Digital bullshit

On Jun 22, 8:32=A0pm, "hr(bob) snipped-for-privacy@att.net" wrote: >

It would be nice if some sort of elementary spectrum analysis could be part of the 'signal strength' readout.I suspect the coefficients in the ghost canceling (equalizer) portion of the receiver would be much more effective as they indicate how much correction is needed for the RF. Having aligned antennas for DTV with a Tek spectrum analyzer, I can tell you that less than 10dB of notching in the signal will usually work OK even with older receivers. Shallower notches work even better. Our Samsung DTV receiver from 2003 gives a considerably different signal strength reading from the ATI HDTV Wonder and still different from the Tek. The Samsung leans more toward overall level while the ATI tends to favor flatness of the spectrum vs actual strength. In both cases they DON'T like dynamic response changes as they are Jurassic in the DTV world. My later Hauppauge tuner is much more tolerant of dynamic multipath and while it doesn't show spectrum either, it shows raw errors vs correctable errors.

G=B2

Which tuner card do recommend? I would like to find one with onboard decoding, not dependent on the host CPU, that has well written drivers (directshow). I had no luck with the Hauppauge WinTV-HD (original) card.

Michael

Are you refering to 8VSB versus COFDM? If yes, I agree. We should have gone with COFDM as Europe has done:

On Jun 22, 11:09=A0pm, msg wrote: > Which tuner card do recommend? =A0I would like to find one with onboard > decoding, not dependent on the host CPU, that has well written drivers > (directshow). =A0I had no luck with the Hauppauge WinTV-HD (original) card. >

I've only tried 2 different models. The ATI HDTV Wonder of which I have 4 - 1 on the shelf and 3 in computers though one of the PCs is currently not in use. The other tuner is a Hauppauge "WinTV-HVR-1250 PCI Express TV hybrid tuner" running WInTV 6. I was having problems with Fox on ch 65 in LA so the Hauppauge is connected to cable though I did have it running on the antenna for a while. The ATIs were all in Atlhon XP single core PCs (2 3200s and a 3000). Cruising around on the net would cause occaisional stutters while in record. Just a simple 'record' would use 10-25% CPU time but sometimes bump up to 100 and then the stutter. Lasr fall I got a Phenom 8650 on a Gigabyte board which is nearly stutter-free and that's _trying_ to get it to fail by doing audio noise reduction in Adobe Audition while recording TV. It's pretty much do what you like without problems. I now have a Phenoom II on another Gigabyte board which is even better.

G=B2

Can only speak for the UK, but when digital STBs came along they varied tremendously in quality. (I can see the main London TV mast while typing this and have a good quality outside aerial.) Not surprisingly the cheaper ones were worst for blocking and dropouts. My main system uses a Topfield twin tuner PVR and works perfectly - as it should at the price.

Hmm. I don't want any degradation. Here we only have 5 analogue channels, all on UHF, and the most recently started is not surprisingly CH5. Which was squeezed into a waveband which didn't really have space for it. And despite my perfect reception of all others, it isn't great at some times of the year.

Of course there's a debate about the lower than ideal bitrates used on digital - but that's another argument.

Strangely the first digital off air most had was NICAM on TV. And that was designed so its carrier was more robust than the video. So you had 'perfect' sound even with a pretty well unwatchable picture.

You nailed it.

Thanks for ignoring literally everything I wrote.

On what planet do you live? In the Peoples Republic of Santa Cruz CA, the various mutations of cable providers have done fairly well at keeping the analog system running. I live in the trees, which have the irritating habit of falling on the power, cable, and phone lines, whenever the wind blows. There were plenty of incidents of ingres, water incursion, rotten connectors, intermod, and other problems resulting in marginal signals or worse. I didn't have cable, but did plenty of troubleshooting for friends. Incidentally, most of the problems I found were from customer provided wiring and distribution. Ocassionally, there was a signal level problem, but that was rare.

I also had a chance to do a side by side comparison between analog cable and digital satellite picture quality. Satellite was much better looking. As simple clue is to horizontally shift the picture until you can see the right edge of the picture. Analog was ragged indicating jitter, which causes line misalignment, and manifests itself as image blurrrrr. Digital was a nice straight line.

Nope. Analog didn't do that. It had a different set of picture impairments, most of which I consider to be equally iritating, but which I learned to tolerate over the years. As others have mentioned, analog fails slowly and gracefully, while digital is either perfect or awful, with nothing in between.

Content? You mean like programming that targets an intelligent audience? Surely you jest. Whether analog or digital, todays programming is barely worth watching. Do we really need 100 home shopping channels and continuous infomercials? There is one difference. In the past, the FCC limited commercials to 15 minutes per hour. Now, it's 30 minutes, which I find oppressive.

Anyway, have someone with a clue look at your system. There's something wrong. If the service were as bad as you suggest, the various service providers would have an angry mob at their doorstep.

Several years ago, I set up the great 36 inch CRT Toshiba in the living room. That was great, but when I got glasses, I could not believe the reception. It was then I became aware of some of the horrible digital signal processing that was broadcast as analog. It was a problem mostly on certain feeds, and especially sports on grass feeds. The grass really looked funny. Good analog is going to look better than highly processed digital video except for that HDTV. Its funny the local stations, especially news feeds look just as bad in their HDTV transmissions.

And that damm cell phone !!!! Who is that talking ??

I still have not checked my cable. What is going to happen to the analog cable stations. like from 2-70. ?? Are they still there.

greg

Crikey. Hope that doesn't happen in the UK. More than bad enough at 15 minutes.

I also bought one of these (an NPG) and it is pretty good given it was the cheapest. The tuner is good, somewhat more sensitive than average cheap top boxes but what I really like about it is its separate IR sensor that you can place where it will properly see your remote. The remote works from everywhere unlike typical boxes that you must point to very precisely.

I also found most of the times where a particular brand or model of receiver appears to be less sensitive it is actually a problem with self generated noise or marginal shielding. Not the tuner itself but poor supply filtering or shielding from its digital circuits, in most of them you can see the noise on some weak analog channels (assuming the receiver is connected between the antenna and TV). I have found two effective solutions:

- use better RF cable along with properly shielded antenna connectors (note that in these last years its has become very common to use cheap prebuilt antenna cables that have very bad shielding, if any at all)

- connect some other active device between the antenna and the receiver (eg. a VCR or a satellite receiver with antenna passthrough). It really helps, have done that many times, and my theory is that the lower noise of the other device helps sense the weak antenna signals and stops the receiver noise to reach the antenna.

For marginal reception you can still see the program quite well with just some small coloured rectangles appearing randomly. However I agree that where the analog was still viewable the digital does not work.

well, I had the misfortune to get one of these:

.....and my experience was the opposite of yours. I have contacted the manufacturers and will let you know what they say-don't hold your breath though!

The average length of a 1 hour program is 40 minutes with 20 minutes of commercials here. I absolutely abhor commercials and watch nothing live. I plan all my watching well in advance with help of my DVR. Takes about 5 seconds to ffwd through commercials and I've gotten good enough at it now to know where to stop so the DVR can back up to the start of the next segment. Also, the programmers are pretty clever with their timing. Most limit the start of the commercials to after the first 10-12 minutes of the program. Then its approx every 8 minutes after depending on what channel you're watching. This is for a

I recall watching or reading something about the strategy of commercial advertising on tv. It's well studied seeing the expense companies incur to produce and air them.

Hi!

I'm not sure I do, yet.

For *analog* TV capture-to-video Hauppauge had a couple of different solutions. The WinTV HVR-1600 mentioned in the review linked to above has an onboard MPEG2 encoder as part of its Conexant chipset.

But for digital/ATSC, the process is done entirely in software running on the host CPU. Software that, for no particularly good reason, could sap a Pentium 4 531 CPU in a Dell OptiPlex 210L PC.

I think it's a question of efficiency somewhere--and I also think that one of the Digital TV converter box SoCs could be used on these cards to shuffle the burden away from the main system CPU.

Just recently, I gave an ATI TV Wonder HD650 a spin, thinking that it might work better than the Hauppauge card. Getting it installed was an incredible job. Even the latest version of ATI Setup didn't work at all. It would constantly drop the machine into a Parity Error bluescreen!

I'm not the only one who has seen this show up as per some searching that I did on the subject. You'd think anything serious enough to drop a working machine into a memory parity error (when the memory is definitely good and of the right spec) would be glaringly obvious to these people. I guess not.

I finally did the setup myself, by using the Windows Device Manager to install the drivers. And with a little prodding, I got the ATI MultiMedia center installer to pop outside of the multi-installer set that ATI runs through as they set their software up. This worked around the parity error problems. The video quality isn't nearly as good as the Hauppauge card offered. It does seem like *maybe* it doesn't load the CPU as heavily.

ATI uses their own TV Wonder IC on the TV Wonder HD650 board. It's not well documented like the Conexant part used by Hauppauge, so what all it has onboard is a mystery. However, the board very clearly sports a RAM chip, so I suspect that the ATI IC has some sort of integrated processor core and quite possibly an MPEG encoder of some sort. But where it works and when it is used is something I do not yet know.

In the end, a Zenith DTT-901 converter box hooked up to my old ATI TV Wonder PCI board has worked the best of anything so far when it came to watching ATSC digital TV on a computer.

William

Hi!

Most of the TV channels here are actually doing really well. It hasn't made the programming any better though. But one of them (WCIA-TV) is plain miserable. It sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks and sucks so badly on any set I've watched it on. That is to say it Just Doesn't Work.

Of course, anything I want to watch on TV is probably on CBS. So it goes.

I don't know why--I've watched it on sets that could receive their analog signal with rock-solid clarity and sets that were hooked up to very good directional antennas pointed the right way. Even the slightest little thing upsets it to the point of unwatchability.

And did I mention that it sucks? I can't see how these people don't know there is a problem. (And yes, I'm assuming it is *their* fault judging by the wide variety of TVs I've watched it on in many different locations.)

I hate 'em. Whatever compression or encoding they're using on the majority of digital cellular telephone networks makes any background noise sound like intrusive mumbling or underwater bubbling. And that's to say *nothing* of how people behave in public with them!

(Oh wait! I wrote a rant that was partially about that!

Of course, I know I'm a minority. I don't carry one with me regularly, have it turned off when I do have it around.

(I also discovered that there was at least one person in this world who has less to do than the Maytag repairman of yesteryear. That person is the person at AT&T who writes you a letter to say that you've had your phone for so long that they are shutting down the network it runs on.)

The problem (at least as I saw it) was that analog couldn't provide you with 500 subchannels of TV wrestling (!!!) with high definition pictures so you can see *all* of the compression artifacting and 5.1 surround sound so you can hear it as well. I'm not sure why we needed it, seems to me that it was more of a solution looking for a problem than anything else. They *say* it's for reuse of the old spectrum for various other purposes, a claim that I guess I find doubtful at best.

Oh, and of course, analog TV *worked*. It might have a snowy picture or monophonic sound, but who cared. If you wanted to watch (big if) you *could*.

Wow. Did I just get on a bit of a soapbox or what?

William

On Jun 24, 1:47=A0pm, "William R. Walsh" wrote: >

Right now this computer, AMD Phenom II X4 920 (2.8GHz quad core) is recording QAM-256 HDTV with a Hauppauge 1250 card running WinTV V6. CPU activity is 12-15%. The other Phenom machine (8650 2.3 GHz tri- core) is recording ATSC HDTV with an ATI HDTV Wonder and MMC 9.14 software. CPU activity is 6-10%. The old Athlon XP 3200 with MMC9.14 and another HDTV Wonder runs 15-30% CPU time and while it's less tolerant of multi-tasking, it has only one purpose - to record HDTV - so it's no problem. I'm NOT a fan of ATI's software. I went through a LOT of 'upgrades' until they finally gave up and started over with the

G=B2

Its about making money. If I had the brass neck to sell empty space for billions, I'd be done for fraud.

"Long dubbed "beachfront" spectrum, the 700MHz band is considered ideal for advanced wireless services such as mobile television and wireless broadband because the signals are strong enough to penetrate most interference. In all, the spectrum auction brought in almost $20 billion, with Verizon spending $9.6 billion and AT&T dropping another $6.6 billion. "

I try to do most of my watching via PVR, either later after the programme has finished, or about 15 minutes behind so that I 'catch up' in the last segment after the last commercial break. I got pretty savvy at using x30 whizz speed too by looking at the time stamp that comes up when you do this, but some of the Sky channels over here seem to have gotten wise to this. Every couple of ads, they stick in a 'sponsor shot' the same as you get right at the end of the ad slot. Even though you are watching the time stamp, it still gets you every time, and you instictively hit the "play" button ... :-\\

Arfa

Yes, much of it is indeed about making money. There has been a huge amount of public brainwashing going on with regard to digital TV. Most people think it is better than analogue, because that is what the government (here in the uk) want them to think. That allows a switch-off of analogue TV services with the minimum of fuss, freeing up the UHF bands for sale to cell phone operators and others, for billions.

Some aspects of digital are better. It allows many more channels (if that's what you want) to be crammed into the same space. When it is a full data rate transmission or in HD, with an appropriate (that's good quality, operating in native mode) receiver on the end, the results can be quite stunning. But at grass roots level, it also has many shortcomings, not the least of which is pixellating or nothing at all on even a slightly marginal signal, feeding an 'average' receiver. Heavily 'charged' air during thunderstorm activity, has a profound effect on satellite digital reception, and heavy rain disturbs my digital terrestrial tv to the point of pixellation and total freeze, even though I am only 20 miles from the transmitter with a good 'line of sight'. Whilst my analogue reception used to degrade under similar circumstances, it never-the-less remained watchable.

If you have a crap digital receiver however, the results can be truly dreadful. I see supermarket brands all the time, and even on a good quality transmission, they still look awful. For the most part, the same couldn't be said for analogue receivers. Over the years, I have owned many 'el cheapo' analogue TV sets, and they have all performed remarkably well on some very variable signals.

Thing is, love it or hate it, digital is with us now, and we are just going to have to embrace its advantages, and live with its shortcomings. I think that the trick is to spend that bit extra on buying quality equipment, and make sure that you have the best signal possible available to it. It's easy to become a technology Luddite, especially as you get older, but sometimes, I think we cling onto elements of our youth just because we feel comfortable with them ...

Arfa