Paul G. Allen wrote:
Ralph Shumaker wrote:
(I hate how badly the digital broadcast TV fails. It's either very
good with no glitchiness (or nearly none), or it's insanely bad. It
should degrade gracefully, but absolutely does not!!!)
With the current technology in use, this can't be done. The
compression technique used does not lend itself to very graceful
failure. If part of the information that is sent to your receiver has
a glitch, then there is a good chance the entire frame, or several
frames, will be FUBAR.
The data is not sent as a constant stream as in analog TV. It's sent
as separate packets of information that must be reassembled in the
receiver in order to reproduce each frame or an entire set of frames.
If the right information is missing, for whatever reason, you might
miss an entire section of the broadcast.
What gets me the most about this, is having a vague awareness of
holographic concepts. Take a frame of 35mm film that has an image
holographically stored on it, cut it in half, and each has all the
visual information, except each half has only half the clarity. Look at
either half straight on, and the other half of the image is not visible.
Lean outward, away from the cut line, and like looking around a corner,
you can see the rest. In other words, cutting it in half, the image
loses clarity, degrading gracefully, but the whole image is still there.
I've probably butchered the description for anyone who understands it
better than I do, but this is a decent description of how the analog TV
signal degrades. Even when the picture is so bad that it is nearly
imperceptible, it is often possible to follow what's going on with just
the sound. This is not even close to being the case with digital TV.
I'd like to have the people who are responsible for forcing the switch
to be forced to watch digital broadcast TV at my house for a few days.
Whet pisses me off about digital TV is that even with the best HD
signal source, the picture sucks. We really are getting shafted by
what they charge as compared to what they give us and most of us don't
even know it.
PGA
What they give as opposed to what they pretend to give, yeah, I can
understand your discontent. But I'd be happy to have a signal that
degrades gracefully.
Being interested in something when all of a sudden the picture degrades
badly is one thing, and not nearly so bad if I can still hear what's
going on. But the audio degrades so badly that I don't have any idea
what is going on or being said, in addition to not being able to see
what's happening. It's ludicrous.
Airplanes mess with the signal terribly for about 30 seconds at a time.
But helicopters make me *really* wish for someone with ground-to-air toys.
I've seen the same /graceful/ degradation on my friend's digital Cox
signal. And I highly doubt that aircraft have anything to do with *that*.
--
The causes of inflation are not, as so often said, ‘multiple and
complex,’ but simply the result of printing too much money.
--Henry Hazlitt
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