Challenge TV - September 2011 onwards

Ever heard of lossy compression? If you want decent quality, WAV, FLAC or Apple Lossless are the way to go usually.

Unless you stick to high-ish bitrate of around 320kbps, compressing audio to MP3 will lose you quality - it's a pretty ancient, and not particularly effective, audio compression system (AAC is significantly better).

With modern broadband rates and storage costs, why use MP3?

I thought it was generally accepted that people cannot tell the difference between a 192kbps (I think) MP3 and the uncompressed source file? Uncompressed files are only really necessary in audio production, not for general consumption.

For these short voice clips from Challenge ... does it really matter about the overall sound quality?!? I'm well aware
that MP3 is a "lossy" audio format, and while it certainly matters for music, for voice clips, who the hell cares?!?

What's going on with the weird letter box mode on Family Fortunes at the moment?

Looked odd. The second episode is in the normal 4:3 ratio.

Please describe it in more detail.

EDIT: Don't worry about it. I can see for myself on Challenge[TV]+1. It is being broadcast in 4:3 but with black bars on all sides. Odd.

Still, if zoom in you can cut off the Challenge[TV][+1] DOG and end up with a clean copy of the episode, albeit with a slightly soft picture.

Which can only be classed as "clean" if you like watching TV shows from the perspective of a fish. Otherwise it looks simply dreadful.

As others have stated - probably not a huge issue for off-air recordings of Challenge TV...

However (and apologies for off-topic-ness) 320kbps is widely deemed the minimum bitrate for stereo MP3s if they are going to be used for broadcast (though this doesn't stop lower bitrate stuff being used...)

When I first got an iPod in ~2003 I ripped all my CDs at 192kbps (because I could hear how awful 128kbps MP3s sounded). However some stuff definitely still sounded a bit off at that bitrate, so I did some blind-ish listening tests (getting someone else to play tracks and I scored the quality) to see what I should rip everything to a second time. I could rank 128, 192 and 256 pretty effectively, and could sometimes hear the difference between 256 and 320k.

However I knew I wasn't going to want re-rip my collection for a third time, so ripped everything as Apple Lossless (which is compressed, but only in the data domain - like a ZIP file the original contents are still entirely preserved) and then converted this to 320k MP3 for my iPod (which had been replaced with a larger model)

I also compress to 256k AAC (which is 'good enough') for my phone.

How fun life was before Spotify.

I frequently use WAV putting out at 1411k, or usually its just a normal 320k....

But moving on, I watched Family Fortunes from last night, and the picture on the 1st episode on my TV was not only letterboxed, but yet had black bars around all 4 sides. Quite sore on the eyes to watch actually.

I noticed that too. I thought they'd fix the postage stamp effect during the break, but not so. The second episode which followed was fine.

There appeared to be a supernatural being of some kind on Family Fortunes this evening. It didn't make itself known until the end but it was there for all to see.

Have a look at this video, apologies for the poor quality but I think you can clearly see something not of this world at the bottom of the screen just as the credits start.
[media:59f4c6bab5]http://up.metropol247.co.uk/davidlees/family_fortunes_ghost.flv[/media:59f4c6bab5]

Did you see it? Something was there making it's way from the audience section to the stage section of the set. Whatever it was disappeared as it glided towards Les Dennis. I wonder why this wasn't picked up in 1987.