TV

We need TV. Seems easy enough, but it's not so simple. France has a few channels and those are either over the air, I think, or on TNT. TNT is not Turner (something) (something) but cable TV in France. It has 18 free channels and other channels that you can subscribe to. If we want TNT in our place with a box, we need to pay 30,00 euros ($45) to buy one. Hopefully, we can get enough channels on the antenna well enough that we don't have to do that, though.

Anyway, there was a TV advertized on the bulletin board of our residence. We sent the sellers (a couple of German students) an email asking about the TV. Turns out they put it on eBay.fr. Cool. We found it. Nobody was interested and the reserve bid was only 1 euro. But, it looked like the TV was going to not sell. Then about 2 hours before the end of the auction, someone put a bid on it. So we bid. Right now there is about a half hour to go and our bid (10 euro max for a bid of 5,50 euros) is the top bid.

It's kind of fun. We are learning about TV and eBay.fr. That's always fun. If we get the TV, we get to figure out how to get it hooked up. Hopefully not too hard and hopefully we won't need TNT or the converter/30,00 euro hookup.

later that evening
Yay!!! We won on eBay. Some guy started the bidding at 5,00 so our 10,00 euro turned it into a 5,50 price. Then, with 1:30 left, some other guy came in with 6,00 and then 7,00 euros in the last 0:14 seconds. The result? We got the TV for 7,50 euros or just over $10. Now we have to pick it up and lug it back. It is very close to where the courthouses are. Not excessively far, but it's not going to be fun to lug it back.

The next day
OK, what a day. We emailed the owners of the TV and didn't get an email. So we decided to just pop over to their place. They are right by a church on St. Anne's Plaza. We rang and a guy answered. He's German and spoke English. He said he's just there with his girlfriend and she's be back in about an hour. So we waited an hour and went back. They are all Germans. Two cute German women studying something here in Montpellier about to head off to their internships in other cities. They leave the next day and the day after, respectively.

Then we saw the TV. We knew how far we had to lug it (about a 10 minute walk unencumbered). It wasn't pretty. The TV is big. Not super big, but big. And ugly. Here it is:


Isn't that the ugliest TV you ever saw in your life? Gee it's ugly! Anyway, it was ours. I gave them 8,00 euros even though we got it for 7,50. So $12 for a TV. Not bad--even though it's so damn ugly.

We managed to get it to come with the chair it was on. We lashed the TV to the chair and started lugging, carrying, and dragging it. We'd try one thing for a block, then try another thing for a block, then another for yet another block. Block after block. When we were half a block away some guy saw us and volunteered his friend to help us. His friend took it the rest of the way and up to our room. We thanked him graciously and gave him a can of beer which he cheerfully received.

Here's the chair which we now have:


Then the hard part. Getting it hooked up. We had a cable but it didn't fit into the TV. But we figured we'd be able to get something off the air even with no connections. You can always get a really staticy picture. But before I go on, I need to explain something about the Radiola RC5.

The TV has 8 channels. By that I don't mean that there is channel 1-8. There are 69 potential channels, but you have to choose the eight you want to see and assign them to 1-8. So how do you program which channels get assigned to the numbers 1-8? Voila!




This has 8 sets of a screw thingies and a 4 positon white slider switch. See the picture below to know what the white slider does. So what you do is use the white slider to select a band. Then you tune it with the screw thingy. You screw a little slider across the length of the worm screw to tune it. It takes about 2 or 3 minutes to fully traverse the length of the screw until you find a channel. Do this for each of the channels, 1-8, that you want to program.

So back to our story. We tried to get a channel on channel 1. Nothing. As I said already, we couldn't get the cable plugged into the TV--just the wall. So we headed back to the Germans at St Anne Plaza. We bought a little shelf for 5,00 euros. and explained our predicament with the TV and asked for advice. They said they had some sort of internet box. They said you can hook it to the wall for the free channels or hook it to the internet for all the channels. We headed back.

Frankly, other than getting the shelf, we didn't make any progress on the TV side. So we put the shelf into our place and made a third trip back to the Germans. This time they gave us their cable box. It is a Neuf brand media center with a card with a smart chip, USB port, ethernet, TV--basically a full media center that is computer controlled. They also gave us a couple of splitters. One splitter had a sightly crushed connector--so it would fit into the TV. That is how they got the signal into the TV. The hole in the TV is the wrong size for the standard cable. So we lugged home the cable box.



We plugged the cable box into the wall and then used the "peritel" to connect to the TV. A "peritel" is a big connector with 20 connections--sort of like the old monster Centronics printer cables from the days of computer yore. With the peritel plugged in, we could see the name of the channel on the screen, but not the channel itself. It scanned and found 22 channels, but we couldn't see them. It seemed like progress, but not really.



Then somehow--I don't know how--with the TV plugged into just the wall, it suddenly had a channel. So we started adding channels. We managed to find 4 or 5 unique channels. THe same that we had in the other place we lived. That means we can watch such shows as Les Experts: Miami, New York: Unite Speciale, portes Disparus (CSI: Miami, Law & Order: SVU, Without a Trace)--we hope.

All that remained was to return the cable box to the Germans. Elena did that while I cooked up a dinner and went to the store to buy a well deserved bottle of wine.

So now we have a TV. It has a few quirks. One quirk is that once every few minutes, it sort of flickers off and loses the signal briefly. It's a $12 TV, so I can live with that.

Also, there is no remote control. Back in the olden days, they didn't have remote controls yet. I think it went Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrial Age, Remote Control Age. This TV is too old. Fortunately, there are only 5 channels, so we don't have to do much surfing.

But the other quirk is that it doesn't turn off. There is a big button called M/A that pushes for in and out. It looks like it should be a power button. But it's not. It doesn't turn off the power. It can turn on the TV if the TV has been plugged in. Clicking the channel buttons will also turn on the power of a freshly plugged in TV. The only way to turn it off is to unplug it. Just in case you were dozing because my blog is too long, let me repeat that in bold: There is no turn off the TV--you have to unplug it!



We haven't decided yet, but we may go out and get a TNT box to get 18 free digital channels. The box would be 30 euros, but we could sell it again on eBay later to get some of the money back. We'll see if it's worth it.

Update from March 31
There are movies, but some of the channels are scrambled for some of the movies. Like we wanted to watch "Be Cool" with John Travolta, but it was scrambled. I found the schedule for movies at http://www.programme-tv.net .