2009 HDTV conversion.

[Grainger49]

Originally Posted by andy

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.

I'm guessing here, you are super critical?

[andy]

Originally Posted by Grainger49

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!

[Grainger49]

Originally Posted by andy

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.

[vintagecollect]

...

[radiotvnut]

Originally Posted by vintagecollect

My Cable company has solved the digital problem for it's customers, it even states such in newspaper and tv ads. In 2009, cable tv signals will be Digital compatible, my way of saying- digital signal will be also fully NTSC analog compatible. That's why RCA's system was good, was Color Compatible with black and white TV broadcasts. This makes sense as cheaper to do on their end than supply a massive amount of digital boxes. Cable is all good!! My setup is complicated enough without having to rig another piece of equipment.

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

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by kx250rider

I got a new HD TV device which uses my LCD computer monitor for display, and the computer for controls....COMPLAINT: The picture has a stop-n-start jerkiness to it, and the audio track is slightly out of sync with the picture. ....
Charles

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.

[kx250rider]

Originally Posted by sleddogman

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.

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

[merrylander]

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.

[andy]

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...?

[vintagecollect]

yes, com*ast

[Jeffhs]

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.

[andy]

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.

[Grainger49]

Originally Posted by andy

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.

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by andy

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.

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).