Digital TV changeover

I honestly don't care about the digital TV changeover enough to get a new TV or a converter box. Most of the viewing on TV (to me) sucks too much for me to care to make a switchover. I only have a TV for playing console games.

It happened here in finland years ago :)

I posted the video on the portable 7" TV. You even get to see me ugly mug off to the side. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAreiN8ptao

Welp, it's official.


It's a sad day,The elimination of a tried and true format in the name of faster speeds in downloading sexyback ringtones.

So much for all those devices like handheld TVs that were perfect for severe weather outbreaks. I live in tornado valley, so this is a major nut-kick.

In a way, it's eerie how the most affected by the changeover are the elderly, and that they too are being "phased out" in a way, not unlike the analog TV technology they grew up with.

Anyway, the whole DTV thing reeks of something that is surely profitable to operators, but not always to consumers.

Compare this with card public payphones which were used to phase out coin-op ones:

These have major advantages for operators, including but not limited to selling "call time" in big chunks rather than small units, not requiring coin-collection (thus avoiding paying employees or collection agencies to do that), avoiding vandalish-theft of coins, and most inportantly, once a consumer buys a pre-paid card, they get ALL the sum upfront no matter if it's ever used or not.

For consumers however, there were practically no advantages unless you made very long or too many calls from public phones. Otherwise, you could not use coins anymore (who were more likely to have on you, since you can buy other things with coins too).

For the rest, there were only disadvantages like the need to dish out a relatively large amount of money for a pre-paid card you might never use, the inability to buy one if there were no shops available due to location/time of the day (pre-paid cards are not a good idea in countries without 24h-open shops or at least automatic vending machines!), and the inability to formally reconvert it back into real money, in case you needed it.

With the introduction of the Euro, some countries re-introduced coin-op phones since now coins became much more commonplace. E.g. Italy now has both coins and cards (although they never entirely abandoned coins). In Greece however they abandoned coin-ops years ago to never reintroduce them.

Same with DTV: it gives operators and telco authorities plenty of advantages, first and foremost the ability to broadcast and license more channels in a given bandwidth, and for companies that offer theme channels, the ability to dish out more of them in areas not served by cable/satellite.

However, single-channel, local TV stations will gain nothing from it, and consumers who only watched state/local TV stations will also gain nothing. On the contrary, they will be forced to pay for the transition, and potentially lose reception of some channels with marginal reception (with DTV, you either see something perfectly or not at all/with too many mpeg-artifacts). Welcome to the digital era, gentlemen.

I don't know if DTV is a total loss for the consumer. With the coupon, I only had to fork over $10 for a converter box, and the reception is much better than it was with analog. Plus, at least here, I get like four channels of PBS, which is pretty sweet (glad to see someone making use of the extra bandwidth, anyway).

geekmarine said:

the reception is much better than it was with analog

This is false. This has always been false. I don't know how the hell they got away with this with false advertising, but the chance of interference with devices between Digital channel signals is enough to bring the once MASSIVE coverage area of a station on analog to its knees at a possible maximum 29 percent... with digital. Yes, really.


I watched as ABC shut off transmission today. the VHF band is completely blank.

:(

Csonicgo said:

This is false. This has always been false. I don't know how the hell they got away with this with false advertising, but the chance of interference with devices between Digital channel signals is enough to bring the once MASSIVE coverage area of a station on analog to its knees at a possible maximum 29 percent... with digital. Yes, really.


I watched as ABC shut off transmission today. the VHF band is completely blank.

:(

False advertising? No, I determined this the moment I hooked my box up. All the stations came in clear as a bell, whereas with analog, half of them had so much static and interference as to barely be watchable, too. Also, I'm able to get a couple of stations that I just couldn't even receive at all with analog.

I'm not basing my judgment on anything I've read about DTV or anything, this is just what I witnessed in my personal experience.

I'll have to side with Csonigo on this one.

As every EE is taught, the advantage of digital over analog comms is the ability to transmit precisely encoded information on a given channel, assuming that you're within the channel's noise tolerance. If this precisely encoded information makes it through, you will be able to reconstruct your original signal perfectly.

Indirectly, digital comms (including DTV) allow a more efficient usage of the bandwidth by using lossy compression e.g. instead of using a 5MHz band for one analog TV channel, you could instead use it as a 20 Mbit/sec channel (assuming a 2 bits/sec/Hz efficiency) and divide it into 4 MPEG 4 channels with quality comparable to SDTV (or even higher), exploiting video compression (the data carrying capability of the channel is the same in both cases, digital merely allows more flexibility).

The only problem is that if the noise assumptions about your channel don't hold, then you may get MPEG artifacts or simply nothing. With analog, you will get a degraded picture but you will still get something. With digital it's either all or nothing, if there are too many errors. This is known as the digital cliff.

On the converse, analog TV can still receive a meaningful image with a negative signal-to-noise ratio aka, even if there's more noise than signal. Imagine every other pixel in an image being noise...with analog TV you will still receive an image. With DTV, that many errors means getting nada.

IEEE engineers recommend using an attic or outdoor antenna for DTV, if possible, rather than an indoor antenna, because reflections and other interactions of the signal with objects (including bodies) in the room will increase multipath interference.

That pretty much means that "ghetto" TV users are fucked. If a bachelor's 14" CRT TV and a pair of cheapo bunny ears were good enough for them until now, now they need to set up an outdoors receiver in scenarios where they normally wouldn't. At this point, going directly to cable and/or satellite DTV sounds more reasonable.

To tell the whole story, some DTV channels transmit multiple reduntant lower-bitrate versions of the same channel, so that they can cope with increased noise and reach a wider audience, at the expense of more encoding losses. However, not all DTV stations do that, and since the policy is squeezing as many digital channels in the same TV band, you won't see many channels doing that.

Csonicgo said:

Welp, it's official.


It's a sad day,The elimination of a tried and true format in the name of faster speeds in downloading sexyback ringtones.

So much for all those devices like handheld TVs that were perfect for severe weather outbreaks. I live in tornado valley, so this is a major nut-kick.

Actually, Never Twice the Same Color (NTSC) was doomed since the mid 1970's, when the government had original plans for HDTV. don't know the specs, but the picture was actually square (1:1).
In the mid '80's, they adopted Japan's analog HDTV standard (5:3), and in 1986, America's first ever HDTV broadcast hit the airwaves.
In 1997, the current formats (three of the 18) were introduced, and were made commercially available the next year. You can say, the rest, is history.

The spectrum will also change, with VHF being unchanged (2-13), yet channels 2 through 6 will likely never be reused, due to very unstable signals these lower-ranges are. Susceptable to interference, thus, dropouts.
UHF will now be in the range of 14-51. Due to it's stability and resistance to interference, many stations decided to stay on their UHF positions, unless they fall between 52-69, which will have to move.
The freed up channels will allow new technologies in communications, because the usable bandwidth for data is for the most part, all used up. This gives people more spectrum to play with.

Maes said:

The only problem is that if the noise assumptions about your channel don't hold, then you may get MPEG artifacts or simply nothing. With analog, you will get a degraded picture but you will still get something. With digital it's either all or nothing, if there are too many errors. This is known as the digital cliff.

On the converse, analog TV can still receive a meaningful image with a negative signal-to-noise ratio aka, even if there's more noise than signal. Imagine every other pixel in an image being noise...with analog TV you will still receive an image. With DTV, that many errors means getting nada.

Sorry, but this is just total crap. Not TECHNICALLY - technically, it's totally correct. Analog TV will be "visible" long past where digital will cut out completely. In reality, NO ONE is going to watch analog TV well before it EVER COMES CLOSE to the "digital cliff". That's the point idiots keep forgetting. The average person complains and threatens to sue if there's even a hint of ghosting in their picture. No one who isn't a masochist will watch a picture with six ghosts, white noise, color shift and god knows what else you'll get past the "digital cliff" on analog. To actually spout that as an ADVANTAGE of analog is to live in denial. The average person is who is deciding this issue, and the average person prefers the picture you get from digital long past when they've given up and said that analog is unwatchable.

Chilly Willy said:

Sorry, but this is just total crap. Not TECHNICALLY - technically, it's totally correct. Analog TV will be "visible" long past where digital will cut out completely. In reality, NO ONE is going to watch analog TV well before it EVER COMES CLOSE to the "digital cliff". That's the point idiots keep forgetting. The average person complains and threatens to sue if there's even a hint of ghosting in their picture. No one who isn't a masochist will watch a picture with six ghosts, white noise, color shift and god knows what else you'll get past the "digital cliff" on analog. To actually spout that as an ADVANTAGE of analog is to live in denial. The average person is who is deciding this issue, and the average person prefers the picture you get from digital long past when they've given up and said that analog is unwatchable.

That's actually exactly what I'd been trying to say. I receive more channels with my digital box - not technically, there are no channels that I couldn't receive via analog, but like half those channels were simply unwatchable. And even for the channels which I did receive just fine, I'd still prefer to watch them without static.

Danarchy said:

I don't even watch TV so this doesn't even effect me.

Ditto

If TV happens to be available I might occasionally watch select shows, but I'll never miss TV or go out of my way for it. It's just not worth it to me.

They had DTV changeover a couple of years or so ago here in Sweden. But the only way it affects you is really if you live in a house. So I never really noticed any difference.

Chilly Willy said:

Sorry, but this is just total crap. Not TECHNICALLY - technically, it's totally correct. Analog TV will be "visible" long past where digital will cut out completely. In reality, NO ONE is going to watch analog TV well before it EVER COMES CLOSE to the "digital cliff". That's the point idiots keep forgetting. The average person complains and threatens to sue if there's even a hint of ghosting in their picture. No one who isn't a masochist will watch a picture with six ghosts, white noise, color shift and god knows what else you'll get past the "digital cliff" on analog. To actually spout that as an ADVANTAGE of analog is to live in denial. The average person is who is deciding this issue, and the average person prefers the picture you get from digital long past when they've given up and said that analog is unwatchable.

This is at appromimately 33% of signal strength, assuming a clean signal. Some TV/converters have higher or lower threshholds before falling down the cliff.
In most cases, the fail ocurrs when the receiver can't tell a 0 from a 1, because the voltage levels between 0 and 1 are too small, and cannot be told apart. To help make sure a 0 is a 0, and a 1 is a 1, there is a buffer zone in the processor which the signal is in "no-man's land", or winds up in a "Don't Care" state. In the case of DTV, Don't Care = 0. In older CPU systems, a 0 can be anywhere from 0 to .7 volts, and a 1 was 1.5 to 5 volts.. The space between to .7 and 1.5 is enough to differenciate between 0 and 1, so as long as the 0's and 1's fall within their ranges, you get picture and sound. Some receivers have dropped the lower threshhold limit as low as 1 volt, so they can work with a lot weaker signal. In a clean signal state, my Panasonic TV actually can work reliably with a mere 26% signal strength, yet my big Sharp needs the 1.5 to work (a steady 38% minimum, 37 if it's very stable). Of course, ghosting of the signal will cause 0's and 1's to combine together in various ways, and depending upon the severity, 1's and 0's can be damaged by constructive interference (where everything is multiplied, making everything a 1), or destructive interference (where the values cancel out, making everything a 0). When there's too much of this, you get the appearance of a weaker signal.
The one thing that may trick you into thinking you lost a DTV signal, is when the broadcast isn't streaming any data at all. You may get a weak signal message, but your meter is pulling in at, say, maybe 85%. You *******ely have a good enough signal, in this case, the station is down. (Hate when this happens.)
In an ideal wirld, you can get the 0 and 1 threshholds right on top of each other (0-.7 for 0, .71 to 5 for 1), the DTV signal would fall down the cliff at the same time the analog would be unavailable, but because of the buffer zone between the two states, DTV will go before analog does. Depending upon the TV's, depends which goes out first, and how far before the other ones go. (With a full tollerance buildup, you can have a DTV work after the analog one stops.)

Maes said:

The only problem is that if the noise assumptions about your channel don't hold, then you may get MPEG artifacts or simply nothing. With analog, you will get a degraded picture but you will still get something. With digital it's either all or nothing, if there are too many errors. This is known as the digital cliff.

On the converse, analog TV can still receive a meaningful image with a negative signal-to-noise ratio aka, even if there's more noise than signal. Imagine every other pixel in an image being noise...with analog TV you will still receive an image. With DTV, that many errors means getting nada.

That's pretty much my experience. I currently have both analogue and digital. When the signal is good, there is no question that the picture is significantly clearer on digital. However, if the signal gets weaker for some reason (eg weather) then there may be a slight degrading of the analogue image but it will still be very watchable. The digital, on the other hand, will quickly show artifacts, big blocks, frozen images or simply nothing.



Another interesting thing is that digital lags about a second or two behind analogue. If you have both systems on at the same time on different TVs, you will see and hear everything on the analogue set up a little bit before the digital one. So much for accurate time checks and so on. ;)

The less TV people watch, the better. Maybe they'll do something better with their time. Like learn actual truth filtered out by the media gate keepers or pick up an interesting hobby or more than a hobby.

Enjay said:

{SNIP}
Another interesting thing is that digital lags about a second or two behind analogue. If you have both systems on at the same time on different TVs, you will see and hear everything on the analogue set up a little bit before the digital one. So much for accurate time checks and so on. ;)

That's due to the encoding/decoding at both the station, and at the TV. (Although it's mostly processing time at the TV's end.)

Yeah, but it still amuses me that the new spiffy technology has such a noticable lag in it. :)

Gokuma said:

The less TV people watch, the better. Maybe they'll do something better with their time. Like learn actual truth filtered out by the media gate keepers or pick up an interesting hobby or more than a hobby.

yeah cuz the illuminati allowed this technology to help people see the light and not be the sheeple they are, right?

Do you listen to youself? :P


In all seriousness though, I really think that the format should have been more international of a standard. like, an ISO of TV.

Chilly Willy said:

To actually spout that as an ADVANTAGE of analog is to live in denial. The average person is who is deciding this issue, and the average person prefers the picture you get from digital long past when they've given up and said that analog is unwatchable.

Of course if you can count on a good location (reception wise) you'll opt for the best picture possible, even with analog. None would use bunny ears when he can hook up to a condo antenna, for instance, and if he's some sort of yuppie that just moved into a fancy apartment with a fancy new DTV in the mid of a large metropolis, sure, then analog is as good as dead.

Have you ever lived on a remote location or in a place where you don't have a condo antenna though? Perhaps with only an indoors bunny ears antenna or even a built-in antenna? Analog is more than watchable in these situations, while DTV craps out entirely. Now how could someone spout that as negligible, is beyond my comprehension. And color phase error? PAL, FTW \o/ NTSC sux :-p

Of course, I can understand that living with higher standards creates expectations that sound unrealistic as soon as you move just a notch lower e.g. some family friends from Germany visited me years ago (in 1997) and for some reason they were stuck for 10 minutes in my condo's lobby...when I went to find out why, turned out they were waiting for the elevator's door to open automatically (N.B.: In Greece, outside of luxury hotels and the such, only elevators installed in the last 3 years come with automatic doors and such jet-set luxuries) ;-)

Maes said:

Of course, I can understand that living with higher standards creates expectations that sound unrealistic as soon as you move just a notch lower e.g. some family friends from Germany visited me years ago (in 1997) and for some reason they were stuck for 10 minutes in my condo's lobby...when I went to find out why, turned out they were waiting for the elevator's door to open automatically (N.B.: In Greece, outside of luxury hotels and the such, only elevators installed in the last 3 years come with automatic doors and such jet-set luxuries) ;-)

Hahahaha! Yeah, that's a good point. It's all about expectations, and people's have gone up considerably in the last couple generations. I have Dish Network, and looked on analog broadcast as something akin to dial-up modem service. :D

Enjay said:

Yeah, but it still amuses me that the new spiffy technology has such a noticable lag in it. :)

That IS an interresting point, being you get a fairly instant response with an HD camcorder hooked into a TV (albeit a 1/29.97 second delay), yet the stations can't do it.
I'll have to correct myself, as this example proves the delay is primarilly at the station. :)

Maes Sayeth:Have you ever lived on a remote location or in a place where you don't have a condo antenna though? Perhaps with only an indoors bunny ears antenna or even a built-in antenna? Analog is more than watchable in these situations, while DTV craps out entirely. Now how could someone spout that as negligible, is beyond my comprehension. And color phase error? PAL, FTW \o/ NTSC sux :-p

I notice that as well, and what's worse, are stations that are nowhere near as strong as their analog counterparts. WB56 (Boston) had a good analog signal, not perfect, almost analog cable quality (or better if a long distance from cable company), yet the digital signal is reading 41%? Yeah, good.
On the other hand, one station that would shoot down your statement, is ION 68 (Boston). Their analog station doesn't come in at all, and barely get shapes on the roof antenna, yet the digital stream is in the 45% range. It can go either way, unfortunately, too much the wrong way.

Of course, I can understand that living with higher standards creates expectations that sound unrealistic as soon as you move just a notch lower e.g. some family friends from Germany visited me years ago (in 1997) and for some reason they were stuck for 10 minutes in my condo's lobby...when I went to find out why, turned out they were waiting for the elevator's door to open automatically (N.B.: In Greece, outside of luxury hotels and the such, only elevators installed in the last 3 years come with automatic doors and such jet-set luxuries) ;-)

Wow. Old elevator, huh? Isit an Otis, or a Dover?

Georgef551 said:

It can go either way, unfortunately, too much the wrong way.

This can also be just to them using a different actual channel (not the same frequency and transmitter as the old analog one). Since frequency slots are generally reassigned, they have no reason to use the old one exclusively, or they could simply have combined the DTV changeover with a transmitter and/or coverage upgrade. I wouldn't surprised if there were areas that skipped directly from no service at all to DTV!

Wow. Old elevator, huh? Isit an Otis, or a Dover?

I'm not quite an elevator expert, but I'll try to look at the engine room or something. It was installed (and likely designed) by a local company, as most elevators are, and like most elevators installed from the 60s to the late 90s in my country, it has no automatic doors (only a single door, and no safety inner doors either! You can see the walls/doors moving as you climb/descend!).

Many of those elevators are now being retrofitted with internal sliding doors for safety.

Maes said:

This can also be just to them using a different actual channel (not the same frequency and transmitter as the old analog one). Since frequency slots are generally reassigned, they have no reason to use the old one exclusively, or they could simply have combined the DTV changeover with a transmitter and/or coverage upgrade. I wouldn't surprised if there were areas that skipped directly from no service at all to DTV!

Ala channel 68 Boston. Analog didn't work at all, or enough to know SOMETHING was there on the rooftop antenna. Some stations are just pathetic. 56 was strong, and their digital station (41), is weak. There are no excuses for that, especially since the effective radiation power to reach out equally with 41 is FAR LESS than it took with 56. Back in the analog days, that's when stations scrambled for the VHF spots, especially the lower channels. It only took about 20Kw to broadcast out the same distance, a high channel like 56 needed about 1.8Mw.

I'm not quite an elevator expert, but I'll try to look at the engine room or something. It was installed (and likely designed) by a local company, as most elevators are, and like most elevators installed from the 60s to the late 90s in my country, it has no automatic doors (only a single door, and no safety inner doors either! You can see the walls/doors moving as you climb/descend!).

Many of those elevators are now being retrofitted with internal sliding doors for safety.

Actually, you can find the manufacturer on the fixtures, the sill plate, or on the cab itself.
There are a lot of old elevators like that here, too.

Bucket said:

Yup, just bought a new HDTV and a digital antenna to go with it.

Wouldn't any antenna just do? Everyone I know is using their regular antenna - hell, I just use an FM dipole antenna and my reception is just fine (with crappy LOS)

tigertoddy said:

Wouldn't any antenna just do? Everyone I know is using their regular antenna - hell, I just use an FM dipole antenna and my reception is just fine (with crappy LOS)

When you live about 15 to 30 miles or so away, and you're not on some hill, you need better. The Terk 1080i and 1080a (same thing, except the "a" model has an amplifier), is the best one. It's got a YAGI UHF antenna. Picks up a lot of what dipoles, bow-ties, and loops miss. They also have oversized dipoles, which do work a little better than any others typically do.

Yes, yes I am. I got a nice HD TV for my room last year, and got rid of all my non-digital technnology at the same time. Luckily, if people in the UK can't afford the £100-£200 on a new TV, they can buy a digibox for something like £20, and that'll be them sorted by the time the switch over happens. ^___^

tigertoddy said:

Wouldn't any antenna just do? Everyone I know is using their regular antenna - hell, I just use an FM dipole antenna and my reception is just fine (with crappy LOS)

Pretty much. It's more about where you're located and where you put your antenna than how much money you spend on it.

What ultimately sucks about DTV, is that not even now did they find an agreement over a unified world standard, but there already are 4 different and mostly incompatible standards of DTV is use around the world.

Probably it won't matter a damn as long as local/regional TV & decoder purchases are concerned, but it's not exactly what I'd describe "good going, eh?" ...

In any case, everything so far suggests it's a technology that gives the most advantages to operators and telco authorities (at least as long as they planned airing more channels or selling more licenses, respectively).

For regional stations which didn't plan on airing multiple programs anyway, it's a loss because of the forced changeover, although it *may* bring better reception and upgraded service for some.

For consumers, it's a definite loss in the short term (the very least, because of the need to change/retrofit existing hardware). Picture quality? In some cases yes, in some cases no, and in some cases...just nothing. It's just not mature enough. We'll just wait and see.