Scottish switchover

Well, no sign of 'Pages From Ceefax' overnight on BBC 2 going yet ?!

After London's DSO, yes it's Tyne Tees (3-4 million ?) and Ulster (1.5 million) left, less than 10% of the UK population, so not worth any great effort I suppose.

I hope whenever Ceefax is finally killed, it's given a proper send off, particularly as the demise of Teletext on ITV/4/5 was a long and slow fizzling out (which is still not totally complete).

Ceefax is still carried on DSat too, though I really doubt it's used very often.

It's not a full service, is it?

Certainly not used by anyone connecting their box to their TV by HDMI.

Only P888 subtitles, and a limited range of pages for viewers in the Benelux countries watching BBC 1 and 2 on cable networks. I think the pages are only carried on BBC 1 London and BBC 2 England D-Sat streams. P888 is on all regions and nations, but not BBC 3, 4, or N24 ?



Yes, they'd have trouble, the VBI doesn't exist on HDMI signals !

Actually, BBC World carries a teletext service, though I think it's supplied by Intelifax ?

I saw a test recording of RTÉ's Soarview stream recently. That was being fed into a standard DTT receiver, and Aertel pages were viewable. Many other countries still run a '1974 spec' Teletext service. TVE in Spain do, and they've completed DSO.

What do those pages say exactly?

Last time I looked (quite a long while ago) BBC 1 and 2 programme listings in CET, and some selected recipes from Ready Steady Cook, and that was about it !

Black Hill stage 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nHRvyN6VSo

I think it only carries pages when referenced on screen. Ready Steady Cook was possibly one of the last programmes to do this.

It was, but Intelfax haven't existed for years. I've no idea what happened to them, whether they lost contracts and closed or whether they couldn't make it pay. At one point they were providing teletext for loads of cab-sat channels which all seemed to gradually lose their text services, including ITV and Channel 4

I'm pretty sure that it's done in house now (there isn't really anywhere else doing teletext these days so it must be) and it's much more basic than it used to be. At one point it had news/business/sports pages and these were also used as the source for the text on BBC World's break filler. I will have a look at what is there next time I'm at work


It's possible, but not as straightforward as it is in the analogue world - it has to be carried alongside the video and then inserted into the VBI in the box

BFBS carries Ceefax London pages up to 600 and Forces text there after.

[quote="Inspector Sands" pid="711799"]

Indeed, though on IDTVs (more and more the norm now) there's of course no need for any VBI faffing about. Just render the data from the TS into the pages. AIUI such functionality is a standard tool within the DVB spec. My Freesat Humax PVR does the same, but only when it's in 'Non Freesat' mode. The stakeholders in Freeview and Freesat (mostly the Beeb) have decided to remove support of 'analogue' teletext. I don't know what loop hole Sony and others have found for teletext support on their IDTVs, perhaps its because they're generic models for world wide use ?

So the last words uttered on BBC analogue TV transmission in Scotland were from Jeremy Clarkson !