Is the US Ready For the Switch To DTV? 423
tonsofpcs writes "On Monday, September 8, Wilmington, NC will be the first television market (#135) to make the switch to DTV by shutting off their analog transmitters. This forum will be posting updates throughout the coming months to keep everyone updated on how the transition works so that we are all prepared come February 17, 2009. So far, it seems Wilmington will still be going ahead as planned, despite Tropical Storm Hanna's proximity."
Re:Despite Tropical Storm Hanna? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I have a feeling (Score:3, Informative)
Something tells me that after several delays and numerous announcements that the people that are unaware of the switch to digital TV probably wouldn't be too upset about missing out on TV for a few days while they track down an analog->digital converter.
Greetings, visitor - you picked a windy day to visit our strange planet.
Seriously, some people will start screaming when the glass nipple is wrenched from their lips, and "didn't you see all the announcements?" just ain't gonna cut it.
The UK is just embarking on the same experiment and its pretty clear that a lot of people (a) rank this as equivalent to having their water or electricity cut off, (b) are "confused" by the announcements and expect the man from the gubment to turn up and fix it for them and (c) resent the idea of having to shell out £25 for each telly.
To be fair - there are some complicating factors (at least in the UK version):
Re:I have a feeling (Score:4, Informative)
DTV also provides fewer stations than analog.
Get a different tuner/antenna.
My experience was quite the opposite. Using my original crappy bunny ears, I was able to receive around 5 channels in analog. Switching to digital brought these fuzzy/static channels to full 1080i. Add in a mid-sized powered antenna, pointed the right way and that number goes up to 32 (counting the spanish and shopping channels).
From the suburbs west of Boston I get: Boston, Providence and Manchester. All in far better quality than analog could have possibly provided.
If you want to blame the FCC for something, blame them for selecting ATSC. Why on earth they chose MPEG2 when everyone else gets MPEG4 or H.264 is anyone's guess (greed from patent holders maybe?).
UK is *very* different (Score:5, Informative)
My experience with digital TV in the UK is going from analogue at 4.5 channels (5 was not available in about half the places I went) to digital with far too many to count. The signal strength, picture and sound quality went through the roof with the transition too. Plus, no messing around with tuning at all, it just pulls channels, names and schedules out of the ether.
If your experience is typical, the FCC has managed a frak-up of truly epic proportions.
Of course, with all the new channels there's still nothing on worth watching, but that's a problem with the culture, not the technology.
Re:I have a feeling (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Will they broadcast a notice? (Score:2, Informative)
They have been broadcasting notices here for the past, oh, I don't know, several months.
Re:Despite Tropical Storm Hanna? (Score:3, Informative)
Even if EBS is still transmitting an analog signal (will it?) many people will probably have their TV off since tehy aren't getting programming and not get a warning at all.
EAS will still be analog as most stations receive it from radio stations. EAS is relayed by the TV station though, which will not be broadcasting analog, so there will be no way to receive it on an analog set (unless a local LPTV station is still operating in analog, as they are exempt from the changeover for now).
As fro radio, it'd be nice if everyone had a working radio and maybe even a weather alert radio; but they are a less effective means of providing updates and warnings since they have to stop broadcasting to send updates; unlike a continuous scroll.
EAS requires an audio interruption of programming, both on TV and radio. Crawls without audio do not meet EAS requirements. Some stations will continue crawls of information that is not required to be relayed via EAS, but this is as a service to the public (and in order to tell the FCC "hey, we meet our public service requirements" next time the license is up for renewal).
Re:Will they broadcast a notice? (Score:2, Informative)
I think the digital signals use the same bandwidth segment as the old analog signal.
Can someone confirm this?
If this is true they cannot have them both on at the same time. Part of the benefit is the digital takes up less room than analog so they free up some space between channels with the digital.
Re:UK is *very* different (Score:5, Informative)
I know exactly what we're talking about; terrestrial Digital Video Broadcasting(DVB) through the air. The stuff you breathe, with antennae and no cables or dishes.
The only tuning you have to do is press autotune and the rest just happens. I've never had to fiddle around with the antenna on digital TV. Same with Digital Audio Broadcasting(DAB), though I have more signal problems with that.
I love the fact that a self-confirmed resident of Pennsylvania, USA has the audacity to tell me how my TV works from the other side of the Atlantic. You may have seen pictures of the boxes; I've owned and used one. This is why I think the FCC has conducted such an epic fail, if what you've said is accurate.
Some commentary on my switch... (Score:5, Informative)
I live in a valley...
next to an HD-only transmitter.
Needless to say, analog *anything* has been an issue. Last spring, sensing there may a be rush later, I got our two coupons from Uncle Sam, and cashed 'em in. A few points on my experience:
o Direction and gain are definitely more of an issue. Since we barely got anything analog clearly on bunny ear/loop, we got next to nothing with digital.
o With digital, it's all or nothing. Either you have clear signal, maybe with some artifacts, or you have black screen.
o *The* most annoying thing is that sounds cuts first.
o So, I did what any self-respecting tinkerer would do. I build a grey-hoverman antenna out of foam board, packing tape, tin foil, and picture hanging wire - all from from Walgreens (U.S. pharmacy) :-D. http://www.digitalhome.ca/ota/superantenna/ [digitalhome.ca]
o Obviously, with such rarefied materials I have a less-than-precise design - that works... really well.
o The GH antenna is highly directional. Since digital is crystal-clear, we put up with adjusting the thing in the bay window.
o We get 9-12 clear channels now, instead of 4-5 distorted ones.
o It's best to put it in an attic, or outside. Be sure to ground it, etc. The higher, the better - generally.
o Note that there are two ranges for VHF DTV, high channels and low channels. The Grey-Hoverman seems to do well with UHF DTV and high VHF. Most DTV seems to be UHF.
o Only some DTV is HD. Stations were given sub-channels. Some use only the main channel and switch back and forth between HD. Others put SD on one and HD on the other. Others use all for HD, with different content. The public television stations, strangely enough, seem to be making the best use of the sub-channels.
o The other prominent build-able design is called a Yagi. It consists of connected bow-ties, rather than zig-zag elements. The Yagi design is nice, because its gain is roughly even across UHF. The Grey-Hoverman seems to have better gain than the Yagi on some ranges, but cuts out in others. Check the frequencies of your local stations and compare them to the two antennas' gain charts before deciding.
o Why the range of channels for me? Well, in a valley the signal has echoes. Some echoes are stronger than others. Sometimes the amp makes the two echoes the same strength. In that case the converter box cannot lock in. Thus, if your location is subject to echoes (hills, valley, etc.), design your wiring to allow the easy removal of your amplifier.
o Also, atmospheric conditions seem to have an effect. On clear dry days we don't do so well; on wet or humid days, I think we could get New York City, if we wanted (we're in southern N.E.).
o Finally, going digital with a converter has one interesting benefit for you OSS fans. Since the Neuros OSD is still SD, converted DTV works nicely with it. I don't have one yet, but they are now on Amazon, and I am strongly considering getting one.
Re:I have a feeling (Score:2, Informative)
One thing to note too, UHF stations (which what all television will be living in after the transition) require more power than VHF (usually by a magnitude of 20x - 30x) because of the frequency difference (higher frequency => more power for same output).
That is a urban legend. Binghamton NY, where I point one of my antennas at has only one station that will broadcast in UHF, the rest are VHF. This will not change after the end of analog.
Re:I have a feeling (Score:4, Informative)
Absolutely correct. This has been sold to broadcasters as a way to save money while transmitting the same content. They can cut power, theoretically, save a ton of money and still get the same advertising revenue.
Unfortunately, as the previous posting observed, the public will pay the price in quality and quantity of stations available to their antenna.
Re:I have a feeling (Score:4, Informative)
According to the FCC, 99% of stations are already at their full digital power limits. Only a few will be increasing their power in March 2009.
One major change is that most stations will be moving from UHF to VHF, and VHF is less prone to breakup. For example my local WGAL is moving from 58 to 8, which should stabilize the image.
Re:I have a feeling (Score:1, Informative)
I've had good luck with this one. http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2253765&cp=2032057.2032187.2032189.2032205&parentPage=family [radioshack.com].
Background: I live in Houston, the transmitters are in Missouri City, 15 miles to the south; I'm on the ground floor in a condo, all the walls are thick brick and mortar; the signal will not penetrate these walls, and even if it did, there are more condos between me and the transmitters; I got a signal by pointing out the window to the sky. I pointed in just the right direction and got almost 30 channels; when the program did the scan, all the channels showed up at once, so I assume they were all sitting on one part of the spectrum.
However if you have basic cable, or possibly even just a cable hookup but no cable, you should plug in a coax connection to the outlet; in some cases, you can use the wiring of the house as a huge antenna; then run a channel scan and see what you can get. Good luck./P
DTV Reception (Score:1, Informative)
There are a lot of great online resources to help with the transition. tvfool.com is great resource for understanding where you are in relation to local broadcast towers.
I blog about the transition in my free time (shameless plug - DTV Transition [blogspot.com].
Re:UK is *very* different (Score:3, Informative)
Eh? We don't HAVE TV licenses in the US. And in most places, when Cable TV first came through the cable companies made sure to see if you wanted to get rid of that "unsightly" antenna up on the roof. For reasons that I'm certain had nothing whatsoever to do with preventing people from dropping Cable TV somewhere down the line and reconnecting the rooftop antenna.
Re:I have a feeling (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, are your FCC/ATSC *really* using MPEG-2 for hi-def? If that's true, it makes no sense at all.
When the US DTV transition was planned, there was no H.264...
The truth is that a $20,000 broadcast HD MPEG-2 encoder does a pretty good job at 18 Mbps. Real-time H.264 HD encoders that could do the same thing have only been in serious commercial production for a year (I've seen them try and fail for years, but now we seem to have enough CPU to make them operate stable and well).
It is my impression that most DVB-T systems like UK Freeview also use MPEG-2. As far as I know, no terrestrial HD digital television uses H.264, though it is possible that some satellite services might.
Re:Some commentary on my switch... (Score:3, Informative)
It's actually a "Yagi/Corner-Reflector".
"Bowtie" refers to a specific type of antenna, a "multi-bay" unit... an antenna that is most definitely NOT a yagi. In fact a multi-bay bowtie antenna resembles a Grey-Hovermann much more than a Yagi/Corner-Reflector.
Yagi/Corner-Reflector: http://www.solidsignal.com/prod_display.asp?PROD=MXU59 [solidsignal.com]
Multi-bay/Bowtie: http://www.solidsignal.com/prod_display.asp?PROD=ANC4228 [solidsignal.com]
That's completely wrong. Yagis have extremely good gain at high frequencies (most of which aren't being used for TV anymore), and almost always very poor gain at lower frequencies. The idea of getting ANY VHF frequencies with a yagi is laughable.
See: http://www.hdtvprimer.com/ANTENNAS/comparing.html [hdtvprimer.com]
Re:I have a feeling (Score:3, Informative)
Although referring to the UK (and explaining why your system isn't as good) you've just described the US DTV switchover precisely...
Digital transmissions (in highdef, no less) in the US have been going on longer than DVB-T transmissions in the UK and most everywhere else in the world. ATSC is also an even OLDER standard than DVB-T by at more than couple years, or perhaps more depending on how you want to look at it.
Indeed. You get to waste twice the bandwidth, having one lowdef channel, and one highdef. And everyone needs to buy a second box if they want to get the latter. ATSC isn't sounding so bad after all.
You'd be wrong. First, because H.264/MPEG-4 AVC simply wasn't available. Secondly, because increased resolution (and/or framerates) brings substantial additional economies with lossy video codecs.
And finally, there's the law of diminishing returns... MPEG-2 is a very good format, and it's very difficult to design something better. H.264/AVC is extremely computationally intensive, and for all that work, you're extremely lucky if you can get twice the compression out of it. In fact, the 2X figure that's commonly cited to explain H.264/AVC's superiority over MPEG-2 really only applies at extremely low bitrates (eg. streaming video), while the two being to converge as bitrate increases...
You can see the same thing with audio... AAC came out at the same time as MPEG-2, and despite more than a decade, there's nothing out there to surpass it. Now, HE-AACv2 is newer, but even those heavily interested in it, openly admit that it's only better at low bitrates, and at 128kbps (for stereo) it provides no improvement over plain AAC (LC-AAC).
Re:I have a feeling (Score:2, Informative)
> Did you just pull that out of your ass? Do you have any evidence at all to support that claim?
I would propose HDMI as a pretty conclusive bit of proof of this claim.
We have gone from a wide open analog standard to a completely closed
digital one despite all of the noise from the government and industry
about being able to "buy your own set top box". Everything has gotten
more complicated and most people have seen their number of available
choices DROP.
Ask a Tivo devotee about pluging in their S3 Tivo into Dish or DirecTV.
The only reason my own digital reception is not total crap is because
I have an HDHomeRun in front of everything. This is a VERY atypical
configuration. I would have thought a $3000 TV would have a better
tuner than some cheap PC tuner box (but I was wrong).
The number of usable channels has gone down, the technology has gotten
harder for people to deal with and there are no longer 10's if not
100's of "VCR" vendors to choose from.
Re:I have a feeling (Score:3, Informative)
I don't understand. What's not "practical" about VP7?
I have yet to ever find ANYONE here on /. with whom I can have a rational discussion about codec internals.
Never the less, the last line of my reply is "See the other reply to my earlier comment for details." which you apparently didn't do, or you'd have found a bit more detail.
You're also welcome to look-up subjective benchmark comparisons of H.264/AVC and MPEG-2, which, even if they've biased the test to use old and poor quality MPEG-2 encoders, at the very least, will demonstrate the diminishing returns of H.264/AVC at increased bitrates/quality.
And finally, there are inherent limits that audio and video codecs cannot possibly exceed... For audio, that limit is called "Perceptual Entropy" (PE), and was defined decades ago. Once you exceed PE, you no longer have any hope of reproducing an audio signal that cannot be distinguished from the uncompressed original... You can only hope to make it sound acceptable, the distortions non-obvious, and eliminate sounds that might seem like they don't belong, anyhow. MPEG-1 Layer II audio, as used in DAB, is already quite close to that limit, and 128kbps compression substantially exceeds the PE for 44.1KHz stereo audio.
For video, I will admit I have never heard of such a nice simple term and single study to exactly define the limit... Still, I'd be willing to make an educated guess that the figure is no more than 40:1, because (like PE with audio) a rather sharp tailing-off of improvements can be seen in subjective codec tests when nearing that level of compression, which spans the full range of codecs, no matter the technology used.
As with audio, even early lossy video codecs (like MPEG-2) are sufficiently close to that fundamental limit to make the development of better high-bitrate codecs largely pointless. Instead, the focus has been, and continues to be, on the low-end, where you're simply trying to make it look "good", rather than identical, and can flexibly discard perceptual information in a way that it isn't too... distracting.
There is still some room for debate on the subject, since MPEG-2 doesn't entirely hit the perceptual limits of lossy compression. Still, newer codecs don't have very much room to squeeze better compression out of video, while maintaining high-quality video that is close to being indistinguishable from the original.
But if you want to argue that point with me, you face two further problems... First, I've used H.264/AVC encoders and recent/advanced MPEG-2 encoders plenty, so I can speak pretty conclusively when I say there's not much improvement to be had at high bitrates (but like HE-AACv2, it does an impressive job at very low bitrates). Secondly, I know codec internals pretty well, so I can also attest that H.264/AVC is heavily based on the same technologies as it's predecessors (MPEG-1, MPEG-2), and that all the (terribly CPU-hungry) improvements that have been made (eg. qpel vs half-pel, multiple ref/anchor frames, in-loop deblocking, et al.) simply can't provide very much compressibility improvement with high quality (weakly quantized) materials... The amount of change and randomness is too high for such tricks to be effective, so the encoded error remains the most substantial consumer of bits.
Re:I have a feeling (Score:3, Informative)
VP7 is a very good codec (and has been around for a while now), but gets completely ignored, because it's proprietary. Not that On2 wouldn't be happy to do the RAND thing, as well as hand out the source code of VP7 to any company out there willing to pay a small amount of money for it... After all, VP3.2 is open source (Theora) and VP6 is part of Flash v8. And in the past they've often committed to keeping license fees much lower than modern MPEG standards.
But, not being a standard, means economies of scale don't kick in... When you're making a VP7 decoder chip, which is only going to be used in a few million boxes for DVB2 (versus innumerable millions of boxes that are likely to use H.264 at one time or another) the cost of designing the chip, and setting up the plant to produce them, keeps prices quite a bit higher. Hence the rationale for standards.
Still, that's just ONE aspect to keep in mind when selecting the video codec you want to use in your standard, for the next several years. Things like license fees, or performance, may negate that added expense.
My only point being... it's very tricky to chose the ideal codec for any standard. You can't just pick something recent and assume it will be the best option into the future. And planning too much for the "future" may drive up prices and ensure that your standard doesn't get adopted, in the present, and instead dies a slow death on the shelf.
Yes, that's certainly true. However, I would point out that there are actually a pretty good number (albeit a very small percentage of the readership) of experts in just about any field that frequent /. It seems they only poke their heads out on rare occasions, however. This leads to strange phenomenon like an article on (eg.) a new RISC CPU getting lots of mindless, worthless, and inaccurate comments... meanwhile, when the same story gets duped two days later, that second article on the subject gets extremely good comments, extensively detailing internals of microprocessors, and similar. Who knows why?
In addition, there are a few regulars who both know what they're talking about, and seem to comment on /. frequently for whatever their reasons. The two that come to mind are Animats and Doc Ruby, (in addition to myself if I may be so bold), who I frequently see offering accurate insights, even though each has their own shortcomings. eg. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=954211&threshold=2&mode=nested&cid=24883605 [slashdot.org]
Not very relevant now, since I've already elaborated in much more detail, here, but it does contain a bit more info on HE-AACv2 if you care.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=956141&cid=24930875 [slashdot.org]