noggin's posts, page 43

Philips Ambilight Smart Android TV

Yep - Gracenote has had quite a history. It started as an open source CD Database (CDDB) and then became a commercial operation. It was owned by Sony for a while - and quite a few Sony TVs and Blu-ray players/DVD players had Gracenote access for TV guides and CD look-up. Lots of Sony consumer disc players lost access to Gracenote when Sony sold Gracenote, or didn't renew their licenses, which means that you no longer get CD track information as you used to. (I guess fewer and fewer people play physical CDs in optical players these days...)

The move from being open source to commercial wasn't uncontroversial, as people contributed their CD data to an open source platform (with the expectation that they would be able to access it, and others uploaded CD information) but then it effectively moved behind a paywall ...

Memories Of Video

No - Antiques Roadshow didn't use D-VHS, they used JVC's Digital-S (aka D9) format. (By then BBC Bristol's OB base had closed and they used a Kendal Avenue Type VII?)

Digital-S/D9 used a VHS form factor (and larger) cassette to record a 4:2:2 Intra DV50 bitstream (not a 25Mbs 4:2:0 LongGOP MPEG2 stream as per D-VHS). The results were identical to DVC Pro 50 (the 50Mbs 4:2:2 DVC format that EastEnders used) and visually very similar to IMX50 and Digital Betacam.

D-VHS was a consumer format, and would have been a nightmare as a broadcast format with it's LongGOP format (insert editing would have required a lot of buffering and GOP mangling)

Digital-S was a broadcast format, and used an intra-frame codec (so insert editing was easy), and the range included broadcast VTRs and a camcorder (which was dreadful).

Arguably Digital-S was the 1/2" equivalent to the Sony 1/2" Digital Betacam format (just as M-format was the 'VHS' answer to Betacam, and MII was the their answer to Betacam SP), however Panasonic had already moved on to the DVC family.
Arguably JVC then pivoted the D9 format to compete with the DVC Pro range - as just as DVC Pro HD used a 100Mbs DV codec to add (reduced resolution) HD compatibility to their DVC Pro range, JVC introduced a D-9 HD based on (I think the same) 100Mbs DV codec. There were arguments that D9 was more robust than DVC Pro because of the larger tape area used.

(Just as HD Cam was 1440x1080 3:1:1, DVC Pro HD 100 was either 1440x1080/50 or 1280x1080/60 subsampled)

Memories Of Video

D-VHS decks were sold in the US with Firewire inputs and outputs that could be fed to/from cable (and modified satellite) set top boxes and would record a lossless stream of a single channel (which had been decrypted I believe). Many D-VHS decks sold in the US didn't have MPEG2 encoders - so couldn't record baseband composite NTSC or HD component signals in high quality (eventually some did have this functionality). Some early decks didn't have MPEG2 decoders either - so you had to play your recordings back into your cable box (for it to decode).

ISTR there may have been a route to recording terrestrial 8VSB ATSC as well. It had a moderate degree of success in this niche format for HD archive and time shifting. It was possible to ingest recordings made on D-VHS into PCs ISTR (though the copy protection on some cable broadcasts inhibited this ISTR)

The D-VHS format in the US was allied closely to the encrypted D-Theater movie format that allowed for HD movie releases on VHS shape tapes.


European D-VHS decks didn't have any way of taking in an external transport stream lossslessy - they only had MPEG2 hardware encoders fed either via SD composite/S-Video (possibly component - but I think the lack of RGB SCART was an issue on at least one model?) and possibly also DV25 via Firewire (which was re-encoded to MPEG2). As HD hadn't' really launched in Europe, and DVB-T was still relatively new, D-VHS was really only sold as a higher-quality / longer-recording SD format and went nowhere as it was so expensive...

International News Presentation: Past and Present

That suggests it was a distribution issue then - the same reason BBC London and BBC North West come from HD studios but are only normally available in SD.

BBC News nostalgia, including BBC World

Wasn't that because the generic news bulletins on BBC World were titled BBC World News? (i.e. the programme she was presenting was called BBC World News)

The Sport Thread

And then watch all the equipment start failing... The air con is there to cool the equipment, not the people...

If air con fails in a modern OB truck you have to stop broadcasting and power down in most cases. One (quite inexperienced) company bought a second-hand truck and powered up the equipment and not the air con. They wrote off a very expensive router by doing that...

CNN International & Domestic

10Mbs of reliable upstream connectivity will get you reasonable results with a decent encoder and some protection using Zixxi, SRT or similar. You have a slight trade off between latency and quality.

It's not technically 'broadcast quality' - but for talking heads without a huge amount of motion that's not bad. Most modern broadband connections will support that. I get around 18Mbs upstream/68Mbs downstream on my regular VDSL connection in London.

International News Presentation: Past and Present

Yep - looks electronic to me. My guess is that CBS rigged an NTSC camera in TV Centre - you can see the floor monitors flickering as you'd expect from a 60Hz camera pointed at a 50Hz CRT. It's possible the BBC had an NTSC 525/60 capable camera they were able to let CBS use I guess. (PAL 625/50 to NTSC 525/60 conversion wasn't really an option in 1966)

It's difficult to say for sure it isn't film - but it doesn't have the 'film look' to me.

The One Show

Gethin has stood in as a relief presenter on The One Show in the past. He co-presented for a week with Gloria Hunniford ISTR.

This Morning

Or, perhaps more accurately, read a pre-prepared and legalled statement written for him by ITV lawyers...

BBC News (UK) presentation - Reith launch onwards

Not really - 12am and 12pm are notoriously ambiguous - noon and midnight are better on-screen if you must use 12 hour clock.

The UK moved from 12 hour to 24 hour clock more slowly than many other countries - and still uses 12 hour clock informally, though almost everyone here has no problems reading 24 hour clocks and timetables etc. these days.

If you ask someone the time they'll almost always reply in 12 hour clock, even if looking at a 24 hour watch, though the am and pm is almost always taken as a given (you wouldn't conversationally say it's 3pm, you'd just say 3 o'clock and know that someone knew whether it was 3 in the morning or 3 in the afternoon).

Personally I HATE 12 hour digital clocks around the house and only have 24 hour clocks. Ditto on-screen clocks.

The thing I find REALLY weird is US TV control rooms not having their digital clocks in 24 hour format.

BBC News (UK) presentation - Reith launch onwards

You often see 15h in some countries rather than just 15.