IP: this is fascinating -- a real life experiment about nutty standards for DTV & PCs -- a test by Alan Reekie

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 11:05:11 -0500
>To: farber@cis.upenn.edu (David Farber)
>From: "Richard J. Solomon" <rsolomon@dsl.cis.upenn.edu
>
>
>One of the subjects of great debate in the context of digital TV
>broadcasting standards a few years ago was how to deal with the fact
>that the existing digital video scanning standards for 525 and 625-line
>TV signals did not map directly onto those for images generated by
>personal computers and displayed on picture monitors. As it appeared
>that the debate could not be resolved without at least one side abandoning
>its long-established practice, it the USA the FCC finally agreed that
>digital TV broadcast signals in the USA could use any of 18 different
>scanning standards, including several members of both the digital video
>and computer graphics families. In Europe, however, a consensus was
>reached earlier within the DVB Project that - at least initially - all
>digital TV broadcasts should adopt the existing 625-line digital video
>scanning parameter values: 720 pixels horizontally and 576 vertically.
>
>I was very curious therefore to see how this 'problem' has been resolved
>in practice by the makers of "PCTV" adapter cards, that enable (analogue)
>TV broadcasts to be received and displayed on personal computer screens.
>So last Saturday I bought such a card: Pinnacle Systems's "Studio PC Rave"
>made in Germany (but using a PAL/NTSC/SECAM LSI chip made in Korea) 
>costing only
>75 Eur (including VAT) which includes teletext and video editing 
>facilities and
>occupies 1 PCI slot in a IBM-compatible PC with *at least*:
>- A Pentium processor at 133 Mhz
>- 32 Mbyte RAM
>- a directly addressable graphics board with Direct-X v.6 software
>- Windows 95 or '98 operating system
>
>Despite a minor installation problem (at first the card did not fit
>fully into the slot, and the manual on the CD-ROM which contained all
>the software failed to explain how to connect up the sound cable, so I
>had to visit the FAQs on the Web site: www.pinnaclesys.com), I soon had it
>operating with nearly all the 40 channels supplied by the local Coditel
>cable TV network. Even those in the hyperband were available, but CNN and
>TVE-International, which are in channels just below the FM Radio band,
>were missing.
>
>Anyway, I was very impressed by the high picture quality on the 15-inch
>high-res PC display screen (set as usual to 800x600 pixels), which seemed
>to be significantly better than on my TV set. At normal 'computer' viewing
>distance there was no visible 'scanning line' effect, nor flicker, and the
>familiar artefacts like 'ringing' or moiré were minimal.
>More specifically, there was no significant difference in quality between
>the 'full screen' picture and that at exactly 728 x 576 pixels, which
>leaves a small margin for the Windows status bar at the bottom. So it seems
>that - once more - what seemed like an important technical issue in the
>choice of standards is not such a big deal in practice...
>
>Incidentally, one advantage of the incorporated teletext decoder is that
>the whole broadcast database is automatically stored in the computer's
>RAM, so after a few minutes you can call up ANY teletext page instantly.
>And you can easily capture screen shots in both TV and teletext mode,
>either as bitmap images (these files are about 10 times bigger than the
>equivalent *.jpg files) or, in the case of teletext, as text files.
>Please contact me it you want further details.
>
>Here are a couple of quarter-size images captured from BBC TV News and
>converted to *.jpg format (click on the icons to display them): {picture 
>removed

for IP distribution. Yell if you really want them djf]


>-- Alan Reekie
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