OT: Smart TVs

[Dave Plowman (News)]

With respect, bollocks.

And that was around when DAB was introduced?

DAB provides excellent reception on the move. Like in a car, where both AM and FM have severe limitations.

[Tim Watts]

I have yet to see a good word spoken about DAB.

Don't know - it's been around for as long as I've had my limited dealings with DAB.

You may be right - I don't listen to the radio much in the car - usually only Radio 4. These days I have an MP3 "radio" with a tiny (in size) USB stick containing everything I have :)

[Tim Watts]

I would have to add - I'm taking the same view with TV too - Digital Terrestrial TV is crap too. 50 channels of "+1" and complete utter rubbish (all the sales and game channels). And the picture quality is awful with artefacts everywhere.

I get a better picture from Netflix via a Roku3. And I have a load of other choices too.

Now I realise that I'm in the lucky group that has good enough Internet

- but that does include quite a lot of people (city dwellers and people in the denser populated countryside areas).

But all the same - I am seriously evaluating whether I can legitimately dump my BBC license fee. I could happily chop the aerial off now - but I've not looked into iPlayer requirements fully.

[news]

Yes but it seems to me the Radio 5 "station ident" have given up (or at least had given up last time I listened to R5) even mentioning that it was available AM. (when R5 started it was on 909 and 693 - still is for all I know) The trailer was something like "On digital, on Freeview and online" which I thought interesting as I suspect that many more listeners could get it in their cars on AM than on digital.

[Dave Liquorice]

Only if you have a signal.

But generally speaking one will have signal. It's only beacuse you live in a hall of mirrors that AM/FM has some problems. Out here both are fine.

[Dave Liquorice]

Same here, had to make a "distress" NAS purchase a while back and got a Zyxel NSA310, that can automagically download podcasts, so it does. Sync with a cheapo MP3 player and a use cassette interface into the cars radio system.

Yep, DTTV is barely watchable. SD iPlayer is tolereable but I use get_iplayer to grab and keep the programmes I want. HD downloaded via g_ip isn't bad but DSAT is noticeably better.

If you download rather than stream even 500 kbps would do, 1 hour SD programme of about 800 MB would take around 3 1/2 hours. Just set g_ip going in pvr mode overnight. g_ip/BBC is the one thing that can fill the pipe here, but I think some sort of priority is set it's packets as the 'net in general is still useable.

[tony sayer]

In article , Dave Plowman (News) scribeth thus

Well it was a good idea but its effed up now for years..

In some areas .. but overall FM still sounds better;)...

[Tim Watts]

Good tip -

I've use get_iplayer before, then it had lots of problems. Might try again.

Netflix and their ilk should offer an offline download mode. The ISPs should *like* an option to do load bitrate overnight downloads. And I'd be able to watch a film on the train.

EE Film do this (though they are crap in other ways) so DRM must be a solved problem for downloaded cached content.

[Adrian]

Works quite well. I think the Beeb have just accepted it exists, and stopped trying to block it.

[Mike Barnes]

My current car struggles with FM in fairly remote areas. I occasionally try switching to DAB and it's worse. I find burbling more intrusive (renders speech unintelligible more effectively) than hiss.

[Dave Liquorice]

I understand the words but not the meaning ... B-)

[Dave Liquorice]

Naw, just get a gun with a big enough boar.

other.

Sorry, must have slipped from uk.tech.broadcast

Just illustrating that "just bung a delay in" can have some quite serious and unintentional consequencies. The best rule of thumb is don't put any delays in unless you have to and even then think about it.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

That applies to any form of transmission.

You must have a powerful FM transmitter close by then.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

It doesn't sound better at all when suffering from multi-path.

[Dave Liquorice]

Because it's running at around 10 Mbps. Remember this HD signal started out at over 1,000 Mbps. Blu-ray runs at 40 Mbps.

But how accurate is the mapping? Looking at the exchange map on Connecting Cumbria, our exchange isn't shown. This probably because the bit of the county the exchnage is in isn't on the map! But then our exchange is in BT's NE region not NW like the others in Cumbria.

Curiously Samknows gives a "FTTC Staus: RFS date set: 30/06/2014" RFS is presumably Ready For Service, can't say I've spotted any shiny new cabs to take the VDSL head end kit...

1200 m is where VDSL more or less meets ADSL2+ at something over 20 Mbps. If you are less than around 3 km from the exchange and it is ADSL2+ capable you should get more than ADSL2 at the same distance. Our exchnage is ADSL2 we are at about 4 km and get 6 Mbps, if they upgraded to ADSL2+ I'd expect to see a couple of more Mbps added. But it would do SFA for village a 1000 m further away.

The counter to that is "double funding" if the group has been funded by public money. That should lock BDUK out of spending more public money for the same thing in the same area.

I only know of one small cabinet off our exchange, thats a cast iron one but does have a number 4 stenciled on it.

[Dave Liquorice]

Nope we are about midway between Sandale and Pontop Pike, both are about 30 miles away.

[dennis]

Not all iplayers are created equal.

If you use a PC and download a program it will be about 650 MB/hr in HD. The same program download on iplayer for Sky HD boxes will be about 3.2 GB/hr. Watching live stuff on iplayer uses even less bandwidth.

[Martin Brown]

A lot of it is redundant data though. Have to say on a large HD screen the dynamic edge effects can sometimes be annoying on broadcast content and even more so on internet streaming. Certain makers codecs have some of the dynamic coefficients applied in mirror image so if there is a shallow diagonal line (eg edge of news desk) and a slow pan if you look closely the line is a crazy sawtooth mirror image of what it should be.

It only really shows up on slow material with sharp transitions.

I can't comment in general for the whole of North Yorks but apart form a few delays entirely accurate in my neck of the woods.

This iste might shed a bit more light (and worth feeding numbers of friends closer to the exchange).

They won't upgrade any of the smaller exchanges to ADSL2+ we are stuck with what we have got and the decaying 1960's phone lines or if you are really unlucky the corroded to hell aluminium ones they deny having.

There are various private entrepreneur initiatives around here in the process of being annihilated by the BT monopoly. Basically people in areas afflicted with the aluminium lines problem and sync rates > A quick local survey will give you a good idea.

Due to a typo I made I discovered there was one more cabinet on our exchange which being in the area with microwave link competition was mysteriously enabled. I found cabinets 1, 3 easily, 2 by accident...

My line is direct and quite long with no intervening cabinet.

[Martin Brown]

DAB was OK provided that the content is broadcast with enough bitrate to at least equal the FM services it is supposed to replace. I now use satellite or internet radio depending on what I want to listen to.

Scrapping DAB entirely and moving to DAB+ broadcasts would improve things considerably even if it burns early adopters (who probably wouldn't mind) and cheapskates (who would).

I still have a couple of DAB radios and in good weather the one with the fancy DAB aerial gets used but rest of the time it is on FM!

DAB is completely useless for portable radios as the early chipsets were very power hungry. Newer ones are less bad but still lousy when compared to the classic FM tuners that can run on such miniscule power that almost every mobile phone has one built in.

I have yet to find a satisfactory DAB radio to work in N Yorks. There are black spots here for DAB even though VHF FM is high signal strength.

[Martin Brown]

The problem was that DAB was adopted before the much better AAC codec was developed about two years later and is in effect locked into an obsolete technology MP2 (MPEG-1). Modern receiver chipsets can do both.

It might do in central London but I can assure you it doesn't in North Yorkshire. Coverage is flaky outside the capital.