Vuelta Coverage
 

Anyone know what my options are for viewing the Vuelta this year from the U.S.?

None and none. Torrents are probably your only real option.

Check back here in a few weeks

Cycling.tv - but you must pay.

LOL - uh-huh.

Cycling.tv is saying right now that they'll have a free feed at 400kbps - which is pretty darn good! You can pay 21 Euros and get up to 1800kbps which is nearly HD quality. In the past their free feed has only been 100kbps which kinda sucks so I've paid but with 400kbps I may not......their commentary team is excellent as well. Site is a bit wonky and can take some fiddling as well - caveat emptor. They'll also have high quailty video on demand replays that you can watch at your leisure if you pay.

When deciding to buy or not take into account your Internet connection. Obviously (well - apparently not obvious to everyone) if you're on a 512k DSL line you won't get the 1800k feed......

Forgot cycling.tv. I've avoided it because I've heard some bad stuff about wonky feeds and I also can't record it and watch it on the tele.

Cycling.tv and bittorrent are my best friends...

I posted the same question yesterday, only wondering whether Eurosport would show it. They've shown some less popular cycling this past twelve months - championships from Salzburg, some French road racing just before the tour. They also showed the Giro, so I would be kind of surpized if they didn;t show it, but I can't find any schedule for September, so maybe they won;t. I was half hoping they'd show the tour of Germany also, but I just checked their August schedule, and they're too busy showing snooker, canoeing and, errr, beach volleyball (live).

Ho hum.

1. Feeds are feeds. They get the pictures from whoever the broadcaster is. They use the same feeds as eveyone else

2. You dont need to record it. Once the stage is over, they have a highlights and an 'as live' selections available in the 'video on demand' archive.

3. As for the TV - If you have a plasma or LCD with a VGA connection and audio jack, you can watch it on TV. I did this with the Cycling TV feeds during the Giro. I hooked my laptop to my 50" plasma and watched at the highest bandwitdh my cable modem would thruput. The picture was suprisingly good. Better than the picture on the laptop screen.

4. Its all free up to 400 kps. You have to pay for the higher thruput rate feeds. 400kps is fine for me here at the work to listen to the audio part while im working.

I used cycling.tv for the Giro. I can't tell you how much better the coverage was over the Tour. One 10 second commercial every 15 minutes, no stupid (IMO) human interest stories and the announcers don't dumb down the commentary for Joe-sixpack who may be watching. It was $24, you can get 6 movies from Blockbuster or 40+ hours of coverage.

Only the first day was there a slow login, other than that, the 1200 kbs made for a great picture on my computer or I could hook it up to my TV.

Sorry to sound like a commercial, but it was a great way to spend $24.

Thanks. How do you output the signal from the laptop though?

I think I will give cycling.tv a shot this time. :)

I would also keep an eye on steephill: http://www.steephill.tv/2007/vuelta-a-espana/

You need a laptop with some sort of TV out (e.g. S-Video) or a TV with monitor in if you want to watch it on a regular TV. Of course if you do S-Video out you need a TV with S-Video in - or a VCR with S-Video in......CompUSA or somebody like that could probably help you if you need it. Usually you output the sound via the headphone port using a special cable. Again, CompUSA, Best Buy or Radio Shack can probably help you put together a setup.

The biggest problem with Cycling.tv is that the interface is just way too complicated and can be very non-intuitive. Remember there is more than one window, try refreshing those windows, etc. It takes some fiddling sometimes but is usually quite reliable. Don't freak out if the coverage starts 1/2 hour after it should.

During the entire Giro they probably had three late days and required quite a bit of fiddling. They quite-brilliantly rolled out their new interface the day before the Giro started which created all sorts of fun but they've worked out most of those bugs. If you're willing to accept that you might have to try more than one button to make it work and that there are people running all this stuff and people are prone to making mistakes you'll be quite happy. During the Giro there were quite a few people who completely tilted when things weren't totally perfect. Their loss. The guys at Cycling.tv worked very hard to sort everything out. Amazingly, sending an expletive-filled email during a crisis is not nearly as helpful as one would think! ;)

If you can just get it through your head that viewing it 1/2 an hour late is better than not viewing at all, you'll be thrilled.

And yeah, the coverage and commentary are brilliant. One thing the commentators point out is that for whatever reason Spanish TV is prone to using long helicopter shots too often. As mentioned there's nothing Cycling.tv can do about that.

Chris

Another vote for cycling.tv

Watching the horrible coverage of the Tour on Versus made me realize how much I love cycling.tv. Hopefully someday Versus will drop the Tour so cycling.tv can pick it up.

So cycling.tv it is.
Thanks for the help.

how many spanish riders will bet busted for dope............

I do. I record it on to an old VCR and then stick a tape into the machine and watch it later. There's also "as live" feeds available later and a highlights package of the day's stage if you'd rather watch that. I also have no issues with the feed and there are multiple speeds available. The reason I did the VCR thing was early on, they were not too quick with putting up the highlights portion, but after they did, I could pull it up on the computer and wathch it any time I wanted.

I watched the Giro, Tour of Flanders, Liege, Paris-Roubaix, all live. No problems at all. The Giro was on the Versus Channel portion of cycling.tv

I think it's great.

I have paid for cycling.tv for 3 years running now but when they started imbedding DRM codes in the "as live" repeat streams in this years Giro I gave up because I have been capturing the streams with Replay A/V than burning them to DVD. Now if you dont capture live (which does not contain Digital Rights Management YET) your f'ed. However if you just want to watch and not record cycling.tv is a great option. Oh well I did burn 63 hour of the 2005 Giro, 57 hours of the 2005 Vuelta, 51 hours of the 2006 Giro, 49 hours of the 2006 Vuelta and sadly 23 hour of this years Giro, good while it lasted. I also got a bunch of hour of the spring classics too. Should be enough to keep me entertained on the trainer for a couple of winters. By the way if you want to burn use high quility DVD's like Taiyo-Yuden's, got to buy them on line, all the stuff a you local Best Buy is usless.

steppy

My 3 year old Sony Viao has a VGA external monitor output jack and a 1/8" audio line out jack. My plasma TV had VGA input jacks and 1/8" audio in jacks.

Works out quite nicely.

I bought a wireless mouse and keyboard set to round it all out. At this point my laptop is just a CPU.

The only glitch is you need to turn off the screen saver while your watching the broadcasts.

I wouldn't pay for cycling.tv again after the Giro debacle; any day of the week you could get a seamless clean feed for free from RAI while cycling.tv was all over the map. In 2007 this is pretty pedestrian technology, the porno-kings seem to have it mastered but cycling.tv doesn't.

+1 except the porno kings don't give a damn about Digital Rights Managment, skin is skin. Funny story I never have paid 1 cent for porn but I purchase a prepaied Master Gift card for 20 bucks and attempted to sign up one day on a sight I was intrested in and their security service quickly disable my account and credited my gift card, reason "we detected possible mis use of a gift card". Real reason they wanted me to use a "real" credit card so they could automatically re-new my account. *******s.

steppy

I have DishTV (sattelite)and I just subscribe to Dish Latino for the month. They have a channel from Spain that has Vuelta coverage daily. Just set the DVR and off we go. Costs 20 buck or so for the month.

TVE (the equivalent of RAI 3 and France 1/2) in Spain carries it every year. Someone in VT told me a year or so ago that they went to a friend's house there to watch it live every day. Some satellite service carried it, but I never found out which one.

Yeah, Comcast here had TVE - what, 3 years ago? - but have since dropped it. It was friggin' fantastic! The graphics were good enough and I can pick out a little Spanish and I know the sport so I could follow it easily.

The best was going to Comcast to figure out the most cost-effective way for me to get it. They call out their spanish TV expert and she starts talking to me in Spanish. The look on her face when I told her I wanted to sign up for TVE but didn't speak Spanish was priceless.