detail registers. But in this case, the red channel is kind of, kind of at the max, but you still have detail in the pedal. So demo to manage to kind of keep that in check. And that's that's a technical technical achievement well done here.
Scott Wilkinson (01:32:23):
The cropping is gorgeous. Yes. I also really like the fact that the, the flower and the pets are so sharp and the background is so out of focus. Really, that's brings your eye to that flower.
Chris Marquardt (01:32:36):
Yes, it does. And and another example, like with a camera, you don't need all the information. Half a flower is enough, <laugh>. You're
Scott Wilkinson (01:32:43):
Right. Right,
Chris Marquardt (01:32:44):
Right. What the rest looks like. Okay. And last but not least, here's a black and white photo. Wow.
Scott Wilkinson (01:32:50):
Look
Chris Marquardt (01:32:51):
At that. Karate. And it's, it's, it's kind of a snapshot, but then it isn't because what we're looking at is looks like there's some trailers and there's a whole bunch of palm trees, and it apparently has rained. So there's a big puddle in the foreground, and that reflects, that gives it a symmetrical reflection of palm trees. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and reflections where we're looking for, we are looking at the perfect assignment and reflections have the tendency to just make a picture feel a bit more complete, because that, that, that mirror image of what's already on the picture kind of doubles it. And the symmetry gives it some I'd say some, some a, a restful feeling, a very serene feeling. Gives it apic, gives it a feeling of completeness. So yeah, that's what we're seeing here. Reflections. especially if it, if they're, if they reflect in something like a puddle that is not disturbed by wind, which is very calm and very mirror
Scott Wilkinson (01:33:54):
Yes. At the very mirror-like
Chris Marquardt (01:33:56):
That makes a very perfect picture. So good job. Everyone, everyone else, sorry for not getting two pictures. But all of them were pretty amazing. And now
Scott Wilkinson (01:34:08):
Time for the next
Chris Marquardt (01:34:09):
Assignment. Fish ball out.
Scott Wilkinson (01:34:11):
<Laugh> drum roll please. Yeah.
Chris Marquardt (01:34:15):
Your job. Yeah. I'm, I'm drawing one out to the drum roll.
Scott Wilkinson (01:34:19):
Let's do a drum roll. This tuba drum roll. <Laugh>. What is it? It's
Chris Marquardt (01:34:24):
The fanciest assignment. Fancy.
Scott Wilkinson (01:34:26):
Ooh.
Chris Marquardt (01:34:27):
Ooh. Fancy, fancy,
Scott Wilkinson (01:34:28):
Fancy, fancy. Hey,
Chris Marquardt (01:34:31):
Here we go. So one month. One month to take pictures off. Well, fancy things or fancy pictures. You can go as meta as you like.
Scott Wilkinson (01:34:41):
<Laugh>.
Chris Marquardt (01:34:42):
What's, what's the idea that comes into your mind when you hear the word fancy? Put that in a picture, submit it to the tech guy group on flicker and tag it with the tech tg. Fancy. That's how we find the, to talk about them here. TG Fancy is the tag tech guy is the group on Flicker and yeah. Good luck. One month to go.
Scott Wilkinson (01:35:06):
Am I correct that one has to take this picture within this month? It can't be something you already took.
Chris Marquardt (01:35:12):
Yes. Yes. That is actually the point here. You want this to be we want this to be a new picture and the main thing is to get off the sofa, to go outside to take pictures. <Laugh>, take some pictures please. You can pick, you can submit one picture a week and yeah.
Scott Wilkinson (01:35:29):
Oh, a total of four, roughly.
Chris Marquardt (01:35:32):
Yes. In the month total of four roughly. And and yeah, good luck. Fancy.
Mikah Sargent (01:35:37):
Good luck everybody. And Chris Marqui, thank you so much for being here with us. Where should folks go so they can check out your work?
Chris Marquardt (01:35:47):
Oh, the best place is chris marqui.com. That's where I, that's where I have everything, including links to my workshops. I'm gonna do a photo tour in September, so if you wanna see Eastern Europe on a, in, in an electric car road trip that takes oo from Berlin to Sylvania, then yeah, check that out. It's all over
Scott Wilkinson (01:36:09):
One. That's awesome. When is that?
Chris Marquardt (01:36:11):
In September. Early September. First two weeks.
Mikah Sargent (01:36:14):
Awesome. Chris, thank you so much for your time and we will see you again in about a month. Get in your fancy photo submissions. Bye-Bye Chris.
Chris Marquardt (01:36:24):
Bye.
Mikah Sargent (01:36:25):
Thanks again to Chris Marqui for joining us and yes, please get in your fancy submissions. Fancy. Oh my wood. That's
Scott Wilkinson (01:36:34):
Fancy. That's so fancy.
Mikah Sargent (01:36:36):
And doesn't it have that southern vibe? It's
Scott Wilkinson (01:36:38):
Fancy. Well, you know, if I was still in Southern California, I'd be going to the Renaissance Fair. Oh. And there is some fancy, fancy at the Renaissance.
Mikah Sargent (01:36:48):
That's a great, oh man, that would be good to see. Yeah. alright, let us take a quick break before we come back with more of the show. I do wanna tell you about Mint Mobile, which is bringing you this episode of Ask the Tech guys after years of fine print contracts and getting ripped off by big wireless providers, if we've learned anything, it's that There's always a catch. Always a catch. Always. Always. So when, you know, we first heard about Mint Mobile and that it offers premium wireless service starting at just $15 a month, what you may have gone, what's the catch?
Scott Wilkinson (01:37:25):
Yeah. Really
Mikah Sargent (01:37:26):
<Laugh>. But after speaking with them and using Mint Mobile, it all makes sense. There actually is no catch because Mint Mobile's secret sauce is that they're the first company to sell wireless service online only. And in doing so, they cut out the cost of retail stores and pass those sweet savings directly onto you and they can ditch that catch because of those savings. Hmm. I have a secondary, it's a Google Pixel phone and it is running on Mince Mobile and it is so much easier to deal with than the phone that I, the iPhone that I use, which is on one of those big wireless carriers where they're all these little, you, you go and you look at the bill and suddenly there's, there's like, it's sometimes it's 30 cents, sometimes it's nine. Do you know what I mean? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there's all these weird charges that just seem to c come into play and it doesn't make any sense. And you're going, why has this changed with Mint Mobile? It's the same every time. Every time it just looks the same. There's nothing to worry about. It's it's great. It's so
Scott Wilkinson (01:38:31):
They're not using the cellular service. Yeah, yeah. They're using
Mikah Sargent (01:38:33):
Online. They're using online. Yeah. So you don't have to go in person. You know, all those, the, the stores that these big wireless carriers pay for and having those people there in the stores. Oh yeah. That's where they get to cut the cost cuz it's just online. Wow. so they, they can save you money in the end is they are also saving themselves money. And honestly, I love the, the straightforward nature of Mint Mobile, but also there's a little bit of cheekiness to Mint Mobile that's enjoyable. <Laugh>, we've got this, this little slight bent of comedy that I always, their commercials are, are pretty entertaining. Their commercials are so fun. Yes. <laugh>. So for anyone out there who hates their phone Bill, mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just 15 bucks a month. And honestly, mint Mobile is the, the carrier I suggest when I hear a family member complaining, oh, I hate this about X and it's always the big carrier, I don't like this.
(01:39:24):
They're trying to think of something new. I consider Min Mobile because genuinely it's just so simple and easy to understand it. Min Mobile gives you the best rate whether you're buying for one or if you're buying for a family. And it mint families start at just two lines. So sometimes those family plans on larger carriers, you can have four or five people because actually counts <laugh>, right? All plans, all of them come with unlimited talk and text. And then you get high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any Mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all of your existing contacts. In fact, that's what my partner did when he switched from one of the big carriers to MIT Mobile. Kept the phone that he had at the time and just did a new sim and it was easy, easy peasy.
(01:40:10):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> switched to Mint Mobile and get premium wireless service starting at just 15 bucks a month. To get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free, go to mint mobile.com/atg. That's mint mobile.com/atg. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month@mintmobile.com slash atg. And if you've got one of those phones that has a, an EIM that's already built in, then you don't even have to wait for the, the SIM to arrive at your doorstep because you can just use the EIM instead. So mint Mobile will work through that method as well. So you could get started today, mint mobile.com/atg. Please give them a try. I think you'll be very happy. All right. Now that we are back from the break, let's head to another listener question. This comes from Erin and Erin writes in, I currently have an L G G one and I have been a big fan of LG for the last six years with their O LEDs. I've been reading about the improvements for the G three and Sony's QD O L E D screens. If you had the budget, would you get a G three? I love the, all of these numbers. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> a G three or an A 95 K and Aaron is looking for 77 inches or bigger.
Scott Wilkinson (01:41:37):
Hmm. This is an actually an excellent question. Okay. because LG at c e s this year did announce in the G three series, their 2023 G series this update that I mentioned earlier which improves the brightness of the OD and it, it's, it's really coming up to meet L C D tv, which the one advantage L C D TVs have over ODS is brightness. They're brighter. So this new update from LG is bringing them closer. Given that, I will say this if he wants a 77 inch, he can go with either the G three or the Sony A 95 K. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I would choose the A 95 K. It's more, it's gonna be more expensive even than the G three I'm pretty sure. But here's one difference between a conventional OLE and a QD ole conventional ole in order to get to in increase brightness. They've done this since day one for oles. Each pixel of the image has a red subpixels, a green subpixels, a blue subpixels, and a white subpixels. Okay. So it's called W R G B? Yes. Okay. That white subpixels, it put out more light, but it also desaturate the image at high brightness. Ah,
Mikah Sargent (01:43:13):
Cut
Scott Wilkinson (01:43:14):
Lead such as Sony or Samsung that we were talking about before doesn't have a white subpixels, it's just rgb so it stays more saturated as you get brighter. It also achieves greater brightness because of the fact that it's quantum dot based rather than using processing and micro lenses and other kind of tricks. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So my choice would be for 77 inch would be the Sony A 95 K. Now if he wants to go bigger than 77, the Sony maxes out at 77 inches as does the Samsung. The G three will go to 83 inches. So if you want something bigger than 77 G three is the one to get.
Mikah Sargent (01:44:00):
Got it. I actually have a question that I just thought of that is not coming from the listeners, but I was just think thinking back to short throw or even sort of, I don't know what you, it's short throw projector then what? Just projector.
Scott Wilkinson (01:44:13):
Just projector. So long throw I guess you could call it. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (01:44:16):
Long throw projector, short throw projector. Right. How do they render black? Are they not shining anything in that area and so then it's as good or close to O L E D or no? Are they shining light there?
Scott Wilkinson (01:44:30):
Generally speaking, projectors don't have as good black as flat panels. And the reason is, well, there are three primary technologies, imaging technologies that get the picture on the screen. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> one is D L P, which is a, a chip a a microchip. Right. A a biker chip. Right. A about an inch square roughly with millions of tiny micro mirrors on the surface and they vibrate back and forth. <Laugh>. That's cool. It's pretty cool. And so light shines on these micro mirrors and the amount of time they go back and forth very fast, but the amount of time they, and in one position they reflect light towards the lens and thus towards the screen. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> in the other position, they reflect light away from the lens.
(01:45:21):
So the more time they spend in the on position s sending light towards the lens, the brighter that pixel will be. Okay. The more time they send, they spend sh shooting it away, the less bright it'll be closer to black. But again, it's not perfect. You can't get zero black from, from these vibrating mirrors. The second technology is L C d, Epson is the most famous example of that. And again, it's a transmissive technology. So light passes through an L C D panel that brightens or darkens, but it can't get perfectly dark. Right. Third type is called lco liquid crystal on silicone and it's basically an L C D, but the light passes through the L C D bounces off a mirror and comes back out again. That generally achieves the best blacks. And JV C is the most famous maker of El Os, what they call D I L A. Again, these manufacturers all have names for stuff. Yeah. But they achieve the best black levels. Most u s t ultra short throw projectors use D L P technology which is good, but it doesn't get to perfect black. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, none of them get to perfect black JVC with its D I L A or Elco projection gets closest. And so if I were getting a a projector, I would get a long throw projector from jvc. Okay. That would be my answer. You
Mikah Sargent (01:46:53):
Like long throw over short throw?
Scott Wilkinson (01:46:55):
Well, in a dedicated room. Ah-Huh. <affirmative>. Now if you're gonna put this in a living room or a game room or someplace where there's gonna be more activities going on and the lights are gonna be on and you know, then yes, an ultra short throw is probably a good, a good way to go. Got it. But for a dedicated room, long throw jvc, in my opinion and sorry, Sony and Epson <laugh>, you make fine projectors, don't get me wrong.
Mikah Sargent (01:47:22):
Yeah. But it's specifically to, for this question. Yeah. Yeah. JVC has the technology that
Scott Wilkinson (01:47:28):
Does really makes the, the best black to me, you know, the best black and the most accurate color rendition, those, those are the two most important things. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Peak brightness is also important. But if you have really deep blacks, the rest of the the image is gonna pop
Mikah Sargent (01:47:44):
Out. Yeah. No matter. Yeah. Even if it's not incredibly super bright. Right. The blacks are black then Exactly.
Scott Wilkinson (01:47:49):
Else, which is why ole I prefer ole. Yeah. Because it's blacks go down to black, go down to zero mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And then even if it can't get as bright as L C d, it gets plenty bright enough and the picture really pops.
Mikah Sargent (01:48:00):
Yeah. Okay. This next question comes from George and I love it because George has answered George's own question. Oh. In the question. So what do you know? George asks what equipment is required to listen to Apple high res Lossless? I currently use Iams connected to a Dak Amp that plugs into my iPhone for Lossless listening. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So what George is talking about is a lot of the Apple Music library, and then also if you add your own music to to the app, to the app, to the music app mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, then it will have full on Apple, high res lossless. And I can't off the top of my mind remember exactly what the numbers are, but it's quite high. Higher than a, than a, you know, cd cd
Scott Wilkinson (01:48:45):
I can give you those numbers if you want. Yeah, please. Okay. So a cd, there are two, two things. Two, two parameters or, or measurements in evaluating or d specifying digital audio. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> one is the sample rate. How many times per second was the sample? Was the wave form the audio sampled? And h how many bits were used to represent each sample? Cds have these two specifications. The sample rate is 44.1 44.1 kilobits per second. Is that right? 44.1 kilohertz kilo. Sorry. Sorry. My mistake. Yes. 44,100 samples per second. Each sample is 16 bits. Okay. Now that can get reduced down by compression to mp3. But we're talking about high res here, so we're not talking about lossy compression, we're talking about lossless compression. Apple lossless compression, L a L a C, apple lossless audio coded deck can cut the amount of data by about half.
(01:50:00):
That's as much as lossless can do. So anyway, that's CD specs. 44.1 kilohertz, 16 bits. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> high res audio is anything more than that. Oh, really? So, and the typical numbers are 96 kilohertz, 24 bits. Got it. It, and the, the audio files can go up to 192 kilohertz or 384 kilohertz <laugh>. I think those are useless. Yeah. I personally think they're useless. Even 24 96. I wouldn't go any higher than that. I don't, there's no need. Yeah. the good thing about going at a higher sampling rate, 96 kilohertz, whatever sampling rate you use, you'd better not be recording any frequency, any sound, greater than half of that. Because if you do, you get this artifact Okay. Called aliasing and it's really ugly, so you don't want it. So you have to filter out everything that's coming into the system that's above half the sampling rate.
(01:51:08):
With CDs at 44.1 kilohertz, half of that is 22.05. Our hearing range only goes to 20 k. Actually, yours and mine isn't even that high. Right? Right. So you have to filter out everything above 22 kilohertz, but you wanna let in everything below that or below 20 kilohertz. So the slope of the filter has to be very steep and that causes its own problems. If you sample at 96 kilohertz, you can have a nice gentle slope on the filter. Got it. And that will prevent what are called phase artifacts. You can still prevent anything higher than let's see, half a 96 is 48. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So you wanna prevent anything higher than 48 from getting in. But anything below 48, you can let it in, even though we won't be able to hear it. Right. so this nice gentle filter on the input when you're digitizing is, is a very good thing.
(01:52:06):
So that's the use use case for 24 96, 24 bits. The number of bits specifies the dynamic range of the audio. With 16 bits, you have a theoretical dynamic range of 96 db mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, which is more than enough with dynamic range. You have to think about what's your noise floor. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, like if you're still listening in a car, your noise floor is really high. There's a lot of noise in the car. Yep. So there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to have high resolution audio in your car. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, none. You need either a super quiet room with speakers that can reproduce more than 2020 kilohertz, or you need to have headphones. And he's listening on I ems Yes. In ear monitors, which we're listening on right now. Yep. And those and headphones can easily get the dynamic range and the frequency response necessary to really appreciate high high resolution audio, which is where what I normally listen when I'm listening to, to high quality audio, I will normally listen on headphones or IMS like these. Sennheiser I e 300 s are lovely. I love because you can really appreciate the advantage of high resolution audio much more than most speaker systems in rooms. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> rooms have higher noise floor speakers may or may not be able to reproduce the, the high dynamic range and high frequency response. So the headphones and your I EMS are better way to go there. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (01:53:47):
So, George, you again, have an effect answered your question because you're doing what you do need to do. So yeah. When o on the iPhone, whenever you go into the settings and you say this is the music that I want to download, this is the quality of the music that I want to download, this is the quality of the music that I want to stream. If you set it all the way to the max, a little popup will show that says, Hey, if you wanna listen to it at this level, you need to have special equipment to do so. So that's what George is asking about. Well, George, with your IMS connected to a dak a digital audio converter, or excuse me, digital analog converter. Right. and an amp that is connected to your phone, that is exactly what you need. As
Scott Wilkinson (01:54:26):
Long as the DA could de the dak and the amp can reproduce the
Mikah Sargent (01:54:30):
Higher, higher, hopefully, hopefully you are using Yeah. A dak an amp that will play back. So, in effect, to answer the question of what equipment do you need, you need a DAK and an amp. You know, in theory that is powered on its own and it's separately powered from the phone that is, shows that it's able to reproduce that apple high res lossless format. And then you've got what you need to do. So,
Scott Wilkinson (01:54:55):
I, I tip, just for the, to answer that question, I use a, a product from a company called ifi. I F i.
Mikah Sargent (01:55:02):
Yeah, that's what Leo gave me one of those. Yeah. The hip
Scott Wilkinson (01:55:04):
Deck. The hip
Mikah Sargent (01:55:05):
Deck. Cut it, the hip, the
Scott Wilkinson (01:55:06):
Hip deck. And, and it works beautifully. And it can even be powered from the iPhone doesn't need its own power. It's got a rechargeable battery.
Mikah Sargent (01:55:14):
That's right.
Scott Wilkinson (01:55:15):
Yes, too. So it can either use its battery, it can be powered by the iPhone, which I don't normally recommend cause it's going to drain the power from the iPhone really fast. But it's a great product. Ifi makes great and they're really cost effective too. I think it's like 150 bucks or 130 bucks. And I
Mikah Sargent (01:55:30):
Love the design too. Yeah.
Scott Wilkinson (01:55:32):
Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (01:55:32):
I think it's, it's a nice, okay, good. You've got the link. So we'll have the link, George, for you in the show notes.
Scott Wilkinson (01:55:38):
<Laugh>, in fact, Eric Deckman in the chat room saying, I have a hip flask, same thing. Well, it actually is called that cuz it kind of looks like a hip
Mikah Sargent (01:55:44):
Fla. I was gonna say it does. That's exactly right. <Laugh>. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if someone, when I went to a concert tried to take it off me thinking it was a flask or something. <Laugh>. Right. I actually think we should take another break and then we'll answer just a couple of more questions and then we will say goodbye for the day. So let me tell you that already. I know right. The time just flies, flies by <laugh>. But let us talk a little bit about Cisco Meraki. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we're also bringing you this episode of Ask the Tech guys. Cisco Meraki are the experts in cloud-based networking for hybrid work. So whether you're employees are working at home, perhaps are working at a cabin in the mountains on a lounge chair at the beach, employees are working from all over the p the place.
(01:56:29):
And a cloud managed network provides the same exceptional work experience no matter where they happen to be. Honestly, hybrid work is here to stay. That is what we have come to find mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and discovered that everybody is doing the hybrid work thing. And frankly, employees are expecting hybrid work as an option. Hybrid work works best in the cloud and has its perks for both employees and leaders. Workers can move faster, they can deliver better results. And with a cloud managed network, they can do a better job. While leaders can automate distributed operations, they can build more sustainable workspaces and they can proactively protect the network. There was an I D G market pulse research report conducted former Iraqi and it highlights top tier opportunities in supporting hybrid work. Hybrid work is a priority for 78% of C-suite executives, cuz leaders want to drive collaboration forward while staying on top of boosting productivity and security.
(01:57:32):
Hybrid work, of course, does have its challenges. The I D G report raised the red flag about security, noting that 48% of leaders report cybersecurity threats as that main obstacle. It's the main reason why they want to improve those workforce experiences. Always on security monitoring is part of what makes the cloud managed network so awesome. It can use apps from Meraki's vast ecosystem of partners. These are turnkey solutions built to work seamlessly with the Meraki cloud platform for asset tracking for location analytics and more. With that, they can gather insights on how people use their workspaces. So in a smart space, for example, environmental sensors can track activity, they can track occupancy levels so that you can stay on top of cleanliness, you can reserve workspaces. So based on vacancy and employee profiles, you may have heard of hot desking. That's kind of what this is.
(01:58:24):
It allows employees to scout out a spot in a snap. Locations in restricted environments can be booked in advance and include time-based door access. And then the big one, mdm, mobile device management. Integrating devices and systems allow it to manage, update, and troubleshoot company owned devices. Even when the device and the employee are in a remote location. You can turn any space into a place of productivity and empower your organization with the same exceptional experience no matter where they work with Meraki and the Cisco suite of technology. So learn how your organization can make hybrid work work by visiting meraki.cisco.com/twit. And we thank you Cisco Meraki for sponsoring this week's episode of Ask the Tech Guys. All right. We are going into our final bits of the show. Ask the tech guys this week with Scott Wilkinson joining me here in person. Thank you.
Scott Wilkinson (01:59:21):
So happy to be here.
Mikah Sargent (01:59:22):
Yeah, it's great to have you here. And we've gotten quite a few questions about home theater. So it's,
Scott Wilkinson (01:59:28):
I'm super happy to <laugh> for this people dig this stuff, you know, they wanna know what TV to get and how to make it work well and the best it can. So that's what I'm all about.
Mikah Sargent (01:59:38):
Yeah, absolutely. Let's see. Let's go to, oh yes, that's right. We have a video question. Someone has, has emailed us in a video question, so let's give that one.
Caller 5 (01:59:52):
Hi, Mikah and Scott Love your shows. Nope, you can help me. I have a bluey player that has been acting up a lot lately. It's very frustrating to watch because it'll freeze and then it will stagger. Oh, wow. And I don't know if there's something wrong with a player. It does happen to more than one disc, but I need to find a replacement player. And I was wondering what is available these days for the Blu-ray d v D world? I don't wanna give up on these guys. They're, they're, they're great and they have a lot of them. Thanks.
Scott Wilkinson (02:00:37):
Wow. <Laugh>. Wow. We were talking earlier about disks versus streaming, and she's got a lot of, lot of blu-ray disks. I I assume they're Blu-ray, not 4k. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> or, or U h d Blu-ray. That, that player that she had very smartly took a picture of the manual which it's a, it's a Blu-ray player.
Mikah Sargent (02:00:57):
Yeah. For those listening by the way, if you didn't get to see so there's playback of a show that she was playing on the Blu-ray player and it would go for a few seconds and then it would stop and sort of pause and then it would start going again and then pause again. So definitely something wrong.
Scott Wilkinson (02:01:14):
Oh yeah. I I think it's time to replace the player. Yeah. It, it looks to me like it's a problem in the player. It's not worth fixing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, so buy another one. And then the question is, which one to buy? It looked to me like she had a pr probably not a 4K tv.
Mikah Sargent (02:01:30):
Yeah.
Scott Wilkinson (02:01:31):
So my normal recommendation would be to buy a U H D or 4K Blu-ray player, which can also play regular Blu-rays and DVDs. And I might still recommend that on the off chance that maybe someday she'll get a 4K tv, you know? Yeah,
Mikah Sargent (02:01:48):
Exactly. Yeah. You, so if you've got the, this hardware already updated, then whenever you make the choice to get the tv, you're not having to buy another new blueray. Correct. Right.
Scott Wilkinson (02:01:58):
Yeah. Correct. Exactly. So that's why I would probably recommend a a 4K or what's called a U H D Blu-Ray player and LG makes 'em, Sony makes 'em and Panasonic Okay. Makes them, and the Panasonics are generally considered a goodbye. And I'm looking to see if I have in my notes for home theater geeks. I might have my notes for maybe I do, let's see here. Wait a second. Oh, maybe not darn it. I, I was just answering this question or I'm going to be answering this question on my show. Oh, nice. A similar question about what, what Blu-ray player ultra HD Blu-ray player to get. Panasonic makes several they make, and they're in the, I believe they're called the u bps ultra ultra HD BLUERAY players. Let me just see if I can find that real quick. They make one at the $200 level, one at the $450 level and one at the $1,100 level <laugh>. Whoa.
Mikah Sargent (02:03:16):
What do you get with that?
Scott Wilkinson (02:03:18):
Well,
Mikah Sargent (02:03:19):
Why, why do they go up so much? What can you add to
Scott Wilkinson (02:03:23):
The, what can you add? It's a very good question. One of the things you probably add, I, I don't know the exact answer, but probably things like the player can do a lot of the video processing for you. Got it. Which the lower cost one probably doesn't. So let me see. U H d Blu-ray players and so I'm just looking on Amazon here. They have the, oh yeah, it's the DP dash U B something or another mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And they have the four 20 with this is all Panasonic now. DP dash UB four 20 is 218 bucks on Amazon. The U B U U D P U B eight 20 is 423 bucks. And the one thou 9,000 is almost a thousand bucks. Woo.
Mikah Sargent (02:04:29):
Yeah. Yeah. I see that the U B four 20 does not support HD R 10, HDR 10 plus and Dolby Atmos, whereas the eight 20 does.
Scott Wilkinson (02:04:40):
There you go. Exactly right. Exactly right. So the four 20 is a more basic unit mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. but it's only 200 bucks.
Mikah Sargent (02:04:49):
Right? Right. Yes,
Scott Wilkinson (02:04:50):
Exactly. So, you know, now the Sony B D P S 6,700 is 150 bucks. That probably doesn't support Dolby vision either. Again, they, they Dolby vision, you and Dolby Atmos, you have to pay Dolby a licensing fee. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (02:05:12):
So they add that to the cost of Exactly. So that you are in effect paying for it.
Scott Wilkinson (02:05:15):
Exactly. So if, you know, since you don't have a 4K tv now maybe spending only $200 is okay. But again, if it de it depends. Yeah. Are you, are you thinking about buying a new tv? Right. Is it gonna be soon? Is
Mikah Sargent (02:05:32):
It, see the flow chart getting worked out?
Scott Wilkinson (02:05:33):
Right. Exactly. Exactly. If you're gonna buy a new 4K TV soon, I would spend the extra money and get one that's capable of Dolby vision. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and Atmos. If not, then sure. Spend a couple hundred bucks, get, get the real basic one. You can, you can actually get a Blu-ray player that and that's probably gonna be in like the 50 buck range mm-hmm. <Affirmative> these days.
Mikah Sargent (02:06:00):
Just a standard. Yeah.
Scott Wilkinson (02:06:01):
Non, non ultra hd, non 4k, in which case you can get it from probably, I know you can get 'em from lg, Samsung, Sony any, any major name brand will be fine. So that's kind of what I have in mind about that. Yeah. Here's the Sony, well, geez, Sony Blu-ray player is 120, 130 bucks. Here's one for 88 bucks on, on on Amazon. L G B P 1 75 Blu-Ray player se 75 bucks. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, so if if money's really tight, you're not gonna get a blueray ultra HD player TV anytime soon. Maybe spending 70 bucks is okay and then just upgrade it when you get that tv. But if you're gonna get it soon, then I would say get a 4K player, because you'll be glad you did when you get that 4K tv.
Mikah Sargent (02:07:00):
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that's, that's great advice. Especially again, sort of working through that flow chart, right. Based on the television that you had, you don't have sort of a more modern set, in which case you don't necessarily have the, the technology to appreciate that expenditure, but Right. Maybe this sometimes is an aspirational thing. You get it. Yeah. When you go, oh yeah, now I wanna go ahead and make that upgrade, so
Scott Wilkinson (02:07:26):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. Exactly.
Mikah Sargent (02:07:27):
You're kind of looking for a way to push yourself into that <laugh>,
Scott Wilkinson (02:07:30):
<Laugh>, give me a way to make it happen. No, I always am <laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (02:07:34):
Alright, we've got a question from Vernon. Who's, who wrote him from Canada. Vernon says, I have more than 3000 emails in my Gmail account. What, is there a way to delete them without going page by page <laugh> 50 at a time? You know, I have this same question. This is a good question. So I, I checked it out and it depends on what page you're using. Because if you're, and I, the problem with this, obviously I cannot show my inbox because it's got a bunch of emails in there that, you know, I need to not show. But if you, if you're in your main Gmail page and you select the little checkbox that highlights what emails are available on that screen from the inbox page, then it won't let you select more. But if you have any sort of filter set up, if you have any sort of categories set up, if you have any tag set up, if you go onto any of those screens and you select the checkbox, there's a little option that says it, it will pop up and it's kind of just a little link and it says select all of the emails in this filter in this category, in this thing.
(02:08:45):
Oh. Or just the ones that are available on the page. So you can click that and then it will actually select more than just what you're viewing on the page. So my suggestion for you in this case would be to basically switch to one of those categories and then it's probably gonna break it into, you know, a thousand emails as opposed to the full 3000. But then at least you could select those, those thousand, get rid of those, and go to the next category, select those. And so it's a little bit of work not nearly as much as page by page. Exactly. And then of course, there's the option that I'm sure a lot of folks would, would mention, which is you could use a third party app, which is a little bit more complicated. So you know, you have what is it, thunder, Thunderbird, I don't know if Firefox, even if Mozilla still makes that, but just a third party email app.
(02:09:34):
And many of those are gonna let you select more than just the first 50 emails, in which case then you can archive the ones that you don't want. So if you wanna keep it all in Gmail, just use the categories or tags, you'll be able to select more than just the first 50, and you can go from there. Great. All right. Let's see a question in the I R C says, I'm thinking of going with Verizon for cell data to stream videos and Verizon caps, their streaming quality to seven 20 p. Ah, how will this look on a TCL 4K TV with HD R? Is it going to look bad? Should I just avoid going with Verizon as my main form of internet? So this is actually a good question. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, if I am, if I've got this brand new television, but the only thing I can stream on it is something that is lower quality, is it going to try to upscale to 4k? Oh, it absolutely will. Yeah. Can I change resolutions on the TV or
Scott Wilkinson (02:10:33):
Not really? Okay. You, it's, it's gonna take whatever it gets and upscale it to 4k, which is one reason to buy you know, a TV with better processing mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, because that's where the upscaling happens. But I, I would strongly recommend finding a service that doesn't cap your, your streaming at seven 20 p, that's pretty low. Basically, the lower the resolution of the input, the more the TV has to do to upscale. The harder it is, it's gonna look softer. It's just gonna look softer. It's not gonna look that great. I, you know, and I must admit, I don't know which services, I didn't even know this about Verizon.
Mikah Sargent (02:11:20):
Yeah. I didn't know, especially if you're doing it, I can understand if you're doing it from a hotspot from your phone Sure. Method, right?
Scott Wilkinson (02:11:27):
Sure. But at home.
Mikah Sargent (02:11:28):
But at home, if I'm paying for Verizon internet. Yeah. and, and even if it is cellular, cuz this person is in an rv, but even if
Scott Wilkinson (02:11:36):
It's, oh, well if it's cellular then, but
Mikah Sargent (02:11:38):
If I
Scott Wilkinson (02:11:39):
Isn is that restricted?
Mikah Sargent (02:11:40):
Yeah. But if I've got a puck that is specifically meant to be this hotspot device, Uhhuh <affirmative>, I feel like they have to be mindful that there are some people who live more nomadic lifestyles. Right. So maybe, yeah. It's just, it's just Verizon. Maybe you should check with other carriers. I would. And see, I think T-Mobile would be a good one to check based on, I remember Leo talking about his daughter, he got her cellular through T-Mobile Uhhuh <affirmative> as an internet connection and it was pretty great. So you may see how they cap theirs if they do.
Scott Wilkinson (02:12:10):
Yeah. Yeah. I would definitely look at others. Cuz seven 20 P is gonna look pretty soft.
Mikah Sargent (02:12:15):
Yep. Yep. I love this. This question also came from the irc. It says this is a, this is a future looking question. Hey Scott, here's a question. Oh, 10 years from now, are we going to be mounting and watching our TVs in portrait mode to match our cell phones? Do you think video will go the way of portrait mode?
Scott Wilkinson (02:12:36):
I hope the hell not
Mikah Sargent (02:12:38):
<Laugh>.
Scott Wilkinson (02:12:39):
I really hope not. I don't think so. I I think that, I mean, sure. Cell phone, and I'll tell you this, I, when I shoot video with my cell phone, I do it in landscape mode, <laugh>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But most people shoot it in in portrait mode. I, in fact, somebody, I was outside a store and somebody asked me, oh, can you take my picture? Sure. So I rotated it in this. Oh, can you rotate it in the other way? Yeah. Yes. I really want portrait mode. Okay.
Mikah Sargent (02:13:04):
<Laugh>. I've had that happen too.
Scott Wilkinson (02:13:06):
Yeah. But content, you know, professional content, movies, TV shows, they're always gonna be in landscape.
Mikah Sargent (02:13:13):
Yeah. I mean the two separate art forms. Right. Exactly. It's, it's, and when we're viewing on our phone viewing in that mode with our phone, that way makes sense. Sure. We don't, me, I, I shouldn't say everyone, but many of us aren't <laugh> opening up a video on our phone that is, it's meant to be watched this way and looking
Scott Wilkinson (02:13:32):
At it that way. Yeah. That's
Mikah Sargent (02:13:34):
Terrible. So you've got the two different modes means of looking at video.
Scott Wilkinson (02:13:37):
Now, I'll tell you this, Samsung at least makes a TV where you can, you can turn it <laugh>, you can rotate it. <Laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (02:13:44):
He's so extra. I know. <Laugh>, this is true. As, as John points out, his eyes are always going to be landscape, not portrait. That's true. We got two of them and they're set side by side, not up and down. So That's right.
Scott Wilkinson (02:13:57):
<Laugh>, <laugh>, that would be different. Boy, God would be different, wouldn't it?
Mikah Sargent (02:14:01):
So yeah. That, that makes the most sense to me. I don't, I I don't think we, I
Scott Wilkinson (02:14:06):
Don't think in 10 years it's their TVs are gonna be meant.
Mikah Sargent (02:14:08):
Honestly, I don't think in 10, well, maybe 20 years. I don't think we'll have TVs in the way that we see them right now. I think they will be augmented screens. Yeah. It's, we're wearing glasses or frames or something. Right. That we, I can turn and make any blank space on the wall of screen or the screen could be right in front of me. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and you know what I mean? So I think one of these days will get rid of the concept of like a frame that's on the wall,
Scott Wilkinson (02:14:36):
Right. And or mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. I've been following a company called Light Field Labs that's making truly holographic displays and they're in the early stage. Oh yeah. I remember you talking about, you know, I was talking about this on the tech guy for once and in 20 years, 10 to 20 years, you're gonna have true holographic images in your
Mikah Sargent (02:15:01):
Room. Won't that be cool?
Scott Wilkinson (02:15:02):
And that will be super
Mikah Sargent (02:15:03):
Cool <laugh>. That'll be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see. Alright. I think that brings us to the end really
Scott Wilkinson (02:15:10):
Already
Mikah Sargent (02:15:11):
This episode of Ask the Tech guys. Oh man, it's been a pleasure having Scott Wilkinson here in person. Thank you. It's
Scott Wilkinson (02:15:17):
Been a real pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (02:15:19):
Folks wanna follow you online, check out the great work that you're doing and see and listen to you. Where do they go?
Scott Wilkinson (02:15:25):
They, the best place is right here@twittwit.tv slash HTG for Home Theater Geeks version 2.0. <Laugh> you know, we did a, we did the Home Theater Geeks for eight years. Wow. from 2009 to 2018, and then it was off the air for a while, but I was invited to come back and do it again. And I'm so happy to be doing it again. And it's, it's me answering questions and pontificating about one thing or another. Occasionally have a guest on we've got Tom Holman, the t h of t H x Oh wow. On the show. That's might be his might be, might have started this might this last Thursday. He's, he's a two-parter. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, he gets two parts <laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (02:16:14):
Yeah.
Scott Wilkinson (02:16:15):
But it drops every Thursday at 4:00 PM and it's a club twit show, so you gotta join Club Twit, which I hope you do because it's well worth it. Not only for Home Theater Geeks, but for so many other great shows as well. And we, I have a great time doing it, and that's now mostly what I'm doing in this realm.
Mikah Sargent (02:16:35):
Awesome. speaking of Club Twit, you can join the club by going to twit.tv/club twit. When you head there, you will see the option to subscribe to the show or subscribe to the show too. <Laugh> become a subscriber starting at $7 a month or $84 a year, and joining the club gets you a lot of great stuff. First you get access to the Club twit discord, which has a lot of, it's a great place to go and chat with your fellow Club TWIT members. Those of us here at twit, sharing animated images, having loads of great conversations. You also got every single Twitch show that is published as a public show. You get that without any ads. So you in effect are sponsoring the network. You're supporting the network. So you get to get all of those shows ad free. It's just the content and access to the twit plus bonus feed that has extra stuff you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the show special events. You
Scott Wilkinson (02:17:27):
Can watch the shows being sh being recorded.
Mikah Sargent (02:17:29):
Exactly. You can watch it live as they're being recorded. So it's a great place to join the club and support the network directly. And then as Scott mentioned, you get access to Home Theater Geeks. You also get access to the Untitled Linux Show, which is a show, as you might imagine, all about Linux <laugh>. There's Hands-on Windows, which is Paul Program, where he covers windows, tips and Tricks. And then my program Hands on Mac, which is all things Apple. So got lots of tips and tricks for your Mac, for your iPhone, all sorts of fun stuff. And we continue to try to make the Club more and more valuable to you as a subscriber. So when we say starting at $7 a month, that's because some people said, Hey, I'd like to give you more. Can I do that? So if you'd like to pay more than $7, you can.
(02:18:14):
And we would love to have you join the club twit.tv/club twit ask the tech guys records every Sunday round about 11:00 AM Pacific. So please tune in by going to twit.tv/live every Sunday. But we think the best way to get the show is by becoming a subscriber or a follower, depending on what service you're using. So just head to twit tv slash atg. There you'll find links to subscribe to the audio and video versions of the show across all sorts of different platforms. Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, all of those places. So please consider following us, subscribing and making sure that you have access to the episodes as soon as they hit. You can find me online@chihuahua.coffee. That's c hhi h hoa h a.coffee. That's where I have most of the links that I'm available online. Or find me at Mikah Sargent on many a social media network. I record. Ask the tech guys every Sunday, Tuesdays, I do iOS today with Rosemary Orchard and Thursdays tech News Weekly with Jason Howell. So please check out those shows as well. And we will see you next week for another episode of Ask the Tech Guys. But until then, I thank all of you for tuning in and hope to see you again soon. Goodbye. Geek out.
Jonathan Bennett (02:19:34):
Hey, we should talk Linux. It's the operating system that runs the internet, but your game consoles, cell phones, and maybe even the machine on your desk, you already knew all that. What you may not know is that Twit now is a show dedicated to it, the Untitled Linux Show. Whether you're a Linux Pro, a burgeoning ciit man, or just curious what the big deal is, you should join us on The Club Twit Discord every Saturday afternoon for news analysis and tips to sharpen your Linux skills. And then make sure you subscribe to the Club twit Exclusive Untitled Linux Show. Wait, you're not a Club Twit member yet. We'll go to twit.tv/clubtwit and sign up. Hope to see you there.
