I experienced for the first time one of the new TV converter boxes that reads digital rather than analog signals.
It's a pretty unpleasant tradeoff, in general.
Basically, rather than a consistently fuzzy picture you get a beautiful perfect image - except when the signal is lost entirely and you get massive visual artifacts and no sound.
It's the sound thing that shocks me the most. Software video players have long given priority to sound to make a video watchable even if frame skipping is required. I can't imagine why the digital broadcasts wouldn't provide some sound redundancy to achieve the same thing.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Digital Broadcast TV
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2 comments:
This converter box experience was at our house - where we got the cheapest converter box and do most of our TV viewing on a relatively new wide-screen MAC instead of TV. (On this occasion the computer was displaced by the Christmas tree, probably a poor choice in retrospect.) Since we have never had cable, even with the pixilations and sound issues we are actually really impressed with how much better the reception is; we are just terribly lazy about fixing the set up to optimize the quality. Sorry about the negative experience for you, but you should not judge the technology by our poor implementation.
I suspect that 50%+ of the general public will be opting for the cheapest converter box out there; if so this experience is likely to be the rule rather than the exception.
This migration could be a boon for cable providers...
Also, the noticeable signal loss during shows like Family Guy (largely static animation) was particularly questionable. How much bandwidth could that show really take?
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