So what's the truth about lead-free solder ?

you

Which part of " There's no tuning involved " didn't you understand ?

You press a button, it gives you the channel. Of course I know it does any internal tuning required in firmware.

Graham

Yes it 'breaks up'. Typically with weird pixellation.

No it isn't.

No, a dropout is a momentary LOSS of signal.

Graham

No. In HDTV broadcast, "dropout" is when a tuned station has more than about 10% bit error rate, and the FEC cannot repair the data stream, and everything from a few picture artifacts appears, to complete frame losses (dropouts) occur. The picture artifacts are also dropouts, just not those that cause the tuning device to display a blank screen for that given frame, which they do when it gets beyond a certain point.

If they wanted to, they could show you the frames, and you would see horrendous amounts of image artifacts, and likely audio problems as well.

It IS called dropout. Lost packets ARE lost "signal" as the packet would not have been lost, were it not for the tuner's inability to reconstruct any missing packet data from the FEC coding. This has been true from way back in the early satellite receiver days.

Videocipher

Digicipher II (most closely related to the new HDTV broadcast schema).

The current HDTV broadcast schema is also a General Instrument format, now owned by Motorola.

On a sunny day (Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:05:06 -0700) it happened Spurious Response wrote in : Right, I turned in a portable TV last week.

The boxes that are sold here are equipped with a SCART connector, a waste. My 30 year old portable has no SCART, and neither is it HDTV (high resolution). HDTV is here only available in HDMI DHCP, and still rare anyways. The normal broadcasting on 'digitenne' here is not HDTV, but DVB-T 720x576. The idea of a 'portable' is that you bring it to the camping, switch it on, and see the picture. This fails now for many portables. I am watching digital TV via the PC for satellite, and also via USB with a settop box for terrestrial. This allows me to record transport-stream, burn to DVD, automate things, etc.

I have not seen any digitenne portable TVs yet, but I am sure the market will soon overflow with these. I do see a lot of very cheap analog TVs for sale :-)

mmm, it is actually not so simple, for example with satellite we now are moving from DVB-S to DVB-S2, and also from 720x576 to 1980x1080 interlaced or progressive, all with HDCP / HDMI..... using MPEG4 / H264 with some sort of audio, well we have now mp2, AC3, more to follow..... That, and your sets fall apart after 3 years because of lead-free, it is a great time for manufacturers of electronics consumers stuff now ain't it? Not even to mention Blu-ray versus HD-DVD or whatever, no connector fits.... no format is the same.... It is a wild wild world out there :-)

On a sunny day (Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:48:39 -0500) it happened msg wrote in :

Never heard of it, sound OK though.

Thanks for playing. It is like taking candy from a baby though.

Graham

I imagine you haven't looked very hard in that case. Many have UHF outputs.

Graham

konijne keutel Eeyore wrote in :

If you had as much as a clue, did not cut half the posting, knew at least half as much about TV as about rabbits, you would be chaising them.

I wasn't replying to the bits I trimmed.

Graham

To enlighten the others: to buy anything with any sort of analog output sucks, as analog is dead at least here in the Netherlands (except for audio). Buying a settop box with USB output, if you have a laptop with USB, creates the portable TV with much better quality and recording possibility. The USB settop box I bought runs from a 12 V adapter, so also from a car battery. I researched quite a bit to get the best deal, and SCART was not part of that, let alone a horrible interference prone, PAL coding artefacts decorated UHF analog output. ftp://panteltje.com/pub/dvb-t-nl.txt

You must have some rubbish kit over there then. A good PAL analogue TV set, with a decent signal going in, beats a crappy highly compressed digital signal, hands down, every time. If you want to talk about a picture decorated in artefacts however, then digital is the hands down winner every time in that category ...

Anyways, although your analogue terrestrial *transmissions* may have ceased, I think it is unlikely that everyone in Holland has just thrown all of their analogue-input ( both RF and composite ) portable TV sets and such in the bin, and as long as that is the case, there will still be a need for analogue outputs on other equipment such as STBs. Bear in mind also that an analogue signal does not need to be UHF modulated, to be PAL encoded. One of the default modes of the SCART standard is good old PAL-encoded analogue composite video, both input and output.

Arfa

On a sunny day (Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:35:53 GMT) it happened "Arfa Daily" wrote in :

Well, maybe you do not have digital yet. And for sure you have not seen the HDTV tests on satellite like those from France. I am not denying mpeg2 compression has artefacts, but those very much depend on bandwidth (bitrate), and bitrate is a bit less then 4000 kbps on digital here. (non HD). Although that is less then DVD max, it is absolutely enough for a stunning _noise free_, _moire free_ (PAL & NTSC composite), _easy to record_ (as .ts), _no loss editing_ (digital), _space saving_ (both on disk and in the ether), allowing as many sub-channels as you like (more languages, more subtitles, teletext, other services, timecode, all in the same stream).

It seems to me you do not _HAVE_ digital yet. I have had digital sat now for about 7 years, and terrestrial for about a year. As to range an signal to noise, I can get stations that I could only get with a lot of noise and some reflections too in analog, now as clear as glass. Really, only an inexperienced person would claim that composite PAL in _whatever way_ was better. And I know composite PAL better then many of you here, as I worked many years at the source, Even studio quality (directly from a PAL camera) has all sorts of artefacts, just where the right striped shirt. I say: Just buy a good digital set :-)

Hmm, all the pro cameras I know come out in RGB or YUV.

Nobody in the professional world should be using PAL/NTSC in the studio's primary signal chain today

martin

Interesting you should say that. There must be tons of gear out there that's 'legacy' so-to-speak PAL.

Graham

I think you can still buy toy composite mixers, try BHphoto etc and the camera control units (CCU) all had the usual PAL ScH and timing adjustments, but rarely used, and don't forget that the (almost obselete) Betacam SP format recorded in YUV anyway.

The PAL outputs are great for preview monitors, ie non critical, and less wiring.

PAL is a very robust transmission format, but absolutely sucks in a production setting

martin

On a sunny day (Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:55:42 +0100) it happened Chris Jones wrote in :

No it is crap.

< In the UK,

YUK

Yea, well known, BBC, before it went brain dead, used to make nice pictures, even had in the very old ages 4 tube cameras, I have been there, touched them, had some interesting discussions with their techies.

Whatever you may think, compared to digital it sucks. And that is digital done the right way, it makes no sense to compare bad digital to HQ studio analog PAL as you do here when you talk about some cheapo unspecified piece of consumer quality, about some unspecified channels, sure you can get it as bad as you like.

Idiot.

Now that sure counts as a professional test.

Morons.

BYE

Really? Could I have a model number and manufacturer? Every source I've seen says that to date there is absolutely no such thing in existence, and is pessimistic about the appearance of such before the deadline and/or at a price anywhere near the ridiculously low projections for price of such items.

--
"Liberals used to be the ones who argued that sending U.S. troops abroad
was a small price to pay to stop genocide; now they argue that genocide
is a small price to pay to bring U.S. troops home."
  -- Jonah Goldberg

On a sunny day (Thu, 26 Jul 2007 23:06:19 +0100) it happened Chris Jones wrote in :

Well, tehre are some channels 9I can tell you as ican get all UK stuff here too via satellite, tha tis ITV1-4 BBC- Parliament (if that is a channel), many more, and soem of teh FTA Ky.

I have __***NEVER***__ seen 'noise stop', that is actually a sign of your decoder not keeping up, I have noticed that some Sky channels transmit in

352x288 (the set will scale it to full) so at 1/4 the bandwidth, but you cannot blame that on the digital system!!!!!! Blame it on Rupert!!! You are not talking about a f*cking Skybox no?????????????????

Exactly, there is, if you have a PCI card, some Linux program that shows all the bitrates for the various streams in the transponders. Cannot remember the name of the program, there are hundreds of utilities.

Sure, I do not question the observation, but I do say you need to compare GOOD digital with GOOD PAL composite, else comparing makes no sense.

I

Yes those pople may exist, but normal people would return the set.

That is why I am using a PC, no matter how they encode it, I will find some decoder.

The public will keep buying new stuf fevery standard change say maybe even more often then the lead-free requires.

On a sunny day (Thu, 26 Jul 2007 23:13:52 +0100) it happened Chris Jones wrote in :

On my PC I have voice control, I can just say: show BBC1 show ITV1 show ARD show RAIuno

and in a second or so (as the motorized dish moves to a different sat) I have it on the 1680x1050 LCD (no not yet 1980). All it needs is a PCI card and a satellite dish.

Your granny could do it, if she could find the power button on the PC and monitor.

You can find the scripts on my website (Linux of course).

login with user 'guest' and password 'none' without the quotes.