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The MHEG Stuff (July 2003)

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PE
Pete Founding member
Why do the BBC transmit that dreadful MHEG caption for Radio 4 that seems to moire terribly (I typed Moira three times there - tsk) instead of a better one. Does it do that on all the boxes or just the ITVd and Goodmans ones?

Plus why does the world service one flicker whereas Smash Hits (similar colour) doesn't?
:-(
A former member
Hymagumba posted:
Why do the BBC transmit that dreadful MHEG caption for Radio 4 that seems to moire terribly (I typed Moira three times there - tsk) instead of a better one. Does it do that on all the boxes or just the ITVd and Goodmans ones?

Plus why does the world service one flicker whereas Smash Hits (similar colour) doesn't?


Hmm... I've noticed this too; on some radio channels the colours have a dreadful "S" shape on them.

Notably, the effect is usually eliminated in composite mode.

No reason why they couldn't change it though.

41 days later

CW
cwathen Founding member
Both Radio 2 and Radio 4 have particularly poor images I've noticed. It looks to me like a lack of colour depth. They do look a bit better in composite, but only because the resulting colour bleeding works in a positive way to make the transitions less distinct.

Also, does anyone know quite what affects the loading times of the images? The BBC World Service image takes an age to load, whilst the Asian Network image (which has more colours and is generally more complex) loads much more quickly. Are they stored in some bitmapped format so that image size comes into play more?
IS
Isonstine Founding member
Just seems to be a lack of colour depth to me.

Here are the MHEG screens for Radio 2 and 4 - presented in their raw MHEG format on a PC, albeit with a bit of JPEG compression:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jamesison/dtt-radio2.jpg

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jamesison/dtt-radio4.jpg

Just grainy like an image in 256 colours of similar, if you compare with Radio 5 Live's logo then you can see a bit of a difference - but the 5 Live logo is a lot simpler and with less colours of course:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jamesison/dtt-radio5.jpg

Sorry for the size of the images - had to be in their original size else including the pictures would have been pointless!! Can't believe I actually just spent time doing that. Shocked
PE
Pete Founding member
Isonstine posted:
Just seems to be a lack of colour depth to me.

Here are the MHEG screens for Radio 2 and 4 - presented in their raw MHEG format on a PC, albeit with a bit of JPEG compression:


you should have saved them as PNGs then Very Happy

You'd really think that a broadcasting company would change graphics being broadcast that just look naff and don't work or do what they are meant to. Mind you this is from the people who brought you News 24...

At least the EMAP lot put effort in and have competition details on their MHEG. Plus the World Service graphic is dire. It's nearly as bad as new the Jazz FM one. They replaced a lovely classy logo with something that would be quite at home in the crap mocks thread.

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