US ATSC conversion: with 700 some odd days until NTSC is turned off, you would think that US TV stations would run a dayly counter...

Yeechang Lee wrote:
Ivan wrote:
Here in the UK the amount of homes with terrestrial digital had
reached almost 9 million (and growing!) six months ago
http://www.tiny.cc/dymOd.

And none of those homes, except the lucky few hundred within range of
the London trials, is receiving HDTV.


HD packages are already available on satellite and cable (Sky digital
satellite in 8.8 million homes) for those wishing to upgrade.

The digital terrestrial switch-over starts next year, so there will
eventually be higher powers and more bandwidth available for terrestrial
HDTV (although the fear now is that the extra spectrum will be sold off to
the highest bidder, instead of being handed over to the digital
broadcasters) however the government may well decide to line their coffers
and leave HDTV to the satellite and cable companies.

http://ertweekly.com/default.aspx.locid-05nnew0bd.htm

"davmel" kirjoitti
...
I would hardly call it bit starved. With a 23Mbps transport stream you
won't get more than a 13-15Mbps HD video channel plus a 6-7Mbps SD
video channel plus a 1.5Mbps video programme guide plus multiple dolby
digital and MPEG audio streams.

whining

I envy you Australians. In Finland we have in each DVB-T multiplex (or
transport stream) five or six SD channels, 2-3 Mbps each

There's no dolby on any channel, probably because the only carrier
company in Finland charges so much for bandwidth, and I haven't seen
even plans on starting HDTV.

/whining

P.V.

Ivan wrote:
HD packages are already available on satellite and cable (Sky
digital satellite in 8.8 million homes) for those wishing to
upgrade.

Irrelevant, since you were the one originally talking about
terrestrial. I thus talked about terrestrial, demonstrating that the
US is almost a decade ahead of the UK in terrestrial-HDTV deployments
and programming, then also added details on HDTV over cable and
satellite. You then switched to talking about satellite, because you
can't deny that that's the only way Britons except the lucky 450
receiving the London trials are getting any HD.

And, for the record, a mere 184K out of those 8.8M Sky subscribers
have HD-capable settop boxes. For their troubles, they currently
receive *three* channels with 24 hours of real HD programming.

In the US, pretty much any US subscriber to a HD-capable cable or
satellite service will have at least a half dozen and more likely
about ten channels with true 24-hour HD programming, on top of the
seven national broadcast-network channels that as I previously noted
run close to 100% of their prime-time programming in HDTV. 30% of US
households have HDTVs nowadays, and that figure's rising fast.

The digital terrestrial switch-over starts next year, so there will
eventually be higher powers and more bandwidth available for
terrestrial HDTV

Right here you hit upon something which I'll bet will astound any
consumer electronics-savvy American who has occasionally heard of
Freeview but hasn't looked into the details: *It's not HDTV*. In the
US, the switch from analog to digital broadcasting has been
essentially the same as the switch from 4:3 SDTV to 16:9 HDTV, with
only a few stations that ended up using their assigned bandwidths to
offend viewers with tricks like five SD channels instead of one HD
channel (and even those have by and large long since learned their
lessons). In the UK, once the digital switchover begins in 2008 and
finishes in 2013--14 or 15 years after US stations *began*
broadcasting in HD with ATSC--over-the-air HDTV *may* occur, if The
Powers that Be feel like it. I suspect it will, if only to avoid the
embarrassment of Britons who either subscribe to Sky HD or visit the
US and see real HDTV everywhere, but Freeview may simply end up
offering double the SDTV channels it provides now, or something.

--
URL:http://www.pobox.com/~ylee/ PERTH ---- *

Homemade 2.8TB RAID 5 storage array:
URL:http://groups.google.ca/groups?selm=slrnd1g04a.5mt.ylee%40pobox.com

Yeechang Lee wrote:
Ivan wrote:
HD packages are already available on satellite and cable (Sky
digital satellite in 8.8 million homes) for those wishing to
upgrade.

Irrelevant, since you were the one originally talking about
terrestrial. I thus talked about terrestrial, demonstrating that the
US is almost a decade ahead of the UK in terrestrial-HDTV deployments
and programming, then also added details on HDTV over cable and
satellite. You then switched to talking about satellite, because you
can't deny that that's the only way Britons except the lucky 450
receiving the London trials are getting any HD.

And, for the record, a mere 184K out of those 8.8M Sky subscribers
have HD-capable settop boxes. For their troubles, they currently
receive *three* channels with 24 hours of real HD programming.

In the US, pretty much any US subscriber to a HD-capable cable or
satellite service will have at least a half dozen and more likely
about ten channels with true 24-hour HD programming, on top of the
seven national broadcast-network channels that as I previously noted
run close to 100% of their prime-time programming in HDTV. 30% of US
households have HDTVs nowadays, and that figure's rising fast.

The digital terrestrial switch-over starts next year, so there will
eventually be higher powers and more bandwidth available for
terrestrial HDTV

Right here you hit upon something which I'll bet will astound any
consumer electronics-savvy American who has occasionally heard of
Freeview but hasn't looked into the details: *It's not HDTV*. In the
US, the switch from analog to digital broadcasting has been
essentially the same as the switch from 4:3 SDTV to 16:9 HDTV, with
only a few stations that ended up using their assigned bandwidths to
offend viewers with tricks like five SD channels instead of one HD
channel (and even those have by and large long since learned their
lessons). In the UK, once the digital switchover begins in 2008 and
finishes in 2013--14 or 15 years after US stations *began*
broadcasting in HD with ATSC--over-the-air HDTV *may* occur, if The
Powers that Be feel like it. I suspect it will, if only to avoid the
embarrassment of Britons who either subscribe to Sky HD or visit the
US and see real HDTV everywhere, but Freeview may simply end up
offering double the SDTV channels it provides now, or something.




Calm down Dear!.. I wasn't even thinking about HDTV when I made my original
post, it was merely to counter some of the obvious misconceptions some of
the contributors appear to have about COFDM.

I merely wrote to say that not only is it very much alive and well here in
the UK, but doing far and away above anyone's original expectations .

Just reading one or two comments in this thread alone appears to indicate to
me that there are people who would welcome a $30 SD receiver which they
could simply plug into their TV's and instantly produce 20 or 30 extra
excellent quality 'free' TV and radio channels.

My guess is that if you had left HDTV to cable and satellite and put
together a Freeview style package for OTA, you would by now be counting the
total number of digital viewers in tens of millions.

On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, davmel wrote:
Which is why there are far more HDTV broadcasters using ATSC than any COFDM
modulation.
That will change dramatically when Europe and Asia provide more HD
programming using DVB-T.

Want to make a wager about that?

Europe and Asia never surpassed the US on analog, and the same thing has
now happened in digital. The only serious challenge to the US's
domination of HDTV is Japan, but Japan has only about 1/10 the number of
broadcasters for a population that is about 1/2 the US.

In the language of COFDM, "inferior" means "better".
If most of the world's population has an "inferior" standard that provides
lower cost equipment through greater unit volumes then I suspect most end
users would prefer that system.

Exactly. That's why VHS beat Betamax. And that is why Australia is stuck
with COFDM.

Too bad the Australian consumers will never see the price savings. You
pay more, and will always pay more. The price savings is taken the
manufacturers.

Yeah, but since you can't have single frequency networks you need to waste an
enormous number of TV channel spectrum to avoid interference.

I don't see where you get this. Most digital TV broadcasters in the US
are in UHF, and are using adjacent channels. US channels are 6MHz, which
can contain 1 HD channel and 1 SD channel without picture quality loss, or
as many as 5 SD channels. The major stations are all doing the former.

Japan, which also uses 6MHz channels but is using COFDM, can only have a
single HD channel and 1seg (low-res), or 3 SD channels and 1seg.

If you check the scale on that map the coverage area extends out close to
200km (hardly underwhelming)

With "adequate", not "primary" coverage.

And what the hell is "adequate" supposed to mean? Digital either works or
it doesn't. There's no such thing as being "a little bit pregnant".
It means a typical house with an external medium gain antenna pointed in the
right direction will pick up the signal reliably. The signal can be picked up
much further than those maps show by using a tall mast and high gain antenna.

How much do you want to stake on that statement?

I already debunked claims about COFDM based TV mobile performance with
direct tests. I'm about to debunk the claim that "ATSC doesn't work when
mobile" (I just need a few more tests).

How much do you pay me when I debunk your claim that "a typical house with
an external medium gain antenna pointed in the right direction will pick
up the signal reliably" from a transmitter that is, say, 150km away (since
you say "close to 200km")?

Broad spectrum impulse noise will affect all transmissions including
analogue/ATSC/DVB-T etc., that's why you use decent quality coax.

But it affects COFDM far more.

Pretty much the only gripe we have is that one of our broadcasters (Ch 7)
considers 576p to be HD as a pathetic attempt to circumvent the government
requirement for all digital licence holders to broadcast in HD.

So you have a sleazy broadcaster that is the Australian equivalent of
Sinclair in the US. Remember that if you consider using Sinclair's
behavior as typical of the US.

Seattle, a third-rate US city, has 14 (or 16, depending upon you count)
digital broadcasters, offering 8 HDTV channels and 26 SD channels of
programming. Tokyo, a first-rate Japanese city, has only 7 (or 8). How
many digital broadcasters do you have in Australia, eh?
A grand total of 5 but given that our population of 20million is spread out
over an area the size of the U.S. the market can't sustain more tv networks
with the available advertising revenue.

5 digital broadcasters for 20 million people. Pathetic.

I for one would prefer quality over
quantity.

"Those Amazing Kangaroos!"

It's preferable to having 500 channels of crap like in the U.S.

Oh, so you don't have cable and satellite yet.

NTSC has better color (particularly green) than PAL. PAL was a clever
workaround for the inferior vacuum tube tuners prior to the mid 1970s. With
modern electronics, that phase change just steals bandwidth. Then there's
that flickery 50Hz, which is a lot more noticable than the extra 100 lines.
Interesting that you point out a better particular colour for NTSC which
stands for Never Twice the Same Colour.

NTSC stands for "National Television System Committee".

"Never twice same color" was a silly joke that ceased being valid about 30
years ago when the old single-tube front ends got replaced with modern
tuners.

PAL is essentially the *same* as NTSC with an added phase-shift at each
line; it's a trivial analog conversion from PAL to 50Hz NTSC.

For the past 30 years, NTSC color performance has been *superior* to that
of PAL and SECAM.

A more reasoned argument can be made about the TV system. SECAM and most
PAL is broadcast with 625 lines, at a cost of a 50Hz refresh rate. NTSC
and PAL-M is broadcast with 525 lines at a 60Hz refresh rate. There are
tradeoffs here, and reasonable people can disagree on this point.

However, for 30 years, only an ignorant person fails to recognize that
NTSC was the best analog color system. It just didn't work well with
cheap vacuum tube electronics.

You probably were still ****ing your diapers (if you were even born yet)
in the days of vacuum tubes. Before prattling about historical detail,
remember that some old farts are still around who were there at the time.

If the US had chosen DVB-T, Australia would have chosen ATSC. It's all
about protectionism.
Rubbish. The only highly protected market left is the USA. The US government
is a proxy for the wealthy lobby groups that line the pockets of senators
with cash so that their particular standard or technology it adopted rather
than what is best for the population.

And that's why you pay so much more in Australia than we do in the US?

Australia would never have gone with ATSC, we just followed what the
Europeans did just like almost every other standard. That's just a result of
having a history as a British colony WITHOUT a revolution!

Actually, Australia didn't follow that the Europeans did. Australia
actually tries to do HDTV.

The US market is the largest market in the world and is price-sensitive.
ROTFL. Is that what they're teaching you in Geography these days? You might
want to check on the population of China and India which are certainly NOT
adopting ATSC.

Silly boy. Population does not equate to market size.

The market size is dictated by how many buyers, and how many units each
buyer purchases.

Buyers are a much smaller percentage of the population of China or India;
and those who are buyers buy fewer units.

Every manufacturer sells cheaper in the US than in their home country.
You'll find hardware in China/Japan/Taiwan (where almost all electronic
hardware is now built) to be MUCH cheaper than in the U.S. thanks to
protectionist import tariffs.

Silly boy. You forget that I spend time in Asia and do a fair amount of
shopping there.

Prices are, on average, about 50-100% higher in Japan than in the US for
the same gizmo. Typically, an identical gizmo is 50% more, and the 100%
more is for a localized version (e.g., Japanese display instead of English
display). Mind you, these are *Japanese* company products.

Taiwan and China are not quite as bad, but there's still a markup.

What you will see in Asia, particularly Taiwan and China, are more
lower-end products that are too cheap to be viable to export to the US.

Australians (and Japanese and Chinese and Europeans) pay more so that
Americans pay less. If American HDTVs worked in Australia there would be
one hell of a grey market importing cheap TVs.
You must be living in a fantasy land, we import equipment cheaply from places
like China where it's manufactured, not from secondary markets like the U.S.
where the manufacturing base has died.

Everybody imports from China. But you pay more for your Chinese equipment
than we do.

Ever notice DVD regions? Ever notice how Americans rarely seem to care
about multi-region DVD players?
That's because you've been distracted by all the crap that comes out of
Hollywood to notice all the great content that comes from international
sources. Most Americans wouldn't bother with content if it wasn't in English
(with or without subtitles).

So sorry. Foreign content, including DVDs from Australia, is readily
available in region 1. And they are much cheaper. People rarely pay more
than $20 for a DVD.

That's why Europe has such a market for multi-region DVDs; they want to
play region 1 DVDs.

As a general rule I would much prefer a 576 line PAL region 2 or 4 DVD to a
480 line NTSC version, but the exact choice would come down to which version
was mastered better.

So sorry. Your information is woefully out of date.

Even a $25 DVD player sold here knows how to handle PAL DVDs. If you have
a 50/625 line monitor you can set the player to output PAL to it.

They don't bother making a 480 line version; they just sell it in region 1
with 576 lines and let the player take care of it.

There's actually no such thing as a "PAL DVD". It's all MPEG files, and
how much effort they put into generating the files. Things like color
system or TV system are dealt with by the DVD player.

Now there are DVD players that will output 720p or 1080i and upscale the
576 line content instead of downscaling to 480p.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Mark Crispin wrote:
Europe and Asia never surpassed the US on analog, and the same thing has
now happened in digital.

I think part of the reason more European TV viewers aren't up in arms
about how the continent overall is about a decade behind the US in
over-the-air HDTV (and at least several years behind in
cable/satellite HDTV) is that European reports on HDTV adoption almost
never talk about the US experience. For example, look at
URL:http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/sporteditors/2007/01/hd_or_not_hd.html,
in which the head of BBC Sport does his best to talk up the
laughably-thin list of BBC high-definition sporting events (one each
of soccer, golf, rugby, and events through Wimbledon in the summer) in
the first half of 2007. To help partly excuse the execrably-slow
progress he cites a Canadian newspaper article reporting "relatively
cool response to HD there."

Could it be because the Canadian move to making HDTV programming
available has been slow (not as slow as Europe, but certainly slower
than the US)? Look at this list
(URL:http://www.digitalhome.ca/hdtv/idx/0/426/article/Canadian_OTA_HD_Channel_Lineup.html)
of Canadian over-the-air digital (which in North America almost always
means HDTV) stations. While Toronto has a respectable list (albeit
still shorter than the list
(URL:http://www.hdtvmagazine.com/programming/broadcast-market.php?dma_name%5B%5D=Chicago)
for Chicago, its closest US peer by population), look at the ones for
Montreal and Vancouver. These are the country's second- and
third-largest metro areas! Calgary, the fifth-largest, is completely
missing!

(By contrast, I--living in San Francisco, part of the sixth-largest US
metro area--can with a $20 indoor antenna pick up seven true HDTV
channels, one (PBS) with a slightly-reduced bandwidth, and a
half-dozen more SD digital ones. I'm sure I could get more HDTV
channels from slightly farther-out stations but have never had any
particular reason to try.)

In fact, the only one who does cite the US as an example is one of the
27 commenters, who writes:

I have had HD for over a year now and I will never go back. I
receive about 10 HD channels via cable and the picture quality is
amazing - the World Cup was great. Where I live in the states we
do not have to pay extra for programming or equipment - this is a
key difference from Sky and will definately negatively affect
product adoption.

One guess as to the operative word in the above paragraph.

I for one would prefer quality over quantity.

"Those Amazing Kangaroos!"

Reminds me of those American fools who think that all British TV
programming is as good as (and is of the same genres as) what appears
on Masterpiece Theater.

It's preferable to having 500 channels of crap like in the U.S.

Oh, so you don't have cable and satellite yet.

Seeing this particular argument made by davmel floored me because I
thought no one was dumb enough to make the "500 channels of garbage"
argument any more. Especially considering that davmel is in Australia,
which airs more US programs than any other foreign country in the
world aside from Canada. More than Britain, more than Germany. Given
this fact, why would davmel or any other Australian oppose 500
channels of exactly the programming that makes up so much of what he
already receives?

--
URL:http://www.pobox.com/~ylee/ PERTH ---- *

Homemade 2.8TB RAID 5 storage array:
URL:http://groups.google.ca/groups?selm=slrnd1g04a.5mt.ylee%40pobox.com

P.V. wrote:
"davmel" kirjoitti
...
I would hardly call it bit starved. With a 23Mbps transport stream you
won't get more than a 13-15Mbps HD video channel plus a 6-7Mbps SD
video channel plus a 1.5Mbps video programme guide plus multiple dolby
digital and MPEG audio streams.

whining

I envy you Australians. In Finland we have in each DVB-T multiplex (or
transport stream) five or six SD channels, 2-3 Mbps each

What resolution and aspect ratio are the SD channels?
If they're full D1 720x576 res then the images would be very blurred.
Do the streams have a typically GOP of 15 frames (i.e. I frame every 15
frames) or are there more than 15 frames in a GOP to optimise bandwidth?

There's no dolby on any channel, probably because the only carrier
company in Finland charges so much for bandwidth, and I haven't seen
even plans on starting HDTV.

With the limited bandwidth I can understand why, but at least you have
some decent choice in HDTV via various sats. Currently we have HDTV via
terrestrial and that's it until the next pay tv sat is launched.

Yeechang Lee wrote:
Right here you hit upon something which I'll bet will astound any
consumer electronics-savvy American who has occasionally heard of
Freeview but hasn't looked into the details: *It's not HDTV*. In the
US, the switch from analog to digital broadcasting has been
essentially the same as the switch from 4:3 SDTV to 16:9 HDTV, with
only a few stations that ended up using their assigned bandwidths to
offend viewers with tricks like five SD channels instead of one HD
channel (and even those have by and large long since learned their
lessons). In the UK, once the digital switchover begins in 2008 and
finishes in 2013--14 or 15 years after US stations *began*
broadcasting in HD with ATSC--over-the-air HDTV *may* occur, if The
Powers that Be feel like it. I suspect it will, if only to avoid the
embarrassment of Britons who either subscribe to Sky HD or visit the
US and see real HDTV everywhere, but Freeview may simply end up
offering double the SDTV channels it provides now, or something.

Britain has made the sensible decision to delay HDTV on terrestrial
bands until the transmission of HDTV using MPEG-4 AVC video has been
optimised (and STB prices have dropped to reasonable levels) to allow
transmission at similar quality to MPEG-2 but at half the bitrate which
is essential in the bandwidth limited terrestrial channels.
I suspect the same will happen in all terrestrial HDTV markets
eventually and there will be a messy interim period of some broadcasters
using MPEG-2 and other MPEG-4 which older decoders won't work with.

Yeechang Lee wrote:
It's preferable to having 500 channels of crap like in the U.S.
Oh, so you don't have cable and satellite yet.

Seeing this particular argument made by davmel floored me because I
thought no one was dumb enough to make the "500 channels of garbage"
argument any more. Especially considering that davmel is in Australia,
which airs more US programs than any other foreign country in the
world aside from Canada. More than Britain, more than Germany. Given
this fact, why would davmel or any other Australian oppose 500
channels of exactly the programming that makes up so much of what he
already receives?

We get a selection of the decent programming here in aus, which is a
much better option than having a countless number of stations with
nothing but crap showing.
I don't know anyone that wouldn't prefer some decent programming from
the likes of the ABC, BBC or the CBC over the garbage that comes out of
the USA that is only designed as a distraction to the advertising stream
and made for people with the attention span of a goldfish.

GMAN wrote:
In article , davmel wrote:
The light years you speak of are an indication of how old and already
obsolete the ATSC system is. But don't worry it will only be a matter of
time before the standard is just a foot note in history just like the
long list of USA centric communications standards.
At least the USA was out there seting standards, unlike Australia.

We do set standards but ONLY after we have collaborated with other
countries as part of international standards organisations. We're not
arrogant enough to think that we're more important than everyone else
and as soon as we set a standard everyone else will follow.
Even after Vietnam and Iraq the USA still thinks it can rule the world
on it's own.... Some hard lessons still need to be learned.