UK Digibox: Classic or Dud

More digibox excitement: the other day I put it on top of the DVD player, and when I tried to play a DVD it wouldn't work, just kept saying "CLOSE" and flickering about. Took DVD back to library as "damaged". Got replacement DVD. Also refused to work. Tried DVD that is personal property and known to work. Would not work. Moved digibox. All was sweetness and light again.
That was a bit longwinded. To sum up:

a) I am a joey.

b) My digibox lacks some kind of "shielding".

c) funny old world.

I want one of those Humax recording things.

I wonder if ITV Digital boxes are collectors' items?

3-way at Argos sounds absolutely delightful. Brings a whole new meaninglessness to "please go to your collection point".

-- PJ Miller (pjmiller6...), January 4th, 2007.

Directly after last night's opening episode of gritty kidnap drama FIVE DAYS, a disembodied voice suggested that I "set [my] recorder" to make sure I managed to catch "all the episodes".

Did anyone else hear this, or was it a subliminal message?

It's just my impression, because I don't actually know, but isn't the US pretty far behind when it comes to digital broadcasting in general? Clinton signed a bill that said all transmissions had to be digital by a certain year (I think it was 2007) but Americans have never even heard of digital radio, much less TV.

The other thing that occurs to me is that maybe that's a good thing! Digital television seems like the final nail in the coffin of "the public airwaves", i.e. the idea that no-one can own the magnetic fields of Earth, and no-one can own all the air one must vibrate in order to broadcast radio and television signals. Because governments are "auctioning" the spectrum off. Am I misled in the thought that this is a very different concept from what has heretofore prevailed, i.e. that broadcasters used the frequency spectrum at the public's pleasure?

a) your aerial is crap or badly aligned
b) it is in the shadow of something
c) Signal strength is poor till analogue switchoff occurs (although this is not much of a problem in London, compare to the other two).

Government are auctioning licences rather than selling off spectrum, but it does amount to the same thing. Multiplexing is what is centralising the airwaves. Bouquets of channels need to be broadcast from the same place rather than in a distributed fashion so there are gate keepers other than the government and TV-Channels in the mix.

I also worry that because digital broadcasting has been taken up in a climate where the spectrum has been auctioned, rather than... what, borrowed? - then there will bo no obligation whatsoever to provide public service programming, i.e. educational programming, programing for kids, etc. And government requirements, both in the US and the UK, for broadcasters to permanently switch off their analogue transmitters forever, seem like a government enforcement of this privatization (not to mention an enforcement to buy expensive new kit).

indeed the bbc was explicitly made into a govt propaganda outlet during the general strike, and then during ww2.

there was a huge row re. coal mines being under private property. iirc the landowners got paid.

the biggest constitutional upheaval since 1688 (1910-14) ended in a weird kind of stalemate (in which the authority of parliament had to be maintained *against* the public (women, unions).

Does reception affect things like bitrate? I didn't know it worked like that - I thought you either got the picture quality as broadcast or you got break-up. I thought what Tracer was complaining about was things like 1980s drama serials on ITV2 looking like they've been converted on someone's laptop in ten minutes by some freeware.

I get more drop-outs on less premium AKA shit channels. Is that for the same reason, or am I doolally?

Have had no drop-outs so far, except when I thought the sound was out on Big Brother, having not realized that's just the way the show is.

That is artefacting and has to do with the channel purchasing a paltry amount of bitrate.

Which channel was it?

ha, i spent last night doing exactly that. (although was bbc2 comedy from 1995)(and it was taking about 14 minutes per half hour)

> Bitrate is different. The less premium channels run at lower bitrates and are prone to artefacting.

this is what i thought tracer meant upthread - artefacting / pixelation.

oddly the worst picture i've seen is on csi on five via analogue - facial shadows were a lot darker than they should've been - like they'd been digitised on a 16 colour amiga or something. without dithering.

sounds like a dodgy scart connection to me.

TV was better at 405 lines. There must be a sloganed T-shirt I can get to that effect.

(Give me a break - 3 hours of sleep a night for the last six nights!)

xpost - pixellisationing up is so hard to do.

ebay. they stopped making new ones about two years after they started (which is a pity because it's a great bit of kit). other (inferior) boxes that do the same thing (after a fashion) are available... the humax seems popular.

(the one thing that does bug me with the tivo is the american use of channel numbers. bbc is 21 for instance. which is fine and you get used to it quite quickly because the names are there next to the numbers. but then the digital channels come along and are also numbered in the same range as the terrestrial channels so instead of bbc1, itv1, bbc2 etc being adjacent they are now interleaved with filum4 and fiveUS and the like. fiddly.)

and they're finally giving her an Oscar after decades of neglect.

just shoved a hoooge disk in it because 40 hours wasn't enough. it's open enough so that you can do that. i think later models and all the imposters are locked down tightly so you have to go the official upgrade route. or don't bother.

all the major manufacturers do them now, the sony thing won awards in christmas "What Hifi (And Surround Sound System And Half A Dozen Other Categories)" thing. can get them with dvd burners and hard disks and stuff but they tend to be expensive (tivo was £400 when i bought, £200 a year later, £99 for one weekend in some obscure chain about a year after that that was getting rid of theirs)(that said, first nicam video recorder i bought was £399 so...).

i wouldn't've thought volume would affect bitrate. besides, audio bitrate and video bitrate tend to be independant. the compression trick is the reason mute buttons were invented. if they try and grab my attention that way they get muted out. see also: flashing banner ads and adblock

Audio compression: when audio signal peaks are brought below a certain level to prevent clipping in the audio signal when it is digitised or otherwise transmitted. This is usually accompanied by some gain normalisation to make sure that the sound power level is brought back up to what it was before compression. Heavy compression and normalisation is what makes the adverts sound louder

Compressing the audio: Using a codec, (AC3 and MP2 are the most common for TV) to reduce the bitrate of the audio signal.

Video Legalising, brinigin the video signal to within the parameters of the tranmission system, i.e. making sure that the Luminance, Chrominance and Variage of the signal all fall within specified limits, in a modern all digital workflow this is normally done at the editing stage.

Video Compression: Using a codec (MPEG-2) to reduce the bitrate of the video signal.

Artefacting: blockyness, blotchiness brought on by over compression of the video signal or inexpertly applied compression. In general older poorer video sources compress poorly and show more digital artefacts because they don't have the sharp focus and bright tones footage of modern digital material and because of existing analogue artefacts You can also get artefact with high motion video at low bitrates.

Blocking or Pixilation: If the MPEG-2 transport stream is interrupted then data integrity will break down. The picture is encode by block of pixels, if it can maintain the picture by holding a block for a few frames then the system will try to do this in an effort to keep something on screen whilst this system tries to recapture the stream. this causes squares on the screen to appear to freeze, go black or change to unexpected colours.

"Don't forget to set your *digital* recorder so that you catch every episode."

I half expect them to say "don't forget to set your Humax PVR 500..." tonight.

Sometimes the picture goes away but the subtitles stay. What's all that about?

part 2 (universally judged inferior i think) is on film4 on saturday:

http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/film.jsp?id=132014

in related news (kinda), ftn is showing Takeshi's Castle starting in a week or two. first time on freeview.