OT Utter Broadcasting Stupidity.

[Capitol]

Having got out the ladders, erected the scaffold tower and played with different aerials for a couple of days, I got my system back to operating correctly. So it was time to retune all the TVs and PVRs. A job I hate. All went well on the TVs and the HD PVR, all the channels were there. Then I tried the other two PVRs which are SD units. That's when I discovered that some idiot has broadcast channel 71 SD (Motors TV) with HD encoding. As a result any PVR with DVBT (SD) decoding cannot receive this SD channel. Also other programs have changed channels. Why on earth is this stupidity allowed? I'm sick and fed up with retuning TVs every few months.

[Graham.]

It's not the only SD channel on com7. Al Jazeera Arabic is also there in SD. DVBT2 MUXes are often called HD MUXes but their is no technical reason why SD channels shouldn't use them too, and there are advantages in doing so.

The word is there is going to be more of this happening, in fact, the word is that DVBT will become obsolete soon so if your equipment isn't T2 (HD to most people) then your're f***ed.

[Tim Watts]

And to think how long we did with VHF, then UHF analogue TV...

[The Natural Philosopher]

VHF was only around 450 years IIRC 1936 - 1985, but was more or less obsolecesent by the 70's

UHF ran from the 70s top the 90s as a viable service with no alternatives and was finally ditched in 2012 as digital took over.

a mere 40 years.

The fact is that TVS are nowhere near as expensive in real terms as they used to be, and buying a new one is not big deal for most people

[dennis]

When you look at the bandwidth saved then using SD mpeg2 has to go soon, unless they charge more for SD. Just think of all the extra channels possible 8-|

Sky are trying to get everyone to have a HD box ATM so they must be going to scrap SD encoding soon.

[Tim Watts]

Ah yes - another 50 channels of drivel....

[Tim Watts]

So 45 and 40 years...

FM radio even longer (75 years IIRC)

Now remind me how long have SD-DVB been around - and DAB radio?

Philips/Sony did it right with the music CD format - I have actually gone back to buying those (at a knock down price in HMV opportunistically) as Amazon MP3s are so piss poorly encoded. Even my middle aged ears can hear half the treble is gone on decent equipment.

I really take my hat off to Philips/Sony - they managed to invent a very low compromise standard that still knocks the crap out of the competition.

Whereas I look at digital terrestrial TV and think "what a load of crap" as the artifacts move through the sky and forest scenes.

[dennis]

You should see some of the badly encoded DVDs I have seen, the face moves but the head doesn't or even moves in a different direction.

These were commercial ones too not downloaded knock offs, they tend to be done better IME.

[Capitol]

My classic description of all digital systems is "There aint no substitute for bandwidth".

[dennis]

I know, I built a demo system for TV over ADSL with help from the BBC technology group as part of a tender.

We only had about 1.3 megabits to play with.

When the Olympic swimming was on you could watch square water droplets fly around the swimmers.

This was probably more ten years ago now and Sky, BT and the BBC are still doing what I said to them as being obvious (but they didn't appear to think so)..

if you control the playback platform then you don't need all the real-time networking protocols, you just need to buffer and as long as the average bandwidth is high enough the customer wont care. Nearly all the so called real-time protocol stuff was to allow auditing so they could charge you for what you watched, they do that on the platform instead.

Funny enough Virgin said that wasn't any good and that they would use the vast number of channels they had to play back programmes with one channel per user. Somehow I don't think that lasted very long as the new boxes use IP the same as BT, and Sky.

It was a nice demo for lots of visitors but the BBC decided they wanted their ~million pounds worth of multiplexors, de-multiplexors, encoders and decoders back. We had four or five racks full of BBC stuff at the time being a play out suite as well as receiving live broadcasts and re-encoding them.

Ah.. the good old days. 8-)

[Bob Eager]

Interesting arithmetic! :-)

[tim.....]

for soon, I think you can read 7 years

most people boxes will be f***ed by then

tim

[tim.....]

try buying an HD PVR for much under 200 quid

tim

[tim.....]

I don't think you're gonna get extra channels

You're gonna get the same channels squashed into fewer muxes so they can sell of some bandwidth to telecoms providers

tim

>

[tony sayer]

In article , tim..... scribeth thus

In fact these days I tend to look at a lot of what's on Youtube for 'err D-I-Y stuff and very rarely any TV channels and those are more convenient to look at on the PC:)...

[The Natural Philosopher]

Given I have a computer and a networked server already, thats about 50 quid for an HD dongle

[tim.....]

I hate watching TV on my PC

tim