4 Nov
1998
4 Nov
'98
9:55 p.m.
> US UK
> NTSC -- smooth and flaky PAL -- flickery but more
reliable
Oh, and when speaking of systems - never forget the french
SECAM :) Especialy we had this also here in Germany, since
eastern Germany took it as Standard system, to seperate from
western TV - the people had to decide if they want to see
their stations in colour (SECAM) or ours (PAL) - in the
beginning Multi Mode TV sets have been very rare and expensive.
Officialy they also sold only sets with SECAM decoders, but
since they also exportet (cheap) sets to western Germany, a
modular design was choosen - and PAL decoders have been sold
below the tables :) The eastern government even decided to
change polarity of the SECAM colour signal, to avoide the
possibility of viewing western TV in colour, even if the
westen stations would switch to SECAM (at this time the
PAL/SECAM dispute was still unclear).
Multi mode sets have been quite popular in the past, and
today, almost any TV sold (or at least any I had within the
last 10 years) is able to display SAL, SECAM and NTSC,
50 and 60 Hz. Maybe this is only true above 600 USD.
> Now, more sensible input scheme SCART which seems
excellent AFAIK
> on modern sets
SCART is fine until you have to wire the darn plug
:-). Seriously, it
works well for what it was intended for, although the connector is no-way
constant impedance, and there are some sillies in how the pins are used
(for example, there's audio in and out (doubled for L and R channels),
composite in and out, but only one set of RGB lines). But it's a lot
better than the random mess that came before.
Yes! And SCART is also almost mandatory for TVs since years.
I remember using my TV (via RGB/SCART) as a colour CRT for the
Atari ST, when playing games - the Display was better than on
the Atari colour monitor I had at this time (But in fact I
usualy used only the B&W) Also I could switch the frequency
to 60 Hz. The TV did syncronize very well.
> Closed-captioning and a few Teletext; would put US
closed-captioning to
> other "trick" services which shame except the TV turns it off when you
> may have rather sneaky imple- change channels; useful for many things
> mentations
Of course few people exploit teletext to its full.
It's sent as ASCII
data (with in-line attribute characters for setting colours, etc) in the
vertical blanking interval. This means that it's possible to connect a
teletext decoder chip up to a computer, store/analyse/print the info,
etc. But few people have tried that. There was a teletext decoder box for
the BBC micro (to tie in the start of this thread), and there were even
plans to distribute BASIC programs for that machine on some teletext pages.
Teletext decoders for PCs are still popular here in Germany.
And not only PC - there have been (or better are still) a
lot of solutions for decoding on home computers etc. There
where several solutions for the C64 and at least two different
cards for the Apple ][. For Linux are several simple programms
for capturing available (working with almost any decoder) and
I know even one working as a stand alone solution, scanning all
programmes stations for all pages and buffering them on hard
disk - Just start the server and within the next 15 minutes
you have all pages from all station available in direct, random
access - or just let it run continous...
And to top this, I've seen one software capturing the sub title
page with all changes and timestamps within a text file - you
get an automatic manuscript of all speach ... or when used on
news broadcasts you just get writen TV news :)
And when speaking of features: European systems offer stero
chanals or divided chanals since several years. I don't
remember when thy started in Germany, but I think it was
more than 10 years ago.
Gruss
Hans
--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK