Digital Television

I searched for digital tv and all I found were conspiracies revolving around hidden pixel cameras in your TV and mind control...

Obviously it's already here so if they're spying on me then I'm screwed. I live in an area where there's no cable television offered and my satellite bill goes towards internet, not TV. I used to be able to watch with some static at times, but unless there's some luck or much time involved there's either no signal or it's so choppy you can't watch it at all.

Why was it changed in the first place? Why isn't analog still offered? Most importantly, why wasn't there something put in place to allow some signal or picture without all the blocky video and choppy audio?

reply to post by Estharik

One signal is needed instead of 10 or however many different channels you have, so it cuts down on frequency traffic.

Sounds like you need a bigger antenna.

Originally posted by Estharik
Why was it changed in the first place?

Digital video, like digital audio allows the signal to be recorded, stored, transmitted and received many times over, without any degradation of quality.

In theory it offers the potential of better quality pictures.






[edit on 29/4/2010 by Silver Shadow]

Originally posted by ghostsoldier
reply to post by Estharik

 

Sounds like you need a bigger antenna.

my dad invested in one of those large oven rack looking antennas and he has to go up to the roof to adjust the angle. I know a bigger antenna would help but that's not the point. Why couldn't they continue to broadcast in both analog and digital?

Originally posted by Silver Shadow

Originally posted by Estharik
Why was it changed in the first place?

 

Digital video, like digital audio allows the signal to be recorded, stored, transmitted and received many times over, without any degradation of quality.

In theory it offers the potential of better quality pictures.

Better picture quality at what price? Intermittent function? To me the loss of constant TV doesn't compare to the picture quality. I could at least watch it most of the time with a little fuzz before.

I found a signal booster box (antenna attenuator?) helped a lot. Just about works now.

But hey! its all garbage on TV anyway, so perhaps it will save our brains if we can't get a signal.

reply to post by Estharik


Analog TV has a greater bandwidth per channel.
The switch to Digital is to facilitate the introduction of sub-signals within the side bands, which would only show up as 'noise' on Analog TV.
The push around the world is to Digital TV, Internet Broadband TV and Satellite Broadband. There wasn't anything wrong with Analog technically, other than the inability to modulate sideband signals without excessive noise.
When the populace is more programmed, then will they institute their real plan.

Always follow the money.

Corporate controlled governments wanted You to buy the converter box, or a new TV....

Yeah I've been wondering aboiut this push towards digital ome time now. a couple of things Ive noticed. First the argument that digital is better quality...well as far as i can see thats a lie...The digital pictures frequently break up, way more than analogue ever did. Also you can easily see when you look close that the pictures are pixalated, the same as on a computer screen, nothing like an analogue picture, which was far more natural looking. this has led me to consider the possibility that it would be far easier to make computer generated images for digital tv screens, as before much longer we will not be able to distinguish the manufactured images from the real ones. where as if analogue was still used and CGI images were applied, I would think people would have a far greater chance of detecting them, but as all the images on digital TV are digitised i cant see how anyone will be able to tell the difference at all. Case in point is the Chinese Olympics, it came ot that a large portion of the closing ceremony was infact CGI, however the public were not made aware of this fact until it leeked out afterwards. So the passing off fake tv as real is already happening.

Originally posted by starwarp2000
reply to post by Estharik

 

Analog TV has a greater bandwidth per channel.
The switch to Digital is to facilitate the introduction of sub-signals within the side bands, which would only show up as 'noise' on Analog TV.
The push around the world is to Digital TV, Internet Broadband TV and Satellite Broadband. There wasn't anything wrong with Analog technically, other than the inability to modulate sideband signals without excessive noise.
When the populace is more programmed, then will they institute their real plan.

What's the 'their real plan'?

reply to post by splitlevel


As far as "breaking up", you apparently don't have enough signal. Digital doesn't fail gracefully like analog: with digital you crap out pretty abruptly when the SNR gets bad enough.

For pixelation, that's sort of a combination of the guys setting the compression on the transmitting end, and abrupt scene changes that weren't "planned for" in the compression. To some extent, they can diddle the compression so that pixel bursts are minimized by looking ahead in the signal stream and adjusting accordingly.

For overcompressed material, especially those with a lot of on-screen flashes (camera flash, lightning and the like) you will get bursts of pixelation. However, if you watch something that's really well produced, say an NFL playoff, you'll see what digital looks like with someone with some training at the controls.

Originally posted by Romans 10:9

What's the 'their real plan'?

The real plan is to shift all the VHF analogue TV up to the UHF band digital channels.

That will free up a lot of bandwidth that can be far more usefully used for other purposes.
Nothing sinister in that.
TV has come a long way in the last sixty years, and the original frequency allocations are VERY wasteful of a huge amount of very useful bandwidth.

[edit on 1/5/2010 by Silver Shadow]