After watching the world cup in Big Bamboo in Shanghai and then the Brass Monkey in Taipei I was pretty much blown away by the difference in quality.
Most of it was the picture, in Taipei they were showing in amazing high definition on a high contrast 3m projector screen while in Shanghai we have to make do with a fuzzy, poorly low-contrast picture.
It wasn’t just that though, the Brass Monkey had made a real effort, they’d totally cleared the bar area and put in rows and rows of seats like a cinema, their restaurant was serving food in cardboard take-away boxes so you didn’t need a table to eat, there were extra bottle bars dotted around the place (Big Bamboo by contrast was waitress service and your selection of drinks was limited to what she could be bothered to fetch for you. In my case I wanted a pint of Carlsberg, ““Oh, our draft beer is broken tonight, we only have bottles” the waitress told me, I pointed out that everyone else was drinking pints, “oh, yes, it broke just now” she said, so off I went to the bar to find everything as normal and they were still serving pints…), oh and a big thing for me, The Brass Monkey was no-smoking inside (proper no-smoking, not Shanghai style no-smoking)!!
So, when I got back to Shanghai I somewhat missed watching the World Cup in Taipei, we ended up watching the england match in the Park Tavern at the weekend, that was somewhat better than Bamboo, but still not as good. Then at the weekend I popped into my local game/dvd shop to buy a couple of movies and noticed a box in front of their tv and the empty box at the side, the empty box had 1080i written on it (the resolution of HD tv) so I asked what it was. “Oh, this is so you can watch the world cup in high definition” they said. Well, within about 10 minutes I was back at home wiring it up, and it was well worth the 480 kuai we paid for it.
Basically it turns out there are two domestic HD channels which I’d never heard of, CCTV-HD and Dong-Fang, they broadcast terrestially. So you basically buy a digital set-top box and an aerial (which you just seem to have to place near a window, there’s no aiming and it seems like it doesn’t even have to be outside) and away you go.
So far it looks amazing, the picture is a bit up and down, it almost seems like they compress the signal a little more during the daytime repeats, it looks amazing for the live games though (with english commentary from radio 5 live!). Here are some pictures of the image (click for full size images):
HDTV – watching England get humiliated by countries I’ve barely heard of will be even more painful in jaw-droppingly sharp HD, in fact I’m going to watch the England match in the pub…
Naturally the first thing H wanted to do when we set this up was watch the news to take a look at how dreadful the presenters looked in “real life”. Sure enough the news came on and I heard H screaming with laughter from the lounge, sure enough the presenter had a face like the surface of the moon and was absolutely caked in powder and make-up…
At the moment it seems like CCTV-HD is showing pretty much 24 hour coverage of the world cup, not sure what their normal footage is going to be like..
Edit:
here’s how the setup looks:
I’ve just read something that says you should point the aerial towards the pearl tower, well I’m pointing nowhere near it but still getting a great picture.
Oh, you’ll need to buy a HDMI cable to connect to the tv, other than that everything’s in the box
