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From: Jan Panteltje on 1 Aug 2010 18:43
On a sunny day (Sun, 01 Aug 2010 14:40:16 -0700) it happened Joerg
<invalid(a)invalid.invalid> wrote in <8bm7u2Fi4rU1(a)mid.individual.net>:

>>> Sorry for the rant, but I had to let it out.
>>
>> I dunno what stuff you use, but here it is very possible to add a frequency
>> or station, or sat.
>
>
>Mostly the Magnavox brand. Which is AFAIK essentially Philips. But it
>all seems designed and built by Funai. The lastest box it even says it
>bluntly in the manual, "add-on" only for analog TV channels. Which no
>longer exist out here when using terrestrial.
>
>
>> That is both for satellite, terrestrial, both radio, TV, and data.
>> DTV is not 'unreliable', in fact is is very reliable, but it needs a minimal signal
>> strength for things to lock.
>
>
>ATSC is unreliable. Ask any neighbor here who uses an antenna.

Sorry to hear that, I did read they improved multipath, maybe not enough.


>> You should now about PLLs, Viterbi decoding, etc.
>
>
>I do, but it seems the guys who developed and tested ATSC (or shall I
>say didn't test enough?) may not :-)

Politics played some role there I am sure.
US had to use their own system.
OTOH they say the distances are bigger than in Europe, making 8VSB a better choice.
I have no experience with that system, so I dunno if that is reality.



>
>> Did you ever put a decent yagi or some otehr good antenna on the roof?
>>
>
>Yep, top of the line ChannelMaster. The biggest honking one there is.
>With mast amp, professional distribution and so on.

Nice, should really work.

Only thing I can say about it is that I love satellite.
With many many free programs here in Europe I guess we are spoiled.
I just watched starwars II, I have it on disc also, but it still is a big show.
My advice is to use a PC card and or PC as receiver, both for terrestrial and satellite.
The quality blew me aways this time, satellite, zero bit errors,.
There is a lot of soft for those PC cards that allow you to do many things commercial receivers
cannot do, tweak things.
Some written by me :-)
There is a cute little program in Linux called 'mediainfo'.
I just ran it in that starwars recording:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6273528980 2010-08-01 23:20 Astra1_prosieben.20h13.1-8-2010-187m.ts
grml: /mnt/hdd4/video/satellite # mediainfo Astra1_prosieben.20h13.1-8-2010-187m.ts
General
Complete name : Astra1_prosieben.20h13.1-8-2010-187m.ts
Format : MPEG-TS
Format profile : No PAT/PMT
File size : 5.84 GiB
Duration : 3h 7mn
Overall bit rate : 4 473 Kbps

Video
ID : 511 (0x1FF)
Format : MPEG Video
Format version : Version 2
Format profile : Main(a)Main
Format settings, Matrix : Default
Duration : 3h 7mn
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 3 586 Kbps
Nominal bit rate : 15.0 Mbps
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 576 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16/9
Frame rate : 25.000 fps
Standard : PAL
Colorimetry : 4:2:0
Scan type : Progressive
Scan order : Top Field First
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.346
Stream size : 4.68 GiB (80%)

Audio #1
ID : 512 (0x200)
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 2
Duration : 3h 7mn
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 192 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Resolution : 16 bits
Video delay : -407ms
Stream size : 257 MiB (4%)

Audio #2
ID : 515 (0x203)
Format : AC-3
Format/Info : Audio Coding 3
Duration : 3h 7mn
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 384 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel positions : L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Video delay : -377ms
Stream size : 514 MiB (9%)


As you see it is much longer than the movie, because of the commercials.
Because I view about an hour timeshifted I just fast forward the commercials,
or more precisely just jump over those in xine.

The PC as media server is cool,
From: Joel Koltner on 1 Aug 2010 20:59
Say Jan,

Since you're doing media encoding on Linux, might I ask: Do you have a
favorite MP3 encoder that runs on fixed-point CPUs (...such as ARMs...)?

LAME seems to very much be the defacto standard on floating-point machines,
but I've read that it really crawls if there's isn't an actual floating-point
ALU around and software emulation is being used.

Thanks,
---Joel

From: Joerg on 1 Aug 2010 21:01
Jan Panteltje wrote:
> On a sunny day (Sun, 01 Aug 2010 14:40:16 -0700) it happened Joerg
> <invalid(a)invalid.invalid> wrote in <8bm7u2Fi4rU1(a)mid.individual.net>:
>
>>>> Sorry for the rant, but I had to let it out.
>>> I dunno what stuff you use, but here it is very possible to add a frequency
>>> or station, or sat.
>>
>> Mostly the Magnavox brand. Which is AFAIK essentially Philips. But it
>> all seems designed and built by Funai. The lastest box it even says it
>> bluntly in the manual, "add-on" only for analog TV channels. Which no
>> longer exist out here when using terrestrial.
>>
>>
>>> That is both for satellite, terrestrial, both radio, TV, and data.
>>> DTV is not 'unreliable', in fact is is very reliable, but it needs a minimal signal
>>> strength for things to lock.
>>
>> ATSC is unreliable. Ask any neighbor here who uses an antenna.
>
> Sorry to hear that, I did read they improved multipath, maybe not enough.
>

It ain't good enough for multipath. Analog was better, way better.

>
>>> You should now about PLLs, Viterbi decoding, etc.
>>
>> I do, but it seems the guys who developed and tested ATSC (or shall I
>> say didn't test enough?) may not :-)
>
> Politics played some role there I am sure.
> US had to use their own system.
> OTOH they say the distances are bigger than in Europe, making 8VSB a better choice.
> I have no experience with that system, so I dunno if that is reality.
>

It probably has other reasons as well. For example, people really want
hi-def, meaning 1080 interlaced or progressive scan. And I have to say,
if the channel doesn't pixelate out on us and a hi-def event like
"Dancing with the Stars" airs the picture is truly stunning.

>
>>> Did you ever put a decent yagi or some otehr good antenna on the roof?
>>>
>> Yep, top of the line ChannelMaster. The biggest honking one there is.
>> With mast amp, professional distribution and so on.
>
> Nice, should really work.
>
> Only thing I can say about it is that I love satellite.
> With many many free programs here in Europe I guess we are spoiled.


In the US we do not have free satellite :-(


> I just watched starwars II, I have it on disc also, but it still is a big show.
> My advice is to use a PC card and or PC as receiver, both for terrestrial and satellite.


Nah. I just wired up this new Magnavox box. Like the one before it has
upconversion and all that.

A PC in the living room? Yuck. The most we ever do is connect one to
watch photos, a laptop, via a VGA cable tucked behind a cabinet.


> The quality blew me aways this time, satellite, zero bit errors,.
> There is a lot of soft for those PC cards that allow you to do many things commercial receivers
> cannot do, tweak things.
> Some written by me :-)
> There is a cute little program in Linux called 'mediainfo'.
> I just ran it in that starwars recording:
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6273528980 2010-08-01 23:20 Astra1_prosieben.20h13.1-8-2010-187m.ts
> grml: /mnt/hdd4/video/satellite # mediainfo Astra1_prosieben.20h13.1-8-2010-187m.ts
> General
> Complete name : Astra1_prosieben.20h13.1-8-2010-187m.ts
> Format : MPEG-TS
> Format profile : No PAT/PMT
> File size : 5.84 GiB
> Duration : 3h 7mn
> Overall bit rate : 4 473 Kbps
>
> Video
> ID : 511 (0x1FF)
> Format : MPEG Video
> Format version : Version 2
> Format profile : Main(a)Main
> Format settings, Matrix : Default
> Duration : 3h 7mn
> Bit rate mode : Variable
> Bit rate : 3 586 Kbps
> Nominal bit rate : 15.0 Mbps
> Width : 720 pixels
> Height : 576 pixels


Hmm, we get a lot more resolution than that these days.


> Display aspect ratio : 16/9
> Frame rate : 25.000 fps
> Standard : PAL
> Colorimetry : 4:2:0
> Scan type : Progressive
> Scan order : Top Field First
> Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.346
> Stream size : 4.68 GiB (80%)
>
> Audio #1
> ID : 512 (0x200)
> Format : MPEG Audio
> Format version : Version 1
> Format profile : Layer 2
> Duration : 3h 7mn
> Bit rate mode : Constant
> Bit rate : 192 Kbps
> Channel(s) : 2 channels
> Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
> Resolution : 16 bits
> Video delay : -407ms
> Stream size : 257 MiB (4%)
>
> Audio #2
> ID : 515 (0x203)
> Format : AC-3
> Format/Info : Audio Coding 3
> Duration : 3h 7mn
> Bit rate mode : Constant
> Bit rate : 384 Kbps
> Channel(s) : 2 channels
> Channel positions : L R
> Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
> Video delay : -377ms
> Stream size : 514 MiB (9%)
>
>
> As you see it is much longer than the movie, because of the commercials.
> Because I view about an hour timeshifted I just fast forward the commercials,
> or more precisely just jump over those in xine.
>
> The PC as media server is cool,


Yeah, but you can do the same thing with a DVD recorder. Ok, time shift
must be longer than the total play time including commercials. But that
is never a problem because we watch one movie in the evening and that's it.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
From: Joel Koltner on 1 Aug 2010 21:11
"Joerg" <invalid(a)invalid.invalid> wrote in message
news:8bm6dmF9dpU1(a)mid.individual.net...
> Just curious: Why is it that "modern" TV/VCR/DVD devices only allow
> auto-scan for DTV channels but no "add some later"?

Because not only are the end-users considered to be dumber today, but I
suspect a lot of the designers and engineering managers are as well!

There's at least a silver lining that it's generally easier to figure out,
e.g., which models *do* still assume you, the user, have at least a half-dozen
brain cells still functioning than it would have been 20+ years ago.

---Joel

From: Jim Thompson on 1 Aug 2010 21:13
On Sun, 1 Aug 2010 18:11:21 -0700, "Joel Koltner"
<zapwireDASHgroups(a)yahoo.com> wrote:

>"Joerg" <invalid(a)invalid.invalid> wrote in message
>news:8bm6dmF9dpU1(a)mid.individual.net...
>> Just curious: Why is it that "modern" TV/VCR/DVD devices only allow
>> auto-scan for DTV channels but no "add some later"?
>
>Because not only are the end-users considered to be dumber today, but I
>suspect a lot of the designers and engineering managers are as well!
>
>There's at least a silver lining that it's generally easier to figure out,
>e.g., which models *do* still assume you, the user, have at least a half-dozen
>brain cells still functioning than it would have been 20+ years ago.
>
>---Joel

DTV = "Dumber TV" ?:-)

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

Spice is like a sports car...
Performance only as good as the person behind the wheel.
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