Dumbed down consumer electronics: Adding DTV channels

On a sunny day (Mon, 02 Aug 2010 08:53:44 -0700) it happened Joerg wrote in :

Well, the news is usually bad, x killed, disaster here, war there, heat waves, bush fires, be glad it did not work:-) Play some good music instead.

Those are different things, resolution depends on bitrate, the modulation system has some influence as a choice. For terrestrial we have 64 QAM.

Yep.

Oh, let me see, 14 x 14 x 3 cm. But I was an early adaptor to DVB-T, the boxes these days are replaced by USB sticks:

But I do not use hi-def, it has no problem with 720 p, and a VGA output.

Right, do not pay for the advertising!

It all depends on the bitrate if it is worth it, even with good vision! If they cram many channels in the same bandwidth, you get motion blur, pixellation as you call it, loss of detail, all that. And also the source material counts, garbage in garbage out.

Now first you say that you cannot add single channels, then I say on a PCI card in the PC you can do anything you want, then you say you do not need extra features ????

They just call you, "Dr. Noise." :-)

How old is the ultrasound equipment that still records to VHS? I'd think they'd have upgraded to DVDs in the past handful of years, and at least had an S-VHS option before that?

---Joel

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Actually, DTV performance on VHF isn't that great. And TV-6 is a notoriously bad channel.

There's work afoot at the FCC right now to take TV-6 (and maybe even TV-5) and reallocate it to the FM band. Something I highly support doing!

Also at the FCC last week, there was a Public Notice (or Rulemaking) on ILLR standards. ILLR is an acronym for Individual Location Longley-Rice, the point being, the FCC is seeking comments on the use of that model to better predict DTV coverage. I'm not as involved in that anymore, but I did glance at the Notice and there were some really good gems in there. Including a few links on Land Use Land Cover databases, etc...

But don't just automatically think VHF has great distance propagation so it MUST be good for DTV. Turns out, the propagation through walls is pretty bad (ray-tracing, etc..), I think the sweet spot for OTA-DTV would be in the low-20's. That said, I have DirecTV even though the market I'm in has more that the average number of DTV sources (situated between two big markets).

-mpm

But one needs to know the bad news as well.

^^^^^^^

Hopefully not :-)

Out here they look the same but ATSC and less expensive :-)

No, we fast forward through it. One box even has an advertising FFW button that hops it 30sec at a time.

Dancing with the Stars from BBC is super material, you really see a difference.

card in the PC

I want the regular stuff to work right, my wife will not want a nerd box in the living room ;-)

I griped about the new USA Television system many months ago. The FCC has a web site where you can see all of the "dead spots" under the new system.

The new system is apparently LINE OF SIGHT and is bothered by trees or dips in terrain.

In Cedar Rapids where I live, (pop 100K) there is a big dead spot smack dab in the middle of the most densely populated area of town!

If you check other cities on the FCC site you can see that such dead spots occur inside of many other densely populated metro areas.

A system so vulnerable to rolling hills or trees is downright stupid.

It is as if the CABLE or SAT DISH companies helped design the new USA TV Broadcast standard.

I can put an antenna WAY up on a mast and STILL have trouble because of trees, terrain or directionality.

WHO designed this new USA TV standard and why did the FCC not catch the considerable problems BEFORE committing us to it?

A system designed by bureaucrats ?:-) ...Jim Thompson

On a sunny day (Mon, 02 Aug 2010 13:36:19 -0700) it happened Joerg wrote in :

I am not sure actually, this is bit philosophical, but why should I know it? Today I though: Perhaps because it makes you feel better as it is far away, keeps people quiet, they think they are in an OK place. Politically motivated bad news? Of course a large part of the news is taken up by what politicians play. They are media maniacs that love any problem to get themselves in front of the camera, even if they have nothing useful to add.

OK adopter, hehe :-)

Yes, prices differ wildly, there is no way to tell, many shops in Europe that sell stuff from the US just changes dollars to euros it seems. OK some import duties and we have 20 % VAT on top. I was looking for a NP60 battery for a camera today, you can buy those from 8 to

Good,. There exists soft with scene change detection too, IIRC.

Now I am confused. If it was from BBC, then it must have been original 25 fps . that reminds me of dropped frames and fast pulldown, big problem with motion in a 30 fps country. Here the movies just play 25 fps, no dropped frames, but they are slightly shorter (original film was 24). The pitch of the audio is higher too.

Na ja, these days everybody needs to be a nerd, to use even you cellphone or laptop, or GPS, or TV, or camera, or whatever. Washing machine too.

Maybe one day this will go away, and a robot will do those thing, like programming all those gadgets, But I am sure that will create problems of its own.

camera,

Out here the news is actualy not all that negative. But sometimes boring. For example, I really don't need to know where Chelsey Clinton got married.

Yeah, but it works well enough by hand. I am also rather good in tuning it out in my head, reading up on stuff during the news when the ads play.

shorter

Oh, Jan, we live in the 21st century. The times when such major events were recorded in an analog format are long gone.

It's the level of the nerd factor. A big honking PC in the living room requires one almost not to be married. A small one is ok, but only if freshly married or close to the 50th anniversary :-)

It's still done. Half a year into my job I got a rude awakening just how retro the medical world can be: We had a top notch VCR on an ultrasound machine we designed in the 80's. Also a small or optionally large format photo printer that would deliver images within very few seconds. Boss came in. "Joerg, marketing said the doctors want Lenzar cameras on the machine. Please develop an interface for that and talk to the ME about mounting the darn thing." My jaw dropped and I stood there, in total disbelief. Then rolled up the sleeves and did as told.

These are the "cameras" where you then have to trudge off and develop the film, wash, and hang on a light board. It was almost as if Ferdinand Porsche came into the lab and asked the guys to make sure a steam engine can be fitted into the 911.

Nobody is going to buy new FM radios. That's why I predicted HD-radio to fizzle, which it did.

I think that whatever they do now, in hindsight, is going to be in vain. It's too late, TV stations have shot themselves in the foot. Yeah, our generation might let them force us onto sat or cable (well, except me ...) but when you talk to the next generation out here they just don't care about DTV channels pixelating out. They watch all news content on the Internet and all their movies come from Netflix. I believe TV station managers either don't know what's coming at them or are hoping to be retired when the financials start to tank.

That's what the Ch-13 chief engineer told me. Problem is, people in high-rises all have cable anyhow. Thru-wall propagation is largely a non-issue these days. I know only one person who uses rabbit ears. Because he's rarely ever home.

We simply watch less. So do neighbors. And here goes the ad revenue ...

On a sunny day (Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:08:20 -0700) it happened Joerg wrote in :

the camera,

Exactly, before that it was the life of Paris Hilton IIRC.

Once I made the mistake to actually edit it out. Those are the commercials I still remember, as I had to see them many times to get start, and end, and audio, right in the editior :-)

in

shorter

Cannot follow you here, BBC was recorded at 25 fps (tape) or 24 fps (film). You play at 30 fps (or 60), so you have to interpolate frames and add those at irregular intervals. I have some Linux soft for that, it works, but the motion is not as smooth as at the original speed I think. Do you think digital does not know about frame rate? The problem we had here with LCD TVs (seems to go away with better sets) was that many sets were HD compatible but displayed the 25 fps material at 30 fps, causing horrible horizontal irregular jumping of the picture.

I think you still do not get the concept. I am not a fan of VDR, but have a look at Klaus his website:

the camera,

She did? I didn't know that! I thought she was too ugly ;-)

in

shorter

I was down to Aaron's acreage yesterday... 12 Dell rack-mounted servers :-)

Our cable box has an HD... pause while going potty... fast forward thru commercials :-) ...Jim Thompson

Very few ads remained in my gray cells. The only one I remember from the six years I lived in NL is from Douwe Egberts "En dan is er koffie".

This is what's cooking these days:

Most modern cameras can be switched so you can record in several native frame rate standards:

I don't know how they do it but there is no interpolation at all. I believe they record in US format because the participants are mostly American, so it's for our market. The judges are one American, one British and one (rather hot-blooded ...) Italian.

It is pretty big. Anyhow, ours has the described features as well or pretty close:

Except we have to swap out the disk after x hours. Ok, no big deal.

No, and no need to. Same with BlueRay. Since we are into older movies and don't like games or scifi there would be no use for that here. We rather spend that money at the Japanese restaurant, like today :-)

I preferred the Cavendish myself ;-)

It hasn't really fizzled. While it's certainly not setting the world on fire, there does seem to be slow but steady growth. See, e.g.,

I do find it a little disheartening that the FCC would license a proprietary standard, though -- iBiquity owns the rights to the HD radio standard; every single one of the ~3 million HD radios built out there resulted in their receiving a royalty.

Microsoft is releasing an upgraded, 64GB version of their MP3 player/HD radio/widget, the Zune HD in August, and I have to believe they would have dropped the HD radio chip in it is they didn't think it was continuing to help their sales a bit, as a differentiator with iTouch/iPhone devices. (The original Zune HD came out last September.)

Oh, and STMicroelectronics is still interested:

---Joel

Well, that ad was for Douwe Egbert coffee :-)

Some of the ads for smokes from Germany also stuck because they were quite funny.

Still a drop in the bucket. Success to me would mean that modern vehicles are equipped with it. But that isn't the case. We rented three cars a couple weeks ago. A Chevy Cobalt, a Toyota Venza and a Ford Mustang, all nearly brand-new. None had it. But you already mentioned a core reason here:

That's one of the reasons I think HD radio doesn't have a chance. It's the same with home automation standards, except that there the whole market doesn't come out of the hole.

Neither of the two chips is available at the major US distributors. That's usually the sign of a dead-end, to me as a circuit designer it is a big red flag. This one has a July 2009 date in the datasheet so not exactly new:

I used to go thru a pound tin per week :-0 ...Jim Thompson

Who needs HD content when, as in our Q45, you have AM, FM, multi-disk CD, Tape and SAT all built-in ?:-) ...Jim Thompson