Slightly OT: Reginal News TV transmissions in HD

No, sorry, you misunderstand. Where there's an HD version of an SD ITV region, the ads are the same.

For instance ITV Central West HD, shows the same national and local ads as ITV Central West SD. However, in the South West of England, ITV SD is South West (obviously) but ITV HD is the Central version.

All ITV regions now start life as HD, and are downscaled for SD transmission, it's just that some are not transmitted in HD (yet)

Yes, but it's carried on COM 7, (so only available from 30 tx sites (about 75% of the UK population)

The Beeb have always had a hang up about the opt out switching not occurring at the regional centre. ITV came to terms with the idea about 10 years ago, the Beeb are almost there now with their thinking !

It picks a random region's Inside Out, and shows that, normally in HD, because as I said earlier, IO is often produced in HD edit suites, rather than being a studio production.

The BBC mux farm (that generates the SD BBC Mux (PSB 1), and the main HD Mux (PSB 3) is fed by:-

All BBC England regions in SD BBC 1 and 2 Sc/Wa/NI SD BBC 1 Sc/Wa/NI HD BBC 1 Network HD BBC 2 Network SD and HD BBC local radio ITV HD regions (about 7 I think) UTV HD STV HD C4 HD C5 HD

Only three BBC regions are HD capable (Plymouth, Salford, London)

However that's not the problem, the SD regions could still be upscaled to HD at the mux farm, and inserted into the HD mux.

The problem, as said, is the cost of the extra codecs to generate further regional versions of PSB 3.

Adopting ITV's method will prevent the need of a high bandwidth network feed of BBC 1 HD to be 'looped through' each region.

Which is on multiplex COM7 or COM8 (I always forget which has BBC News HD and which has BBC Four HD) which only the main transmitters have. Many second-tier transmitters only have six (PSB1-3 and COM4-6) and all the Freeview-Lite repeaters only have PSB1-3. (Sorry, I can't think in terms of the corresponding, more esoteric names of multiplexes like SDN, D3&4 and Arquiva, which aren't a nice easy numerical sequence.)

Only 30 of the 80 main transmitters

All 1154 carry three muxes

It was the fact that there are fewer ITV HD regions than ITV SD regions (ie some are merged) that I hadn't appreciated till I read your earlier post. BBC goes one stage further by just having a single BBC One HD (England) region, and one for Wales and one for Scotland.

I imagine with the growth of non-TV news sources (BBC/ITV/Sky news sites, local newspaper sites, Youtube and Facebook for amateur news reporting, etc) there will probably be *less* emphasis on local TV news as the decades roll on.

I remember when ITV closed its Central South studio in Abingdon. Until then, there was quite a lot of news that was local to the Oxford area. Afterwards when the news came from a studio in (I think) Southampton, even though it was nominally for the Oxford area (ie from Oxford rather than Hannington or Rowridge) there were fewer really local stories. I imagine it was easier if they had to send out a crew from Southampton, and get the reporter back to the studio if he was presenting the live programme, to concentrate on fewer, longer reports rather than more, shorter reports. Gone are the days of seeing Wesley Smith filming a report on the flooding in the centre of Abingdon (and seeing myself cycling past!) and then seeing him presenting the live programme only a hour later.

Yes, when I said "main" I meant the largest, big-name transmitters like Bilsdale, Emley Moor, Winter Hill, Oxford, Crystal Palace etc. Those would be part of the 30. When I said "second-tier" I meant the others in the 80 which tend to serve slightly smaller areas (eg Keighley, Scarborough). Other examples are available: I'm just using the ones near me or that I know of.

It's a shame that BBC weren't able to put BBC Four HD into PSB3 for all 1154 transmitters to broadcast. Lack of room, I presume.

In the longer term when/if all TV goes over to the more space-efficient DVB-T2, I wonder which channels will make it into the PSB muxes that all transmitters carry? As long as they get Yesterday, Drama and Talking Pictures I'll be happy :-) Of course it will mean that everyone will then need DVB-T2 (so-called HD) TVs and PVRs, so there's a bit of "selling" needed for that idea...

That's strange, because if you ask it nicely, Google will even provide you with a map showing the area boundary of East Cheshire. (Which I mistakenly referred to as West Cheshire above)

How do you think I selected the five towns associated with the BBC weather forecast pages listed above ?

Or are you saying that they're not in East Cheshire ?

Or are you referring to Cheshire more generally ? In which case I could probably find BBC weather forecast pages for an additional five places which as far as the BBC are concerned, according to you at least, "don't exist."

michael adams

...

The choice of sites tend that way, but is still governed by frequency planning constraints. For instance relays such as Fenton and Fenham carry COM 7 and 8, but larger population coverage main stations such as Sudbury and Dover don't.

First step is to remove the simultaneous transmission of HD and SD channels !

Ah. My channel list skips from 105 to 201.

Heathfield (I think). [I wonder if I had them before the retune?]

So, to partially (but a _bit_ further) answer the question: _London_ regional bits appear during Breakfast (and maybe at 18:30 and some other times?) on BBC News, which you can get in HD in many but not all places.

Heathfield is a six mux Tx, so no BBC 4 HD, BBC News HD, C4+1 HD, or

You see BBC London News on the BBC News Channel (so in HD on BBC News HD), when it is showing Breakfast. On BBC 1 HD in England you get the 'Red Screen of Death' during opts, at all times of day.

Is Dover's because of overspill to the French coast or because of interference with other UK transmitters?

I'd always thought that it was due only to cost/benefit. Those pesky UHF signals just won't stay put where they were intended and have a nasty habit of spilling all over a neighbouring transmitter's patch :-) Isn't the long-term intention to make COM7 and COM8 each work as a single-frequency network, so every transmitter would only interfere with other in-phase synchronised broadcasts of the same data, so there would only be static permanent nulls. If COM7 and COM8 survive beyond the time when they are all SFN, then maybe Sudbury and Dover will get them.

Which you can only do when some (large) proportion of the population has DVB-T2 equipment. And that will take time because people have "only just" been forced to buy a new TV and PVR (or at the very least, a set top box) to replace the old analogue equipment that ceased to work after DSO. It's not as if the decoder can be removed and replaced by a higher-spec one - and even if that was possible, the cost to the user would probably be as much as brand new equipment. My parents bought a new TV and PVR round about the time of DSO at Oxford, so not that long ago, and when I was investigating why they couldn't receive certain channels (which I thought was due to the over-700 MHz changes and a narrowband "grouped" aerial) I discovered that while the TV is DVB-T2 and can receive everything (*), the PVR is DVB-T only so can't record HD or some SD channels.

It will be a shame when DVB-T goes, because MPEG is much less processor-hungry to decode that H264, as I know if I try to spin through a recording of each on my PC: SD/MPEG can keep up no matter how quickly I spin through, whereas H264 (even "sub-SD" 544x576) starts to become very jerky at much above real time. (OK, solution to that is a faster PC!)

(*) Apart from one DVB-T mux which was very weak, and I bet that *is* due to it being out-of-band for their aerial.

In message , NY writes: []

Why only some of them SFN?

Has the SFN concept been proven? I would wonder if the nulls would drift (in position I mean) with conditions - temperature, humidity, possibly even pollution levels.

If it _has_ been found workable, why is it taking so long to spread? I can see concerns about aerial groupings and the like, but surely _some_ areas could have been combined by now.

Exactly. Though I think T1-only _boxes_ have mostly disappeared (from _new_ shelves anyway). Though I think some T1-only _TVs_ are still being pushed. (Perhaps time to remove the below-32" [was it?] concession.)

Such people are apparently of little concern to the planners (and even some posters here).

Of course, the problem is partly mitigated by the decline in the quality of the kit; these days, if you get 5 years out of something, you consider yourself lucky. So changes can come in after all.

Ah, that's one of the "second-tier" transmitters, as I described them, which have the first 6 multiplexes but not COM7 and 8. Depending on where you are, a different aerial might pick them up from Crystal Palace, Rowridge, Bluebell Hill or Hannington. ' It was worth you meantioning the transmitter because it might have been one which had all 8 but which you couldn't receive some muxes with your existing aerial after the change - but no such luck.

In article , michael adams writes

I know the boundary of Borough of Cheshire East and also the boundary of the Borough of Cheshire West and Chester both in the ceremonial county of Cheshire.

I've no idea given that you don't seem to know the names of the Boroughs in Cheshire.

They may well be in the eastern side of Cheshire. I haven't even bothered to look at your list. Crewe is in Cheshire East but under South Cheshire Clinical Commissioning Group whilst Macclesfield is also in Cheshire East but comes under East Cheshire Clinical Commissioning Group. Mid Cheshire NHS Hospital Trust covers Leighton in Crewe. Cheshire East and Northwich Royal Victoria which is in Cheshire West and Chester. It can become a minefield for the unwary.

I said Cheshire doesn't exist i.e. isn't listed under the areas they cover. Not on their websites, not even on good old teletext. The serious wood fire in Macclesfield a while back was listed under Manchester.

It has to be confined to multiplexes where there are no regional variations (opt-outs, adverts: ie exactly the same signal) between any two neighbouring transmitters, which taken to its logical conclusion means anywhere in the UK because there will always be overlaps.

That probably severely limits the choice of multiplexes that can use it - no channels with regional adverts.

I've wondered that too, about drifting nulls and maxima (though too *much* signal probably never did anyone much harm unless you overload the tuner!).

Are some of the DAB multiplexes (or whatever synonym they use for "multiplex") SFN - or am I imagining that?

I wonder how long some of the early DVB-T TVs and set top boxes with old analogue-only CRT TVs will remain in service. I used to have four or five STBs that I'd acquired (eg an old OnDigital one that probably couldn't handle a lot of modern DVB-T transmissions due to changes in parameters that OnD never anticipated). My old TV, a 28" CRT monster that took two people to lift, dating from 2000 when I bought a new house with a larger living room in which my little 14" TV would be too small, was analogue-only, as was my parents' TV and the one at their holiday cottage where we are currently living. All those have been replaced by "digital TVs" - though some are DVB-T only, even if they were advertised as HD ready... provide your own HD signal eg from a DVD player.

It's surprising how long it was after HD broadcasts began that Amazon began selling USB decoders for receiving and recording HD / DVB-T2 programmes. I tend to record everything to PC, which allows me to edit out commercials and continuity (all the spam!) and to store as much as I like and back it up. It also allows me to play back slow-moving dramas and documentaries at faster than real-time :-) It's only when SWMBO started talking about watching on the full-size TV that I investigated Plex server software and a Roku box connected to the TV.

If I felt really adventurous, there's probably a Raspberry Pi project in developing a player that can access the Windows shares directly without needing special server-streaming software on the PC and the corresponding software on the reader, which has always seemed a convoluted and inefficient way of doing it, requiring transcoding and all sorts of guff like that that really makes my PC groan (*). Keep it simple: SMB client and VLC player. Help! I'd have to dredge up my knowledge of the SMB protocol which I used to know like the back of my hand 20 years ago.

(*) I can always tell when my PC is struggling: when the processor usage gets high, the CPU fan ramps up into turbo mode and sounds like an old vacuum cleaner ;-)

True, in the endpoint of national SFNs. But it seems odd that _no_ SFNing has (AFAIK!) been set up yet for TV multiplexes.

I don't know what's on what multiplex these days (too much bother to keep up). Do any of the second-page channels - Dave, CBS Action, Yesterday, Quest, 5USA, etc. - actually take regional ad.s? I haven't _noticed_ any; I'd have hoped it ought not to be beyond the wit of man to sort a national multiplex or two that _would_ be suitable for SFNing, assuming it actually works. []

In the days of medium wave, I think the receivers struggled most when the signal was on the steepest part of the slope! Though I suspect UHF FDM would be very different from MF AM.

It was certainly talked about. Don't know though. Lower frequencies (mostly), so perhaps broader nulls. []

A change fairly early on - something like from 8QAM to 64QAM - killed the vast majority of the OnDigital boxes. (I believe there was some rumour that a few - with Motorola chips was it? - could survive.) They did _that_ change in stages, by only changing some of the multiplexes, so at first they (and other 8QAM-only or whatever it was boxes; the OnDigital ones weren't the only ones) could receive some channels but not others. (Then none.)

I think there must be quite a lot of those; I looked recently into T2 decoder boxes, and found a few models with only HDMI output. (E. g. "Manhattan" "brand" ones.) At first I asked myself what are they aimed at - surely anything that doesn't have a SCART socket will be HD anyway

- but then I realised that no, some would be the "HD-ready" ones (especially the 720p ones). And for it to have been worth making T2 boxes with only HDMI output, there must be a certain number of them. (Having looked for T2 with SCART output - I know that's not HD, but I don't need HD but suspect the writing's on the wall for T1 - I've been surprised how many still do have a SCART output.) []

You remind me of the opposite: a young lady I knew (in Leeds) who was a member of some vintage TV organisation, but unlike most of the other members who'd bought or built dedicated converters to generate 405-line signals, she had - using Linux and some relatively early graphics card - cajoled that into generating such signals directly. []