Aaaargh! Is it NTCS vs. PAL vs. SECAM all over again?

I obviously meant "NTSC", an acronym that according to my professor of electronics means "Never Twice the Same Color". :-)

One of the reasons I ask is because I am currently in Venezuela, and I had no idea about the geo-political-tecno-economic implications.

Brasil and Argentina have decided to go together, with a yet to be determined system, while Colombia and Uruguay have opted for the European system.

-RFH

On a sunny day (Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:39:45 -0800 (PST)) it happened Ramon F Herrera wrote in :

No There are a zillion methods to digitally encode a picture or movie, and also a zillion to transmit those. With the DEATH OF ANALOG, and the last screekes of the ANALOG DINOSAURS and the rising sun of the digital software encoders and transmission systems, it becomes easier to just on the fly adapt to all those standards. So what digital and the 'internet' you are referring to, has learned us, is that, using for example a PC as media centre, you can view all those standards without problems. The modern TVs have ethernet, on top of the standard tuner, so they can connect to a home network with data storage too, and possibly the internet.

Those are just standards, some invented as market protection, for example ATSC, a case where the Americans really did shoot themselves in the foot, and are still doing so. Not even to mention their financial mess.

Mains frequencies and voltages are incompatible too.

Exactly, but not exactly the RF side, there is still some hardware needed, DVB-S2 versus DVB-S is a typical example of that. Also some decoders, like for H264, have special acceleration hardware. Older digital TVs in Europe cannot for example receive DVB-S2, and not decode the H264 as used in DVB-S2 (DVB-S is mpeg2). The old ANALOG standard lasted > 30 years.... in digital we see a change much more frequently, the time from DVB-S to DVB-S2 was only 7 years?

How hopeful with all the billions in royalties involved.

Which European system? There is three that i have heard of.

"The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from." Anon

So your professor was as big of an idiot as you? VITS solved that problem decades ago, and moving away from the early tube based designs had already eliminated most of the problem. VITS is a group of reference signals in the Vertical Interval that allow for automatic chroma subcarrier phase and chroma level compensation. The biggest problems with early NTSC was network feeds where phase and level could be tweaked at every amplifier on the cross country coaxial network. Of course that was in the '50s & early '60s when color TV was a new concept.

That was back when the feeds were through telephone cabling.

My father had a hand in fixing that. In the late 60's he raised so much hell about the poor feeds that he caught David (Jr.) Sarnoff's attention. After many harsh exchanges they became friends and golfing buddies ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Some areas still had ATT coaxial video lines for backup news & network feeds for several years after the switch to C-band network delivery. That system was what was patched togehter to cover the Kennedy assisnation, even though they didn't have time to balance everything before the emergency jury rigging. Lots of mismatch from feeding multiple stations in an area from one line.

I've seen that one attributed to Andrew Tanenbaum.

Jeroen Belleman