The world as frankps sees it!
Posts tagged HD Ready
The Analogue Signal Is About To Vanish …
33 years ago
The analogue TV signal has or is about to vanish in many counties across Norway, and people are confronted with advertisement on TV, newspapers, Internet and posters on bus and subway stops of various digital solutions. One of the most active providers is RiksTV, the company that has the license for digital terrestrial/ariel broadcasting. I find them to be to aggressive and not telling the consumers that most of them don’t need to do anything. Most consumers in Norway either own a satellite dish or are using Cable-TV. It is only the analogue terrestrial signals that are to stop. Hack, even some friends of me have called me to ask what they have to do something.
I would come with a small suggestion to the ones that have cable tv and satellite dishes, and it is simple: Do nothing! You should never even consider RiksTV, simply cause of the limitations that digital broadcasting over terrestrial have. We are about to enter a revolution in TV broadcasting, and my bet is that RiksTV will not be part of it. I have earlier been writing positively about RiksTV choosing MPEG-4 for broadcasting. The Cable TV companies have so far been using MPEG-2, but are now also moving to MPEG-4 (the same standard for compressing the TV signals). The reason why Get customers can choose between about a 100 channels and RiksTV customers only about 25, is available bandwidth. Yes, bandwidth in the same way as when we talk about Internet connections. The terrestrial net that RiksTV today is operating in, has a total capasity of 66 Mbit, and when the analogue net is closing another 44 Mbit will be made available. In other words, RiksTV for the future will have a 110 Mbit in total. Get on the other hand has available about 6 Gbit, just about 60 times more. It should of course be said that some of this bandwidth is used for VoIP and Internet, but there is plenty left for TV signals.
So dear reader, what kind of TV do you have? HD Ready or Full HD? Thought so, you are one of the many Norwegians that have already bought a LCD screen and you now are missing high quality content? Who are you turning to? I hope your answer for the time being NO ONE. Cause they all lack content. I can only talk about Get, as they are the ones providing me with TV signals. They have just introduced their first four HD Ready channels, plus Canal Digital HD. I didn’t sign up, as the channels plus a PVR is way to expensive. They are following a good tradition of milking the enthusiast market first. Having said that, other channels will be added already this spring and a digital receiver without PVR will probably be introduced, and then I guess I will jump on the wagon myself as well.
When it comes to RiksTV, I had to laugh when I read the following news: ViaSat has taken over NRK’s rights to send the Olympics in HD. NRK will only be sending the opening and closing ceremony of the Olympics in HD. What the article doesn’t mention is that they then have to close NRK2 or NRK3 to get the needed bandwidth on RiksTV. Something to consider for the digital future that is upon us?
One last word, I have nothing against RiksTV. I just want to state that their solution is about to become obsolete, a solution that was good yesterday isn’t neccessarily enough tomorrow. More and more people are buying themselves LCD and Plasma screens, and then comes the demands.
Medietilsynet has made a site (information in English) informing about digital TV transmission in Norway (ariel, cable, satellite and broadband).
What does HD Ready mean?
35 years ago
I find all the TVs being sold in shops today labeled as HD Ready. They all fit the requirements set by EICTA (European Information, Communications and Consumer Electronics Technology Industry Associations), so none of the shops do anything unlegal in their advertisement of the next generation TV, which is quite massive today. Don’t try to repeat the name of the association, I’ve tried and you will not make it! And a wild guess, I guess you haven’t heard of them before either?
What made me start writing this article was basically three things:
So what should people buy? In the beginning I must admit that I was not to interested in the subject. The TVs were simply to expensive. And having in mind that I bought a Betamax player (VHS won), a DCC player (If any, MiniDisc won), I have a Laser Disc collection (something that never took off), and I last year bought a PCI DVB-T (DTT) card for my PC. I can still watch DVB-T on my PC, but what I am receiving is just test sendings (see screenshot above). NTV have stated that they want to make use of a technology that can carry HDTV signals, and chose to use MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2. All the DVB-T cards on the market today, as far as I know, can only receive signals in MPEG-2. Making all these cards useless when regular sendings start. Norwegian shops are still selling these cards, but I strongly recommend you to stay away from them.
99% of the TVs sold today are HD Ready and have the screen resolution 1366 x 768. These TVs can only show TV in 720p, without any kind of conversion and scale down. From the picture above you can first of all see the huge difference between today’s analogue sending and 720p, and also that 720p is widescreen. From the picture you can also see that the difference between 720p and 1080i/p is just as big. For 720p the data transfer is 1 MP and for 1080i 2 MP (1280×720 or 1920×1080 pixels resolutions). Regarding the picture above, all screen resolutions will cover the whole screen of your TV.
The problem is the lack of information from NRK, TV2 and NTV. What standard(s) will they be supporting? They have so far only said that they will making use of MPEG-4. Going for 720p will be a clear improvement from today’s TV, but the only thing making sense when building a complete new terristical broadcasting net is going direct for 1080i/p. NRK has given indications that they will be sending in both 720p and 1080i. Both Blueray and HD DVD are capable of showing up to 1080.
So what should I recommend? Probably just that people should wait and see what information NTV, NRK and TV2 will be releasing the following months.