noggin's posts, page 13

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NG
noggin Founding member

AppleTV 4K and Apple Video Services.

DVB Cornwall posted:
After many years, the latest NOWTV app has launched on AppleTV today, fully equipped with HD, Boost and the extra streams. There's a discussion as to the audio standard availability. Still no catalogue of Sports Replay though although that's common across platforms.


If any NowTV subscriber enables their Developer options on their ATV 4K the HUD playback overlay will clarify what the video and audio streaming codecs and bitrates used for audio are (which may differ from the output format - as ATV 4Ks usually decode to PCM multichannel rather than bitstreaming compressed audio formats)
NG
noggin Founding member

TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

Inspector Sands posted:
Run_Telecine posted:

They'd be lucky to have a Take Next button, let alone an Emergency Cut Bank. Surprised the system doesn't *seem* to have allowed a Director to scroll back up the Schedule, and re-take MOTD.

They'll have a take next button as they need the flexibility to move on the schedule at the end of a live programme, with a couple of exceptions they're not fixed length*. That's what the director would have done at the end of Final Score.

I don't think you could go to past events, all the automation I've seen removes items once they've happened. The solution - if there's no manual cut bus - is to insert a new item with the required source and then Take Next to it



*I think its still the case but it used to be that they could make events in the schedule either Fixed or Manual - Fixed events start at the time no matter what, Manual events don't start until they're told to. So the One o Clock News would be fixed as it must start at 13:00:00, but the next event would be manual because you don't know when the news will end


Certainly many live shows are still 'manual take' for off-air with a 2" pre-roll on the event. (i.e. it takes 2" from pressing the button for the cut to be seen to have happened')
NG
noggin Founding member

BBC Lionheart TV

SA100 posted:
Was watching the end of Wallace & Gromit on GOLD earlier this morning and it
Was a ardman productions for BBC Bristol, CBBC International and BBC Lionheart Television.

Any one know what BBC Lionheart were ?


Lionheart was the BBC's North American sales and co-production operation for a number of years.

It's one of the now-defunct BBC divisions, like BBC Enterprises, that have effectively rolled into BBC Studios (via BBC Worldwide).
NG
noggin Founding member

30 years since the closure of BSB

VMPhil posted:
I'm guessing not because of their short time on air, but did BSB do any widescreen experiments, given D-MAC's support for 16:9?


ISTR - though I may be wrong - that they were able to broadcast 16:9 movies - though I don't know if they did? I have dim recollections of BSB having modified wide-band Betacam SP decks installed for this very purpose. I'm trying to rack my brains whether it was BSB or C4 (for their PALPlus stuff) who had a 16:9 telecine that was used by others, including Nordic broadcasters based in the UK, for transfers of movies for MAC 16:9 broadcast.

The BSB boxes didn't letterbox 16:9 broadcasts when output to 4:3 TVs (like DVB boxes routinely do) - as that would have required an expensive frame/field-store, and D-MAC only required a line-store - but they were able to do a pan-able 4:3 cut-out by altering the line clocking.
Roger Darthwell and VMPhil gave kudos
NG
noggin Founding member

The state of TV fonts

IndigoTucker posted:
In my former career as an archivist, we referred to a master book of copyright rules. One of the sections was on typefaces, with the notion that fonts couldn't be copyrighted as after all, they are simply characters of the alphabet. True, the TTF/OTF files are copyrightable, but if someone was to trace the glyphs into a new file, theres nothing that could be done.



https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/I/chapter/III/crossheading/typefaces
NG
noggin Founding member

HBO Max

It's going to be an interesting situation in the HBO/Sky deal territories like the UK - where Sky have exclusive HBO rights (and thus HBO don't have an OTT/SVOD presence), and thus any new HBO Max operation would, confusingly, just be non-HBO content if it were to launch? I wonder if they will create a separate Warner brand for them - or do a deal with Sky?

The Sky/HBO deal dates back to 2010, and was renewed in 2014 and 2019 - with an expectation it would run to 2024?
NG
noggin Founding member

Good Morning Britain

CraigWills posted:
I noticed since ‘lockdown2’ ended they now have more contributors in the studio, Ben & Charlotte plus Sean at the 6am news desk, Laura, Richard and Hilary in their ‘areas’ just after half six today. I assume newsreader now stays throughout the show to read headlines.
I still think it’s a little weird that they sort of removed people and now brought them back but actually there’s been little change to work advice or social distancing requirements.


I think the restriction covering non-essential travel, and working from home if at all possible, were probably the reasons they reduced the studio contributors during England's Lockdown 2.
NG
noggin Founding member

30 years since the closure of BSB

Markymark posted:
noggin posted:

However those differences were probably pretty minor. Sky channels originated composite certainly wouldn't have looked as clean as the BSB channels when playing component content when connected via an RGB SCART connection - but again most people probably wouldn't have really noticed a huge difference.


One annoying thing about Sky's analogue broadcasts, was the field rate flicker that the VideoCrypt encryption seemed to introduce ?


Hmm - wonder what caused that - as the encryption was cut-and-rotate line-based. There was some additional (25Hz?) stuff done on FM satellite modulation wasn't there to do with power efficiency (possibly because of syncs?)

Videocrypt on satellite did nothing for the noise performance of the broadcasts that's for sure.

(The BBC trialled it for BBC Select on terrestrial and because of multi path and other issues it was terrible - which is why the terrestrial version of Videocrypt used line shuffling rather than cut-and-rotate)
NG
noggin Founding member

Pointless Sound Fault

Markymark posted:
noggin posted:
Markymark posted:

I'm trying to think how the talk back system audio can end up polluting the main programme audio ?!

I can only think it became 'acoustically' coupled, perhaps a talkback unit speaker left on in an unoccupied voiceover booth, and the announcer's mic in there somehow routed to Tx ?


The Red Bee playout system for BBC One/Two/Four/CBBC/CBeebies is all IP now I believe. If the talkback audio is too - and it's combined somehow in a continuity announcer monitoring and mixing unit - I guess that might be a route?


Possible I suppose ! Or the first known case of NMOS working without any intervention Very Happy


That said - if it was at the continuity announcer end that the fault condition happened (which it sounds like it might be) - I would imagine that they have a small bespoke sound desk which has inputs from their voice over mic, the output of the playout system's audio, and of their director's talkback - so that they can have a mix of these in their headphones... If that desk is IP (or just software controlled and conventional) a fault condition could presumably exist that bridges the talkback feed onto output...
NG
noggin Founding member

Pointless Sound Fault

Steve in Pudsey posted:
Markymark posted:
Inspector Sands posted:

They do use speakers but I would have thought that the combination of it being a talk back mic and that it was mixed with programme audio avoided any howl round, it sounded a bit echoey though


I'm trying to think how the talk back system audio can end up polluting the main programme audio ?!

I can only think it became 'acoustically' coupled, perhaps a talkback unit speaker left on in an unoccupied voiceover booth, and the announcer's mic in there somehow routed to Tx ?

NC1 and NC2 talkback gets fed to Nations and Regions, presumably multiplexed with the network distribution to keep it in sync. Could the error have been downstream of playout?


I don't believe that to be the case in terms of how the issue happened, nor do I believe the distribution of talkback is that tightly integrated into the network sound and vision feeds. (I don't think they are additional MPEG2 PIDs or embedded audio feeds in an uncompressed SDI-over-IP/Fibre stream, though Audio Description is)
NG
noggin Founding member

30 years since the closure of BSB

VMPhil posted:
So, during the transition period, would you have received a better quality picture of Sky's channels if you used a BSB dish and got them in D-MAC than if you had a Sky dish?


As others have said - Sky was analogue composite, so the D-MAC component broadcasts would have been decoded PAL (with composite PAL artefacts). However there were two areas where it was potentially a bit better.

1. MAC didn't use a high frequency PAL subcarrier, but carried chroma, like lumninance, at baseband. Both BSB's MAC and Sky's PAL were FM modulated on satellite, but FM has a triangular noise shape, which means you get more noise at higher frequencies. As a result PAL composite (used by Sky on Astra) had higher levels of chroma noise than MAC. Sky's PAL composite stuff was always a bit chroma-noisier than a good terrestrial signal at the time too.

2. Sky used a pretty nasty audio modulation system on Astra, whereas BSB used NICAM digital.

However those differences were probably pretty minor. Sky channels originated composite certainly wouldn't have looked as clean as the BSB channels when playing component content when connected via an RGB SCART connection - but again most people probably wouldn't have really noticed a huge difference.
UKnews, Interceptor and VMPhil gave kudos
NG
noggin Founding member

BBC iPlayer

Neil Jones posted:
JasonB posted:
Did the BBC make any edits to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air when it aired on BBC Two? I didn’t spot any unusual edits or cuts when it was on Netflix so I can’t do a comparison.


They used to move the titles, to make the show have a "warm opening" as opposed to the standard American style "cold opening".
A cold opening is where you go straight into a programme without any titles, and the warm is obviously with titles.

However Bel-Air wasn't unique in the BBC's approach to this. Malcolm In The Middle had the same approach done to it too. No doubt others too. Not entirely sure why they felt they had to do this.


Suspect it is/was a cultural thing - US audiences are used to very different presentation styles - with no channel idents before shows, shows having breaks more frequently and in unusual (to a UK audience eyes) locations - such as before the end credits etc. (And in the case of BBC audiences - apart from a strange BBC Three experiment - having any breaks at all!)

Times are changing - but I suspect UK audiences a decade or two ago were more used to shows starting with opening titles.

It may not even have been the BBC who did the re-edits. Sometimes international versions of US shows differ quite significantly from the original US broadcasts - particularly in titles and credits terms.
Last edited by noggin on 3 December 2020 11:01am