I bought a 37″ Westinghouse LVM-37W1 1080i LCD monitor 3 years ago expecting to get 10 years of life out of it. I spent $1,803 on it (I am an early adopter). Now it is losing it’s picture a lot and is becoming unstable.

I understand that the lifespan for a LCD TV is around 60,000 hours. At ten years of use I should have got 16 hours a day use out of it. We usually watch about 2 hours a day.

I did a search on the internet for “Westinghouse LVM-37w1 Repair” and found a ton of people with the same issue I have:

I tried a technician knowledgeable on this set, and it would have cost $500-800 to repair the set. We learned from different forums that the likely culprit was either the power supply board or the LCD controller. We also picked up the rumor that Westinghouse had quit making replacement part. It would seem that the management of this organization has a death wish. TO THE CHASE: shopjimmy.com is now selling parts from cannibalized sets. They have a non-DOA warranty and a good return policy. A power supply from “Jimmy” solved my problem. I have one important hint: To remove the back, take out the obvious screws and the base. Then remove the ~5/8″ rods that protrude from the bottom. There is a screw up inside each rod.

$500 to $800 bucks is a ton of $ for a power supply that is not made any longer. I am not buying Westinghouse anymore if they won’t support their project only after 3 years! I can buy a new 40″ LCD at Costco for $999 that does 1080P.

Another consideration is the TV monitor LVM-37W1 uses 270 watts during use. A new and even larger monitor will require 265 watts. (I thought that would be lower by now.)

Also I would like to get a monitor with a card slot so I can get rid of the Comcast DVR which wastes a ton of electricity.

Update: I was in BestBuy today (the place I bought the LCD) and they do have the power supply listed on their site – so it can be ordered. Now the issue is if I want to replace it myself. PWB assy main bd l37avw 43aab part number Westinghouse Digital Part #5600110382

I want to do the right thing and make sure I am obeying the rules on the video sharing sites that I use, but they are making it so hard.

First off when you upload a video they tell you clearly that they do not want copyrighted material or porn on their site. But they hide, and I mean really hide way down in the bowels of the TOS that they do not allow commercial videos on their site. They only want “personal use”.

Well, every site that I have been to not only has tons of commercial type videos that promote companies but they actually feature them sometimes!

Case and point, http://tv.winelibrary.com/ which is a GREAT show, but it is promoting Gary’s site to sell wine. But yet Viddler.com features his videos! Please explain why?

Another one is AskTheBuilder videos on YouTube which are also great, he is promoting his site and I know that Google loves him because he gets to test out all their new ad revenue ideas.

I have emailed Blip.tv, Vimeo.com and others to see if my videos are ok, and they say no – so I have to delete them.

Vimeo.com response:

Yes, that video is commercial in nature and not allowed.

Blip.tv response:

Based on the example video, it would not meet the standards of the terms of service, per the reason below.

I have an idea to grow my business with video but I do not want to make that investment in time if I will get all my videos deleted.

Sure I can use a paid service to get around this issue like BrightCove, but why should I have to pay when others are getting away with this?

Update: I have also tried the WD Live set top box which does play AVCHD files but they also have gaps between files. I am going to try the Boxee Box soon.

I got my Popcorn Hour device yesterday and I have say it is a really cool little box.

The AVCHD files look amazing and are streaming from my network just fine.

The box does some other really neat stuff.

The only issue I have right now is that there is a gap between files. I have joined them using TSSplitter which works well but it is still not perfect.

I am working with others in the forum to fix this issue. I will update when I learn more.

Someone at the forum suggested to combine them on a binary level with the MSDOS command.

But that didn’t work.

commands do not work on video files, since the resulting file header is not modified.

Then I found this really good thread on AVSForum that had a few ideas. I tried using the free SMLabs tool and it works for the first 2 clips and then freezes on the 3rd one. I like this software so I am still working on the freeze issue. It seems to be working for others that have used it.

Update:

Western Digital came out with a popcorn hour box about 6 months ago.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=572

$99 at BestBuy.

I like my Popcorn hour but my biggest problem with it is it will not playback my AVCHD files back to back seamlessly. I know you can use TSmuxer and other ways to get around this, for for me this is just another painful step.

I just talked with a WD sales rep on the phone that said their product will play files back to back seamlessly! I read this from a review of the product:

Quote:I start on the first file then it plays them in order seamlessly.

For me it is big enough an issue to replace the PCH.

Has anyone here used the new WB media box and can verify that it can play back my AVCHD files back to back seamlessly? I called Bestbuy and asked them if I could demo it, but they said I would have to buy it, try it out and bring back if it didn’t.

In this post I am comparing video sharing sites, like YouTube.com, Blip.TV, Vimeo. The video of the Town of Superior is an idea I have for creating traffic to my RentVine site by providing free neighborhood profile videos.

What I ended up doing based off my results was to use my own flash player on my server but to serve up the actual file FLV from Blip.tv.

Transcoding Results: (I downloaded and researched the flv files)

• Vimeo flv file transcoded resulted in a 6.25meg, video 470k data rate 428×320 On2 VP6, 29.97fps, audio rate 109.4k.
• The YouTube flv file transcoded resulted in a 3.3meg, video 320k data rate 320×240, audio rate unknown.
• MetaCafe flv file transcoded resulted in a 1.9meg, video unknown data rate 320×240, 29.97fps, audio rate unknown.
• The Blip flv file transcoded resulted in a 5.6meg, video 400k data rate 428×320 On2 VP6, 15fps, audio rate 80k.
• Google Video flv file transcoded resulted in a 3.3meg, video 248k data rate 320×240, 29.97fps, audio rate 64k.

Vimeo

YouTube

MetaCafe

Blip.TV

[bliptvsmall Dugdale-SuperiorColoradoNeighborhoodProfileVideo893]

Revver

Google Video

To be fair I used the same .wmv file for each video sharing site. Encoded at CBR two pass, bit rate 800K. I created them all to be the same 320×240 format to match YouTube’s small format for a fair comparison.

Speed is a big issue for me, if it takes the video 15 to load or even just to load the video player and has to keep buffering that is not a good thing for me.

1. MetaCafe loaded in 3-4 seconds.
2. Vimeo loaded in 6-18 seconds.
3. YouTube loaded in 21-25 seconds.
4. Blip.TV loaded in 30-39 seconds.
5. Revver loaded in 80 seconds.
6. Google Video in 29 seconds.

Thumbnail Images: If the thumbnail looks terrible your click thru rate falls off a lot compared to a real quality image. YouTube has the worst thumbnails, that is why I want to stay away from them.

Conclusions: Vimeo is a bit cleaner looking that YouTube, but I am surprised that YouTube actually is not that far off from Vimeo. I love Vimeo’s thumbnail quality, but I do not like the busy flash player that I don’t have much control over.

MetaCafe has terrible quality but great on download speed, didn’t expect YouTube to beat it out. Since it loads so fast I am guessing the data rate must be really low (can anything be lower than YouTube?).

Revver is very good picture quality but it is the worst at download and upload speeds.

Another speed consideration is upload speed (putting the video up on a sharing site), most are all about the same, however Revver is amazingly slow – it took at least 5 hours.

What are your thoughts?

Sad to hear that Comcast will be announcing a 250GB monthly cap today. It starts in October.

It’s sad because most people will not know how to check their current monthly usage, and in fear of hitting the cap will perhaps not watch as many videos online.

This will hurt the online video industry and sites like my SolarDave site.

We are taking a big step backwards on this issue.