Analogue TV memories

In Germany they still have teletext, even on some HD channels, it seems a bit unusual for us to scrap it even though we didn't have to.

And most devices that support Teletext today in Germany store all the pages as they are loaded, so after about 30 seconds, all pages are instantly available.

I think all modern TVs sold in former or present WST regions, still have teletext decoders built in. My brand new Samsung telly has a TTX/MIX button on it. I bet if I tuned to an analogue carrier and set a preset, pressing it would result in a P100 top left corner of the screen

RTE Aertel in Ireland is still going, largely because of a legislative obligation to provide the service. When Virgin Media finishes switching off its analogue service the only people who will still be able to receive the WST service (not to be confused with “Aertel Digital” on Saorview) will be Sky customers who have their digiboxes connected by SCART.

Presumably on SD services only? (Not that HD services can be watched in that way is SCART anyway)

https://www.teletextholidays.co.uk

It certainly is!

I think some boxes can put teletext signals over HDMI?

It's probably mandated for accessibility reasons, isn't it? I'm not sure whether there any devices for the deaf that would still utilise it, although you can still use it to read old teletext pages off VHS recordings, if you (and your VHS player) were so inclined.

Interesting, or possibly not, that six years on from the completion of digital switchover, subtitling hasn't changed at all. It's the same four colours (white, yellow, cyan, green) in black rectangles (they used to mix it up a bit with coloured backgrounds for non-human characters in sci-fi, but they don't even do that any more!).

I remember seeing a bit on See Hear! many years ago about an effort to update subtitling, with animations for emphasis, font variations (bold and italics) and so on, but nothing ever came of it. They were also talking about switchable sign-language-interpreter overlay streams, which also hasn't happened.

I was putting together a compilation of UK soaps from my American friend to react to and I wanted to mix it up a bit so found Pobol Y Cym on iPlayer (sadly couldn't get the subtitles to work correctly in my editing program so had to create them myself, which gives me a newfound appreciation for the people who do it - It's incredibly tedious)

The subtitles on iPlayer are the same as they are on TV with the black background and four colour text, but there was stuff like "Knocking on door" where the background rectangle colour was Red or Blue which surprised me - Like you I hadn't seen that in years.

Glad to see it's still being used somewhere.

I thought the blanking period in HDMI contains ancillary data, rather than the native signals you’d find in the VBI of an ‘analogue’ 625/50 signal ?

That I couldn’t swear by, though I suspect the type of person who has their Sky digibox still connected via Scart isn’t paying the HD charge to Sky (although you wouldn’t need to pay it for RTE HD services, HD-swap won’t be implemented if you don’t).

Knowing RTE, their director general is eager to axe Aertel altogether. She has already sounded out the axing of their so called news channel RTE News Now. Instead of taking their news channel and doing a better job on it, they rather close it down. This is what will happen with Aertel.