Re: 24-bit on tap at Apple?

The real problem with analog TV was that it required quite a few well trained professionals in the production and distribution stages, making the operations quite costly.

By digitizing the analog SD component signal to Rec.601 format as early as possible, makes it easier to use system with very minimal or no manual maintenance by any highly trained technicians.

From the distribution point of view, a SD program can be distributed in 2-3 MHz OTA bandwidth, while an analog program would require 6-8 MHz (depending on country).Getting rid of NTSC/PAL also made it possible to get rid of cross luminne/crominance errors but unfortunately instead we got various pixelization errors in MPEG2/4:-(

Ehhh.... let's relist here:

1) multipath. 2) *always* low SNR unless you're getting blasted or on an actual *good* cable connection. 3) AM noise sensitivity. 4) Going back to dinosaur days, before PLLs, vertical hold drift. 5) 400 lbs of analog filters, tubes, transformers and whatnot. 6) Keeping your left hand in your pocket at all times... 7) Antenna rotators...

Don't get me wrong, NTSC was a bloody miracle, given how it came to be ( check the book "Tube" some time, or the PBS series based on it, or both ) but *the* solution to digital already exists - fiber. And it's mostly here.

-- Les Cargill

The analog service on cable is converted from digital, and it sucks.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a Band-Aid? on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

You just did.

It is where Michael lives, too. It is what it is, except when it isn't, which was Michael's point. He isn't alone.

The typical analog fault is snow or much less often ghosting. It is still watchable as it degrades a long way down. Digital is *far* more picky and doesn't fail gracefully at all.

Pay attention!

*YOU* are.

Never needed one with analog, but I could certainly use one now with digital since one transmission tower is in a different location, and I cannot get a decent signal on all channels. Digitals problem of failing with too much signal as well as too little means I have to switch an attenuator in and out if I don't want picture breakup and audio squeals. Of course some recievers do a far better job than others, just as they did in the analog days. While technology steadily improves, the quality delivered by some manufacturers certainly doesn't :-(

Trevor.

No doubt true for OTA, but for cable systems the most noticable flaw I saw was lack of detail and slightly incorrect colors.

In my case analog was never excellent, even with a very good signal strength and freedom from snow and ghosting. This was cable.

We had about 2 years of concurrent OTA analog and digital here, and I compared the two many times.

Digital is essentially unchanged until certain minimal standards are not met, and then it falls apart completely. That is what it does by design.

Since digital TV is UHF or high band VHF here, the physical size of an antenna with very high gain and excellent directivity is much more managable with digital.

The judgement call is over what you call graceful failure. Never being as good is IMO not exactly graceful.

At some points in a comparison the analog signal will be degraded to the extent that it is no longer enjoyable, while a comparable digital signal will still be ideal.

In many locations the analog signal will never be totally free of ghosts, while the digital signal will be unchanged from optimal.

I guess that would be your allusion to how inherently flakey NTSC color actually was. We all know that NTSC stood for "Never The Same Color " and that is how it was for several decades after introduction.

I agree - its amazing that they got it working as well as they did. The one thing that survives from the era of analog color is the CBS color wheel which was never accepted for the purpose but now does wonderful things in DLP color TVs.

Right, and in some locations you can get a picture on analog that many found watchable, but NO picture on digital at all. And so far no one has mentioned bit rates. The trend here unfortunately has been to constantly lower bit rates to fit in more channels, so that what was once a FAR better picture on digital, is often no better than analog. We have just swapped noise for pixelation. At least we have a few more channels to choose from however, so it's not all bad. But to make the problem worse, we now have most of our High Definition channels broadcasting 1960's re-runs that are obviously NOT high definition in any sense of the word, and not even wide-screen format. What a waste of all those new big screen HiDef TV's people have bought! Obviously a ploy to force people onto pay TV channels. Is it as bad in the USA?

And how about digital radio. Such low bit rates it's always worse than FM. Add in real reception problems in cars where people often listen to radio, and one is almost forced to the conclusion that there is a deliberate conspiracy to create problems rather than solve them! The technology is certainly not to blame, just it's implementation by non technical politicians paid by vested interest groups :-(

Trevor.

That has to be true - different frequencies is probably the major reason why.

Your "no better than analog" claim has to be true if someone goes off the deep end, but in practice, nobody seems to be going there.

For example the local PBS output runs 3 services, 2 16:9 HD and 1 4:3 digital format.

Thats not how it works. With scalers and transcoding the distinctions are blurred. The two 16:9 services on our PBS outlet show a clear hierarchy of quality, but it is non trivial for me to characterize the difference. I think they are both the same number of vertical pixels, but one has a clearer more dynamic picture than the other. The Blu Ray palayer, the cable box and DLP TV have scalers, so the display is always painted @ 1080i.

Just because there are pixels on the screen doesn't mean that they get the data that is required to make them strut their stuff.

Ca. 1960 movies might have content that taxes even modern HD. Cinerama and the high end Cinemascope releases come to mind.

YMMV. Things are pretty good here in the city, but I've spent some time upstate and its mixed bag. Down here the cable services are now 100% digital with 100s of channels and with all but the local OTA channel distribution coded. Local OTA channels are clear QAM. The actual bitrates seem to vary all over the place. Upstate the cable system was a hodgepodge of < 100 channels both digital and analog, and the implementation of digital was a mixture of encoded premium services and clear QAM standard services. I believe the local OTA channels were clear QAM.

And then there are the satellite services, both TV and radio...

WRONG!

Actually, they are. Perhaps you just aren't sensitive to the digital artifacts (or willfully ignore them).

That may not be "how it works", but it *is* the result.

Whatever that means...

Try reading.

I thought you just said that "no one seems to be going there"?

Yes, and they suck too (XM less so than Dish).

Dingledorf! Digital requires a minimum signal strength and needs to be below a specific bit-error-rate (10%).

So, in many cases where the "tuner" *could* actually get and give you the signal, it puts up a blank screen because it has decided the signal is below its minimum acceptable strength or BER.

It has NOTHING to do with the frequency it is being transmitted on. If anything it would improve as a result of that.

I was 50 miles from most of the broadcasters in SD and got them all because I only needed to point my antenna in one spot.

Moving nearer to the coast at a mere 12 miles form various transmitters, my channel count dropped because I had to actually point the antenna at four different directions. Then, there were the nearby buildings causing multipath issues at the main carrier level, which causes the tuner to declare the signal to be below the threshold it set.

The signals are there. You simply need a good tuner and antenna to get them.

"MacKenna's Gold".

Wait! What is it... Oh!

"How The West Was Won"

That is exactly what you refer to (except for the tax part).

Check out the BluRay release.

Your brain taxes your grasp of what is going on with HD screen arrays. Hopefully, this thread taxes your brain. Maybe it will wake up.

SOURCE.

There are several "channels" on cable that are about as poorly compressed as it gets. So it most certainly depends entirely on the channel.

Cable companies are not what they once were. They used to care about the quality of what got delivered. Now, they don't give a fat flying f*ck at all. Half of them can't even keep their heads ends up to snuff. I have seen it take ten minutes for them to re-align a fouled dish position.

Cross posting retards are even worse when the dumb asses add more groups.

Not to mention 2001: A Space Oddessey

Right, and often a far better tuner/antenna/mast/cable etc. than people are used to, or expect.

Trevor.

They certainly are here unfortunately.

As is the picture at very low bit rates!

Whilst you may get whatever scale your box outputs and/or your TV accepts, the way compression systems work is that the lower the bit rate, the bigger average block size. Some systems can interpolate and reduce the block size sure, but they cannot increase the resolution back to what a higher bit rate would give. Hence we now get 1960's TV show re-runs broadcast on OTA Hi-Def channels that actually have lower resolution than what good analog TV was capable of. Truly sad given what the technology can really manage. You are indeed lucky if that does not happen in the USA.

Exactly.

I was talking about 1960's TV shows, but unfortunately not all old movie transfers are done well either, even if the original prints might still be capable of it. A lot of the old movies broadcast here are simply taken from DVD, even when broadcast on the so called Hi-Def channels, and there are plenty of appalling examples of bad digital transfer IME. Simply upscaling that video to Hi-Def scan rates does NOT make the picture "High Definition" IMO. It simply allows them to advertise it as such.

Well I'm in a major city, and things are pretty diabolical at the moment. They were far better when they first started digital TV broadcasting, but things have gotten progressivley worse, except for the number of channels.

Right, it seems to be a ploy to force you onto cable, whether you want to pay it or not.

Right, I don't want or need those either.

Trevor.

I never said anything about a mast.

Indoor, desktop (set top) antenna with pre-amp.

Crappy old first year tuner from US Digital.

The drop out point is what the user needs access to the threshold of.

Right, I did.

Which might work well for you where you live. Consider yourself lucky. Many others aren't.

Trevor.

The only part of this movie that I remember was Julie Newmar as some Indian maiden swimming naked.

Thanks! Rich