I have an early Motorola Pager(now a small brick), a Motorola Microtac phone(been a brick for several years), and a Motorola TDMA phone that it is about to become a brick. I have already have gotten my GSM replacement phone. I even have a Zenith radio with the 45 MHZ band (brick since the 1940s)- it has the standard FM band also.

Luckily, I do not have a GM automobile that is about to have a brick mounted in the dash.

I doubt that HDMI will replace component video other than with 1080p applications. Most HDTV boxes whether cable, satellite, or ATSC have no VGA port. RF output probably won't go away for a long time, as people who don't want to buy a new TV won't buy one anyway if they are "forced" too because of the 2009 conversion or providers misleading customers. I don't like LCD or plasma in TV applications, so I will not be buying one. Don't bother saving old cable boxes unless you want to run your own personal cable system with modulators. Remember most cheaper cable boxes worked like the old UHF converters, took the IF from the cable TV carriers and inserted that onto VHF channel 3 or 4.

I have a big Stromberg Carlson wooden table radio with both the old and new FM bands as well as AM.

As far as old cable boxes, I had one years ago that had a rotary dial similar to a TV tuner. I think it had 37 positions on it. Must have been from the '70's. I think I still have one of those Jerrold boxes with the row of "click" pushbuttons. I think our cable company still issued those out in the '80's.

Yes, quite likely they will (be worthless).

And, further, afaik, there is nothing that says the cable co has to provision a box that comes from outside their system. That's why most of those STBs that sell online are actually worthless in many cases.

Just for kicks, call your cable company some time an tell them you came upon a cable box and you'd like to have it activated. See what they say... :D

For some odd reason digital cable boxes go for good money on ebay. I don't know if people are clueless, or if there's something I don't know about them. As far as I know it's impossible to make them work, even for analog channels, without cable company activation. It would be nice if there was a hack to enable analog and clear QAM digital channels because flea markets are full of old digital cable boxes. These boxes would be ideal for vintage TVs since they have remote volume controls.

Don't be so sure about RF and component video lasting a long time if the MPAA has their way. They want all analog video to disappear as soon as possible (analog sunset). Encrypted digital HD(r)MI only is their goal. Cable boxes and HD/Blu-ray players already have the ability to turn off their analog video outputs if they are told to. I don't think hollywood cares if we all have to buy new TVs if it makes it harder to copy their movies.

All Hollywood and the cable companies care about is making $$$. Hollywood will probably eventually get their way concerning the "analog sunset". Everyone I know that has recieved a new digital cable box from the cable company has to have it activated before it can be used. It's not like the old days when one could buy a stand alone analog box from Radio Shack and plug it up and use it. Really, these new digital boxes are another way for the cable companies to make money on box rental fees if you have no choice but to use their box. We have 4 TV's in regular use; and, that could get quite expensive if we had to rent 4 boxes.

Ummm... Maybe that's because they are businesses? :yes: :thmbsp:

The industry doesn't realize that all movies are copied using computers. HDMI does nothing but hurt the honest people, but everyone knows that. One can get a blu ray or hddvd drive and make a copy, easier than using HDMI, if there is a practical way. If I were all of you I'd ditch cable and go with satellite, it's much cheaper.

I guess I should have added that I'm not against anyone making an honest living. But, when greed comes into play & things start taking place that may hurt some members of society; then , there is a problem. I guy told me once that "all he wanted was to make a living, not a killing".

It goes back to what I've always said. If they are smart enough to encode (or whatever) a movie to prevent copying; then, someone will figure out a way around it.

I have a friend that owns a satellite / TV repair business and his satellite sales have picked up over the past year. I'm sure the increasing cost of cable and the fact that they are moving some of the channels to digital have a lot to do with that. The cable company is coming over Thursday afternoon to hook me up to internet and the $8.00 twelve channel cable. There's no way I'm paying almost $60 for the next step up. Already been there and done that. The only reason I'm getting the cheap cable is because they give a price break on the internet.

An interesting read from AST org. I'm not through with it but thought some solid information would be appreciated by those who, like me, still have question.

http://www.atsc.org/faq/faq_general.html


And another in case it hasn't been posted yet:

http://dtvtransition.org/

Converter Box Coupon Sign-up
 

Gummint Issued

https://www.dtv2009.gov/

We have one CATV hook-up and my venerable Panasonic 12" with bunny ears (I remember the days with the VHF/UHF converter on our DuMont in the 1960s :D).

You are being polite, I have a different name for them.:D

AFAIK if you want to buy a digital STB it would need to be a brand that your cable co supports. Everytime Constipation Energy drops power while we are watching TV I have to pull the plug on the STB, wait 30 seconds then power up again and watch while the STB downloads its software.

Try explaining to your 85+ year old grandma that all 3 of her tv's are gonna be showing nothing but snow come 2009. I ended up listening to a rant for half an hour... and I still don't think that she understands. I think this is an excellent example of what is to come. Most people, even if they see the ads, don't understand what it means, and will not be prepared when it all goes away. The coupons are great, but what if you need more than 2 of them? You have to take the extra cost to the neck. I have a feeling there are gonna be a lot of people in government offices having a fun day when they shut analog off, my grandma was already talking about writing the congressman....

-Ted

In the New York City area, pirate FM stations, mostly serving poor immigrant communities, keep popping up. Seems that there's at least 5 on the air at any one time. I can imagine something like this happening when analog TV sunsets, that pirate analog TV stations take to the air. There are probably many poor people who can't afford cable or satellite TV service, and can't afford a converter box. That's the pirates' audience. And then there's everyones' grandmothers.

Would a pirate pick a VHF channel, or one in UHF?

Back in 1977 or so, in Syracuse NY, someone one weekend did a pirate TV station, possibly the first one in the nation. On channel 7, an otherwise empty channel up there. An article in the New York Times about it apeared one day buried in the paper.

I got a new HD TV device which uses my LCD computer monitor for display, and the computer for controls. Although I'm very impressed with the high detail and super-sharp picture when watching HD broadcast (KTLA Morning Show in Los Angeles on Ch 5.1 via air reception), there is a serious COMPLAINT: The picture has a stop-n-start jerkiness to it, and the audio track is slightly out of sync with the picture. Kind of like an early internet video, but with a clear picture.

The HD tuner I got is a USB device, and my computer is a Core 2 Duo 6300 (IIRC) with 2 Gb RAM and a fairly high-end ASUS board. So I can't blame a lack of power in the computer. If I go out and buy a new TV with an ATSC tuner, will I have better results, or might this be a problem with how far I am from the transmitter? Is this inherently a characteristic of a USB TV tuner, or maybe the one I got is cheap?

Any opinions appreciated...

Charles

I've never had much luck with TV tuner cards, NTSC, or ATSC. They all seem to have various problems that make them not quite usable.

My 45" Sharp Aquos that has a signal strength meter built into the Menu system.

Otherwise -- For US locations only.

Go to www.antennaweb.org

Click on Choose an Antenna

No name needed, but for the best results, enter your Address, City, St, and Zip
Uncheck the 2 marketing checkboxes

The results will give you the all the analog and digital stations available in your area along with their Compass orientation based on your exact address, allowing you to better aim the antenna in the general direction of the transmitter(s). You can also sort the station results with the radio buttons for analog or digital or both and even get a Ground Level Map display.

Bonus -- your current VHF/UHF antenna will work just fine receiving digital stations. No need to buy anything fancy because VHF is still VHF and UHF is still UHF as far as carrier signals go.

You need to better aim your antenna at the KTLA transmitter to get a 70% or better signal so you don't suffer dropouts. Dig up a compass and see post above for help.

I'm guessing here, you are super critical?

Not really, I just expect a PC tuner card to work as well as a regular TV. I don't want dropped frames, bad audio sync, poor resolution, or buggy software!

Ok, I have to apologize, I thought you meant all tuners.

...

If I may ask, what cable company are you with? I'm with C---ast.

Jerkiness is not normal for a digital TV - blame it on trying to use a device (computer) with an operating system (Windows) which was never meant to do real-time video and audio, although many people are trying to make it happen. Computers that are sold as AV devices should not do this, as the manufacturer should have checked the compatibility of everything; but when you plug an external device into an existing machine, most bets are off. I have an ATI digital video card in my desktop machine that I built about 16 months ago (ASUS MB and AMD CPU), and it works fine with no freezes or skips -BUT it always puts up a warning message saying that there MAY not be enough computing power for maximum video quality, blah blah. Then it works fine for live viewing anyway. I have noticed that the RECORDED video (MPEG4) is not as good as the direct viewing, but I don't don't know if that's related to the warning message. I suspect not, as it doesn't skip or freeze, just has typical compression artifacts that lead me to believe the commpression algorithm/parameters could be better.

Mismatch of video and audio (lipsync) is a serious issue which the industry is devoting many man years to fix. It is not just due to the receiver (although it may be in some cases), but also due to the fact that audio and video take entirely different paths in modern TV plants, with different processing delays that have to be matched at each step. If you pay attention these days, you can find analog broadcasts with lipsync problems too. Sooo - if it's a constant problem with your setup, at least part of it may be your setup - but it could be the broadcaster - hard to tell.

Thank you for the tip... I do hope it's a reception problem. I'll post again when I get a good UHF antenna up.

Charles

Lipsync problems are mainly due to the fact that the digital picture has to be reconstructed in the receiver from the compressed information sent by the transmitter. The transmitter in turn must encode all this picture information in 8 x 8 pixel blocks and so the audio is delayed. It is a really fun process, enough to make a saint swear.

You would think they would have added some sort of time code to the video and audio so the receiver can keep them in sync.

One thing that no one has mentioned in regards to PC HD tuners...

After July 2007, every PC HD tuner manufacturer was mandated to embed and enforce DRM capabilities into their products to prevent copying of the broadcast stream if the DRM data bits were set. It's interesting that pre-July-07 tuners haven't shown up for big bux on eBay yet, or do you think folks totally unaware of this little DRM gotcha...?

yes, com*ast

:thmbsp:

In my area (northeastern Ohio) the cable operator is Time Warner (the company took over Comcast and Adelphia, at least in this area, a year or so ago). They have already converted their entire systems to digital, well in advance of the February 2009 analog cutoff, as one TW technician told me after I called the company following the first digital breakup on Cleveland's channel 3. Most of the time the reception is great, but every now and then the picture breaks up into unwatchable squares (pixelization)--even on analog sets. This has happened twice that I can remember since TW completed its digital conversion: once during NBC Nightly News a few months ago and again during a rerun of "Mama's Family" a couple nights ago on the local ION TV affiliate. The picture broke up and froze several times; this went on for about five or 10 minutes before the problem was finally identified and corrected. I would say that this is just due to the sheer newness (for want of a better phrase) of digital television to most people in the industry today; it will take a while to get all the bugs out so that such breakups and freezeups such as I just described will not happen again (or if they do occur, they will do so very rarely), once digital television becomes the TV standard just over 13 months from now.

BTW, someone recently mentioned in an earlier post that "...television is going away soon..." Not really. Television as we know it today will disappear in February 2009, but the medium itself will still be here, only in a new form. Where that person ever got the idea that TV is disappearing from the face of the earth forever is more than I know at this point. I think many people have been taken in by all the aggressive hype surrounding high-definition versus digital TV; remember the ads in the newspapers and magazines a few years back that said all televisions will "go black" in 2009, and everyone will have to get a new high-definition flat-panel TV because their old reliable analog sets would be worthless after a certain date in that year? I blush to admit that I fell for that hype hook, line and sinker, as I called my cable company and had my service upgraded to digital not long after it started. I wish I had known then what I know now about digital and HD TV: that standard analog sets will still be usable well beyond the February 2009 analog shutoff deadline if you have cable, satellite or a set-top box (STB) ahead of your TV for over-the-air reception with an antenna. The point I'm trying to make is that no one will need an expensive flat-panel TV to continue receiving their area's local channels after the analog stations go off the air, although, of course, a plasma or LCD FP will be necessary if you want to see the digital broadcasts in high definition. If you simply want to continue to receive your local stations digitally and don't mind the picture being in letterbox format, digital cable/satellite or an OTA STB and an antenna ahead of your current analog set will fill the bill very nicely. I think many people will do just that, especially if they have an analog TV that works well; the same articles and ads that said analog TVs would be worthless in 2009 also mentioned a nightmare scenario in which millions of analog televisions would appear on curbs across the country once analog TV disappeared, as people replaced those sets with plasma or LCD flat-panels in droves. Again, not so, but that's the advertising business for you. It has been said you cannot believe everything you see in the papers or on TV, and advertising is like that as well. I think the reason all this pull-out-all-the-stops high-powered stuff appears is because advertisers simply want to sell (in this case) high-definition TVs and will stop at nothing to do so, even if the advertising isn't 100-percent true. The hype surrounding high-definition television several years ago, especially the talk about analog sets being useless after 2009, probably started simply because no one really knew much about the new method of TV transmission when it was first announced that American television would switch to digital (not necessarily HD) in 2009. The cutoff was supposed to have been some time in 2006, then was postponed until 2009. We are just 13 months away from what one of Cleveland's TV stations (CBS 19) refers to, on its website, "The Big Switch", and once that happens, there will be no turning back.

I am actually looking forward to the end of analog TV. I think it will be interesting to see what effects digital and high-definition will have on a television system pioneered by RCA over five decades ago. It has been said that the digital switchover is the biggest thing to happen to television since color and even stereo TV sound; we'll just have to wait and see.

I want to clarify a couple of misconceptions I've seen repeated a lot. First, cable TV doesn't have to go digital in 2009. Comcast is going all digital to save bandwidth, but that's completely up to them. Other cable companies could be using analog NTSC until the year 3000 if they wanted to. The other misconception is that flat panel = HD. You can get SD flat panels and HD CRTs (although CRTs are getting hard to find). Until last year, lots of flat panels didn't even have digital tuners and are no more ready for 2009 than a CT-100.

I'm actually looking forward to the switch. Without too much trouble you can get a better than DVD quality picture from ATSC. NTSC looks awful unless you have ideal reception.

THANK YOU FOR REPEATING THE REALITY!

I had a Comcast service man in the house this week. He reported (hope he got it right) that they would have all channels digital by summer, but that the analog channels would be carried simultaneously. This means that customers that have only analog tuners will see no change in service, but those with boxes will get improved reception for the lower numbered channels.

That is Knoxville.

There IS a timecode - it would be impossible to sync otherwise - HOWEVER, there is much more processing in the production process before the encoder that inserts the time code, and there is not always a place to put time code in the streams at that level, or they get skewed between audio and video. Then there is the possibility that the receiver is designed to check it when first tuned to a program, and ignore small changes, as they are probably mistakes (but maybe they aren't) and would cause a hiccup in video or audio in order to get resynced. The problem right now seems to be that there are lots of ways to get it wrong and only one chance to get it right. Hopefully with all the people scrutinizing this, it will be fixed in the near future (but in some cases, it may need modifications to the broadcast plant in addition to better practices, and that will take longer to roll out).

Didn't know that! So does this mean that none of the DVR software will work? That's awful, for people who aren't home when there's something they want to see. Easy to foil though, I bet. I bet I'll still be able to record through a Digital-to-Analog converter onto an old Betamax.

Charles

I was finally able to check digital TV reception at my mothers house in
Oklahoma, 70 miles from the transmitter. To my suprise, on rabbit ears, she receives 5 channels in good weather. Two NBC channels(here NBC only transmitts one channel, Telemundo(not much good to her, in Spanish). and a couple others.

Do not know how well it will work in bad weather or with a better antenna.

I have noticed one repeating artifact in both satellite and digital TV. If a car such as my 1963 Falcon is on the screen, the slotted grill causes a rainbow effect. I have seen this on several items with slotted type surfaces, including railroad cars and dress ties.

This is an old well known NTSC artifact called "cross-color" - where high frequency luminance details (lines or sharp edges) get into the color circuit and are demodulated as flickering color information. A comb filter reduces this greatly, but not on diagonal lines. It does not occur in purely digital systems, but can be seen when the digital signal is converted to NTSC for existing sets. (Or, sometimes, if the original signal fed to the digital system comes from an NTSC source, it may appear in the digital signal from that point onward.)

If the set has an S-video input, it should eliminate the problem.

With a 42" LCD TV, I don't need a PC adapter but, more than likely the DRM electronics will keep it "read only" so to speak. That might mean the output can only be routed to the PC's system display port, so you might have to jump through hoops tapping into the VGA/DVI/HDMI display stream, unless you happen to have one of those older two-head output Matrox video cards.