Posted on 10/21/2005 3:33:34 PM PDT by HAL9000
"The legislation, details of which were obtained by Dow Jones Newswires, also sets aside nearly $1 billion to conduct a consumer education campaign and fund a subsidy program for consumers with analog TV sets to purchase digital converters so that they don't lose signals after the transition."
Arrrrghhh!!
Can congress do nothing without spending?
No questions asked!
Because the government wants to make it illegal for broadcasters to transmit in a manner compatible with legacy sets.
Imagine if Congress had given us all money to buy converters that let us listen to our LP vinyl records on our CD players, or digital displays for our slide rules...
Congress hasn't outlawed vinal records or slide rules.
How much would these converters cost if there were no plan for government subsidy?
$20?
$30?
This whole digital TV thing has been a fiasco since the beginnings in the early 1990s. They went with 18 or 19 formats as a "standard" instead of a single, progressive format (progressive in the sense of a base 720x480 layer with enhancement layers for the higher resolutions). They retained interlacing as an option, which many manufacturers have now used as a baseline (yeech). What a mess.
...Or Old Guns for Digital Converters!
I don't know what they mean by "converters". I can't imagine that an OTA HDTV tuner would be that inexpensive ($50). Of course, ATI has a nice single chip design that could be used but then you have to add in memory, analog circuitry, etc.
NO.
Arrrrghhh!!
You've got that right!. And the Senate is worse than the House.
A Senate bill, approved by the Senate Commerce Committee Thursday, contains a $3 billion subsidy program that doesn't set limits on how many vouchers each household can receive.
Or, how about this ~ bring in your broken gun and get BOTH a brand new gun of comparable function and a digital converter!
They mean digital to analog converters for the tv signal.
IMHO, what should exist is a spec that allows broadcasts to be interlaced or non-interlaced in any resolution up to some limit which is considerably higher than anything sets will be able to display natively for quite some time, and at any frame rate up to 60fps. Sets should be able to accept images in any resolution and framerate and down-convert as needed, maintaining interlaced or non-interlaced display as applicable.
Source data exists in many formats, and being able to broadast data in its 'native' format and let the receiver adjust seems much better than converting data prior to broadcast. Doing things that way ensures that there will only be one 'format change'. Reformatting the data prior to broadcast, my contrast, may end up resulting in another format change at the TV set.
Interlacing is a throwback to the 1950s and slow electrical components. It should be banished and never seen or heard of again.
Source data exists in many formats, and being able to broadast data in its 'native' format and let the receiver adjust seems much better than converting data prior to broadcast. Doing things that way ensures that there will only be one 'format change'. Reformatting the data prior to broadcast, my contrast, may end up resulting in another format change at the TV set.
I disagree. Quality conversion needs expensive equipment. Best to put that at the TV station/source so it only has to paid for one time.
You're concern about format changes on the TV set is handled by progressive enhancement layers. The base 480 layer would be all that a low end set would decode. This saves memory and works fine on small screens. The resolution enhancement layers would be decoded by higher end sets. This is somewhat like transmitting a few coefficients first then transmitting more over time (all this within a 1/30 or 1/60 of a second). A perfectly scalable system. Microsoft had a system like this defined but it wasn't adopted.
wait until americans realize that digital TV means they have lost their fair use rights to record many programs. if left to market forces, anything with digital rights management would fail - people don't want it.
so they get it done by campaign contributions and government mandate.
Well, the broadcast flag has been staved off so far.... So I guess the answer is to a) keep on pressuring Congress, and b) let your Congressional candidates know that you won't vote for people who'll impose the broadcast flag.
I want my HDTV! But I want someone else to pay for it....
It has terrible motion artifacts. Fine details get screwed up. Deinterlacing requires good equipment to get it right. I was shocked at the interlacing artifacts in a 1080i display of a football game -- and this was on a demo disk specifically designed to show off HDTV. Interlacing needs to go, it was fine when we had slow electronics and untuned phosphors.
hey, CGMS-A is enough of a hassle.
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